There is congestion, that is why there is traffic, Now Lagos has two ports, the Apapa Port and the Tin can island port, but we have four other ports, we have the warri port in Delta state, we have the onne port and Rivers port both in rivers state, we also have the Calabar port, we should attempt to fix these ports if there are issues with them, so as to de-congest Lagos, Lagos handles over 80% of the cargo coming into the country, so it is not possible for you not to have what we are having now, and those ports are owned by the Federal government.
The NPA which is the regulatory body is a federal parastatal which raises the question, if we have a works Minister who was a governor of the state and complained for eight years, because these are some of the issues that happened under his watch, and he understands the issues, why then has it been so hard to address these issues, is it money issue, or is it the will power?
I think it is more of the will power than money and we should also understand that it is not only Apapa that is bad, the road leading to Apapa is also bad, so even if Apapa is shut down, the alternate road leading to Apapa is also bad. Looking at the Tanker issue, there had been call from government to them to get out of the roads, but you see a smoke screen and two days later, the tankers are back on the road, so there is no will power to fix the situation.
The tank farms are doing business, if you have tank farms, it means people are going to come to load fuel, then you should provide driving facilities and take them off the road or you adopt the call up system, just stay where you are, use the internet, not the drivers, because the drivers are hardly lettered. If you have the capacity to load fifty trucks in a day, this is your schedule, they don’t need to come to the road, when it is time, they get their call up and then drive in.
People believe that they can do anything and get away with it, the tankers are not owned by the drivers, they are owned by influential.
It’s obvious that the roads are bad, the adjoining roads are bad, it makes it messy, it’s beyond fixing the road, the system needs to work. Nigerians are dying on that road, people are wasting man hours on the road, The vice president coming is optics…we know Apapa only started getting fixed when it became completely impassable, are going to wait for this to become a disaster before it gets fixed, that is the way its looking like, because we are not proactive but reactive…