With over three decades of experience in Shipping and Maritime Law, Hassan Bello, the former Executive Secretary/CEO of the Nigerian Shippers Council, in this interview, spoke about Port reforms and the potentials to contribute significantly to the GDP, excerpt:
There are many opinions about how it doesn’t appear that we are leveraging what the maritime industry can truly contribute to GDP?
It’s not all gloomy. Honestly, there are a lot of things that have been done, but it’s comprehensiveness that is missing.
If you build a port, you have to look at connectivity to the rest of the country. But here we are building ports, or building roads that lead to nowhere.
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Transport is a complex situation, because transport drives the economy. You know, in the ports reforms of the 1990s, there was a pause. The transfer of port operations to the private sector and we stopped there. Once you are doing a reform, it has to be on and on and on. But here, there are no institutional reforms to support it. There are no legal reforms.
There ought to be what you call an economic regulator – the Shippers Council – which was acting in that capacity. Shippers’ Council was a regulator before privatization.
So, what does the current bill in the National Assembly seek to achieve?
The bill seeks to make the legal framework clear and lucid because investors want clarity. They want certainty. They want judicial security.
So, what we need is the National Transport Commission bill which was before the National Assembly, it was passed by both houses, you know, twice or even three times, but to get it signed by the Executive became difficult because of certain interests.
What are those things that are stopping this bill from seeing the light?
The bill is being worked on with the active participation of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy. They have taken interest in that and the National Assembly is in sync with them.
I think it is the territorialism of the various agencies and we have it in all the sectors; even in security architecture, you see the problem but now they seem to be understood.
Now everybody has their hands full. Everybody is working towards the economy. Look at NIMASA, the maritime security agency, they have reduced this piracy thing significantly. They have brought out law; to prosecute, they have tested the law, and people have been arrested and prosecuted.
Look at NPA, they have what you now call the export processing centres. So that export will go out quicker and smoother. I know there will be one or two problems but they are not insurmountable.
Look at our academy in Oran. Foreigners are now coming to the academy; it has changed so much.
If we look at NIWA, it is working with economic stakeholders because the inland waterways are one source of contribution to the economy.
We cannot be an import-dependent country forever; we need to export to earn foreign exchange so that you will see stability and so on.
We need to take advantage of the AfCFTA, a huge open market, but we have to have modernized infrastructure – hard and soft. Our ports must be digital. Our ports must be contactless, our port must be paperless.
We don’t have to go to the port to see a miasma of people go in there. It has to have the technology and then, our ports must work 24 hours. How do you see a port close at seven o’clock, if not in this country? We need to have a port that is a modern port in every sense of the word and that is the function of the economic regulator.
The National Assembly is also talking about a maritime bank. Do we now need to have a bank for every sector?
The Maritime is strategic. And it’s not a Nigerian Bank, It is to be owned by the Maritime Organisation for West and Central Africa (MOWCA).
The MOWCA idea of having a maritime bank is similar to what we are seeing with the energy bank, because the deficit in infrastructure is astronomical.
We have to spend billions of dollars every year for us to catch up with the deficit. Our ports must be modern in construction. The ports were not configured to take export, so you have to make it easy for us to export.
Where is the place of the inland waterways in our port reforms?
It is a very important question you asked because inland waterways are our source of economic prosperity
If we look at the Mississippi River in the United States, the economy generally is fantastic.
But there is new energy in NIWA. There is vibrancy in NIWA. The way I see the new NIWA meeting with investors is encouraging. But we need a lot of regulation.
The boats or the barges can take a lot of cargo; more than maybe 20 trailers can be in one batch. You take all the cement, the heavy cargo, even petroleum.
This will ensure trading is done all over Nigeria between Baro Port to Lagos, Onitsha and all other places.
And I think NIWA should be armed with personnel and budgetary allocation. Try to give them the latitude to raise money themselves, build river ports, make these ports, port of destination and ports of origin and designate special cargo that should be going through the inland waterways.
The private sector should come and invest heavily, but you have to make them comfortable. The investor lives on the air of certainty. What will happen if he invests and suddenly a new rule comes.
Nigeria needs to shut everything and look at the maritime industry. There should be a wave of reforms. We have the dry ports for example, they are a part of the whole architecture. A dry port is as good a port as the seaport. But it seems there is this attitude of, they are glorified bonded warehouses, and this should change.
As we transit into the African Continental Free Trade, one of the major facilitators will be the shipping aspect, have you seen the readiness and the capacity in-country to own ships that will facilitate Intra-Africa trade?
Very important; and ship owners of Nigeria are up to their responsibilities. They want to have a national fleet.
Nigerians most own ships, otherwise, we’re pretentious being a maritime nation. Unless you own the buttons, he who controls the ships will control the trade.
Let me give you an example. Somebody wants onions in Morocco. We have to take the onions to Spain and from there to Morocco because there is no sea link.
They must have the means of this trade. That means ships, rail, road, and inland waterways. They must synchronize, we must have seamless transportation.
Don’t believe that Nigeria is a giant and is going to benefit from AfCFTA. No. Nigeria must be deliberate. It must be concerted, conscious of its responsibility.
We must address the issues with our trade centres, dry ports, they are very important, then the deficit in infrastructure. I’m talking about not even the ships or the road or hard infrastructure. I’m talking about soft infrastructure. I’m talking about trade facilitation.
Thanks to the NPA, we are going to have a port community system; one stop shops to simplify issues, to harmonize issues, so that goods will not stay in our ports more than necessary.
We have the largest cargo dwell time, 21 days. The regional average is 14, with some of our neighbouring ports having just seven days.
But to be fair, shipping has changed. The private sector that came has made tremendous progress. The land side is still giving us problems. Why? Because there is no regulator or a designated regulator. But once the bill is out, the regulator will be the new sheriff in town and everything will come in handy.
Are the agencies in maritime piloting in the same direction?
They are, because of the new ministry. The new ministry has become stakeholder conscious because the industry is stakeholder sensitive. You have to bring everybody together.
So far, I have attended three or four stakeholders’ engagements with the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy and critical questions were asked, analysed and we are developing a map and once you have that, then investors will look at it.
It has to be followed by a legal framework and certainty. For example, if you said the port must operate 24 hours, that’s an order. Then you have a regulator that will say, you can close the port. Customs do shifts.
We can’t close our port by 6pm or 7pm and go to bed or say things like the port doesn’t work on weekends. As I have said before, the port is parallel to the airport, the airport never goes to bed.
There is now the coming together of agencies. Before now, we had bitter divisions over issues of superiority, we all now realize that it’s about Nigeria.
Some people think they are going to be in that agency for the rest of their lives, but people come and they go; what we need is a kind of symbiotic relationship.
But what we need also is harmonized laws, so that we can trade among ourselves. Trade among African countries is abysmal: 14 per cent maybe, it is 76 per cent in Europe. If we trade among ourselves, then we’ll boost our economy. We have to integrate, but the laws must also be harmonized. So, we don’t have every country having different laws. There must be an African law.
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