The House of Representatives has urged the Federal Government to immediately disband the Presidential Taskforce on the Ports Access Roads in Apapa, Lagos.
Rep. Leke Ajibade, moving a motion on the port congestion under matters of urgent national importance on Wednesday in Abuja, urged the house to intervene as the country was losing huge revenue.
Ajibade in his motion, noted that the committee on customs and excise had embarked on a week-long oversight of zone A of the Nigeria Customs Service Command to ascertain the level of revenue generation.
He said the committee also sought to find out their challenges in order to find a way of addressing them using customs budget of 2021.
“The committee, haven gone round the commands under very difficult terrain, discovered that if not tackled headlong, the Nigerian ports are at the risk of imminent and total collapse,” he said.
He stated that businesses, commuters, and residents along the access roads often saw hell as they were daily subjected to nuisance, pollution and emissions to the environment.
According to him, due to the challenges of inaccessibility to ports, it takes an average of 60 days to do a turn-around of a container, whereas should there be easy access to the ports, the turnaround within Lagos should not be more than five days.
“The implication of this is that the country is losing an average of five times the revenue it should have made if the access roads are good.
“Despite the challenges, the Nigeria customs service in four commands within the port makes an average of N100 billion in one month,” he said.
He stated that this would have translated to N500 billion monthly if access roads leading to the ports were to be in order.
The house however said that the presidential task force had outlived its usefulness for participating in extortion and contributing to congestion of the ports access roads.
The house called urged the federal government to pay attention to the constitution of access roads to the Nigerian ports access roads. It added that it should also dedicate the greater part of two months revenue generated by the four commands.
The house listed the command to include; Apapa, TinCan Island, Kirikiri Lighter Terminal and PTML for the construction of all the access roads leading to the commands.
The house said this would help to complete the roads in two months for optimal revenue in the country. The house however referred the matter to the House committee on Customs and Excise to report to the House in six weeks.
