•President of NAGAFF, Tochukwu Ezisi
The National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has raised concerns over the growing extortion, operational inefficiencies and internal sabotage of the ETO Call-up System designed to ease vehicular congestion, especially at the Apapa port.
In a letter addressed to President Bola Tinubu and signed by NAGAFF Secretary General, Godfrey Nwosu, the association lamented the long waiting times at the pre-gates, manipulation in the call-up system, extortion by traffic officers as well as the existence of a cartel whose stock-in-trade is to procure ETO call-up codes through manipulation and hoard them to create artificial scarcity.
According to the freight forwarders, this occasionally raises the cost of code to over N400,000, which pushes up the haulage cost to as high as N1 million for local delivery of cargoes, reports The Guardian.
The freight forwarders said this has resulted in the resurgence of traffic challenges that once crippled port operations in the Apapa before the 2022 reform.
“Every checkpoint from the pre-gates to the port gates has a huge amount that each trucker must pay before he is allowed to get to the next checkpoint. There are well-organised, corrupt syndicates among the traffic officers to ensure that their money is paid per truck. Failure to pay, the trucker immediately turned back. This mess happens only in Lagos Port Complex, it doesn’t occur at TinCan Port,” the association stressed.
It noted the emergence of cartels manipulating access and security protocols, often allowing favoured truckers to flout traffic rules with impunity, especially at night.
“While many truckers spend longer periods waiting to be called from the Pre-gates, some are given preferential treatment to the extent that some truckers access the ports through one-way in the full glare of the security personnel. This malfeasance happens especially at night,” the association stated.
NAGAFF commended the initial success of the digital traffic management system deployed in collaboration with the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), which brought order to the chaotic port access roads, improving cargo movement and logistics efficiency.
The association called on the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola, to review the modus operandi of ETO, noting that the machinery needs to be rejigged.
It also stressed the urgent need to intervene and unmask the remote causes of low productivity, corruption activities, bottlenecks at the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the shortcomings of the operators of the ETO system.
“A thorough investigation needs to be conducted to unravel the disgruntled traffic Officers, NPA and Transit Truck Park (TTP) staff that may be complicit in the above-mentioned and observable clogs in the wheel of the progress of automated traffic management systems,” the association stated.
