•Truckers
A major protest rocked Lagos ports today, as maritime truck drivers and owners marched from the Lilypond Truck Park in Ijora to the Apapa and Tin Can Island ports.
They denounced the alleged extortion rackets and operational inefficiencies that have plagued port access roads, reports The Nation.
The protesters, waving placards and chanting slogans, warned against scrapping the electronic call-up system (also known as ETO) introduced by the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), even as they raised alarm over multiple illegal checkpoints and the black-market resale of digital call-up slots at exorbitant prices.
Findings by our correspondent revealed that truckers are being forced to pay between N250,000 and N400,000 for call-up tickets, while also facing extortion fees of N5,000 to N20,000 per checkpoint en route to the ports.
“The extortion and racketeering have become unbearable,” the Secretary General of the Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO), Mohamed Sani Bala, stated.
“We want to appeal to the management of the NPA to please reduce the number of extortion checkpoints along the port corridors, as truckers are losing a lot of proceeds to the activities of the people operating most of these checkpoints.”
Protesters carried placards with messages such as “ETO call-up is working,” “No to policy summersault, Let ETO be,” “Thank you NPA for being ETO call-up! It has reduced traffic, eliminate extortion checkpoints,” and “MTDA supports ETO call-up against going back to Egypt”, a biblical allusion to their rejection of returning to the disorganised past.
Truckers urged the government to introduce Electronic Tags (ETAG) and a truck scheduling system to prevent manipulation of the call-up process and ensure that only authorised trucks access the port.
Chairman of the Lagos State Trucks and Cargo Operators Committee (LASTCOC), Lukman Shittu, declared that the ongoing attacks against the electronic system are being orchestrated by individuals who benefited from the old disorderly system.
“People calling for a return to the old system are not representing real stakeholders. Those were the ones benefiting from the disorder,” he said.
Zangalo, a senior member of the trucking community with over 20 years of experience, echoed similar sentiments.
“If terminals like APMT or ENL are not operating efficiently, trucks can’t move. And TTP won’t release more trucks, leading to a backlog,” he explained, urging better terminal coordination.
Also speaking, Public Relations Officer of the Maritime Truck Drivers Association (MTDA), Afeez Alabi, warned that any reversal to the old manual access regime would cripple operations.
“The digital system has brought transparency and order to truck movement in and out of the ports, exposing irregularities and significantly reducing traffic congestion,” Alabi said.
However, he noted that while the ETO system was initially introduced at a cost of N10,250, extortionists now resell call-up slots for over N120,000, highlighting the need to clamp down on corruption within the process.
The truckers maintained that the e-call-up system has drastically reduced traffic gridlock on Apapa port corridors and warned that its abandonment would roll back years of progress in port decongestion.
