Ports record 5% cargo increase in two years

The Nigerian Ports Authority has said the AP Muller Terminal and Ports & Cargo limited, a subsidiary of Sifax Group, recorded a five per cent container increase in both terminals between January 2020 to December 2021.

A document obtained exclusively by The PUNCH from NPA, showed that in the year 2020, the two terminals handled a total of 836, 307 containers while in 2021, the terminals handled 877, 004 containers.

In the document, the APMT handled, 619, 290 worth of containers, while Ports & Cargo Limited handled 257, 714 containers in 2021 and in the year 2020, APMT handled, 608, 483 containers and Ports & Cargo handled 227, 824.

Meanwhile within the period under review, the two terminals recorded 14.4m metric tons of cargo throughput through the terminals

Giving details of the cargo throughput, the agency said that in 2021, APMT had a total of 5,192, 984 cargo throughput while in 2020, the terminal had, 5,202, 928.

In of 2020, the Ports &Cargo terminal recorded 1.877, 902 while in the corresponding year of 2021, the terminal received a throughout of 2,160, 704 metric tons.

Reacting to this, the President, Shipowners Association of Nigeria, MkGeorge Onyung, said, that the five per cent increase recorded was too small.

He blamed the inefficiency at the ports as reasons why there was low container increase at the two terminals.

Onyung said, “In fact that five per cent increase is too small because in other places they had more container movements. Because of the supply chain increase, remember during the COVID-19 there were so many shipments and that accounted to an increase both the raw materials and all that.

“You know they had a lot of backlogs during that period so that reflected in the turn out and all that. Shipping companies made more money, between 2020 and 2021, by 2021 they were making $1bn profit every month now they are $3bn monthly. Our ports are congested and inefficient; they should be made more efficient, so we are supposed even record more increase than what we have recorded.”

He added, “What we are saying is that other ports had more than five per cent increased and ours was low because of congestion and turnaround time for ships.

When a ship comes, and you evacuate it very fast. When a ship finds out that you are wasting a lot of time in this port they will go to other ports. That is when you lose throughput in terms of cargoes and container; the whole world had an increase.”