Tin Can Port’s traffic of horror

The resigned countenance, three weeks ago, of Ahmed Bello, a one-star officer with the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA), underlined the horror and helplessness that the traffic gridlock on the Tin Can Island expressway has become. Bello is the LASTMA official deployed at the first gate end of the Tin Can Island Port (TCIP) […]

The resigned countenance, three weeks ago, of Ahmed Bello, a one-star officer with the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA), underlined the horror and helplessness that the traffic gridlock on the Tin Can Island expressway has become. Bello is the LASTMA official deployed at the first gate end of the Tin Can Island Port (TCIP) road to attempt to create sanity out of the intractable bedlam that is the traffic on the expressway.
But, obviously, after another day of unsuccessful efforts at his assignment, the traffic official was at the end of his tethers. Looking so weary in the long container that is his makeshift office under the pedestrian bridge at the first gate, Bello frustratingly waved his left hand at the long lines of trucks stuck in the jam on both sides of the dualised road, momentarily looked away from the Sunday Trust reporter interviewing him to glance at the long wheelers and then exclaimed, “Only God can solve this problem.”
Mr Olufemi Olorunfunmi wouldn’t resort to divine intervention; he believed that it is for man to fix. Olorunfunmi, who is the Apapa Zonal Financial Secretary of the Petroleum Tanker Drivers Association (PTD), a branch of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) directly suffers from the traffic problem. Tankers owns are sometimes, he lamented, held up in the queue for days waiting to load fuel at tank farms located adjacent the port. The transporter told the Sunday Trust that traffic on the road would be free if the federal and Lagos State governments lived up to their responsibilities.
“To say the Tin Can Island roads are bad is not describing the situation well. Trucks are constantly breaking down there, with sometimes the containers they are conveying falling off and blocking smooth flow of traffic. The federal government only needs to repair the road and the traffic jam problem there will be solved,” he believed.
Probably. This publication observed three weeks ago that greater portions of the service lanes of the carriageway between Coconut bus stop and the second gate of the Tin Can Island port had, indeed, broken down and the result was that all vehicles, 99 per cent of them heavy trucks, were concentrated on the expressway. With the speed lanes of the expressway also dotted here and there with their own gullies, the trucks were compelled to manoeuvre their way through, when they could, at a snail speed.
When they could is emphasised, because certain factors are always contriving to produce a complete cessation of vehicular movement for hours on both sides of the expressway. Our reporter observed for three days how traffic moving towards the Mile 2 area from the Liverpool-Tin Can Island area was rendered a snail-and-stall affair due to a wide damaged portion of the road at Coconut bus stop, opposite the array of tank farms.
The situation was compounded on one of the days when a truck conveying a container broke down and completely paralysed vehicular movement on the stretch for virtually the whole day. Olorunfunmi said such a scene is not a rarity, as trucks, many of them old since they were not bought brand new and have been in service for many years, often break down to cause hours of traffic jam.
As regard containers falling off trucks while the drivers labour to negotiate, potholes, nine such incidents were recorded within six days last November alone, killing two people and damaging goods worth over N200 million,
As the federal government always tarries in rehabilitating the road when the potholes start emerging, ceaseless downpour of rain worsens the situation and potholes deepen into gullies.  A truck driver, who simply called himself Saliu, said driving through the road early this year before the rainy season began was, at least, less horrendous, if never smooth. Saliu stated that within an hour in January, he could drive from the base of the Liverpool bridge past the Coconut bus stop, a distance of only about 400 metres which constitutes the Tin Can Island road traffic notoriety. But since April, navigating just that short span, he repined, can take him four hours when there is no vehicle breakdown. Whenever he is unfortunate to be within the area when there is a breakdown, as he was the day the Sunday Trust chatted with him, he could spend the whole day there.   
The other wing of the expressway, which leads the Mile 2 road to the Tin Can Island stretch and beyond that to the Apapa port, assails the sight worse. Long lines of fuel tankers and cargo trailers lay stationary over three lanes, their drivers, rather than behind the wheels were elsewhere, indicating hours of inactivity.  According to Bello, truck drivers, most of them heading into either any of the tank farms to load petroleum products, or into the Tin Can Island port to be loaded with consignments, can spend three to four days on the queue on the service road before they are able to gain access into the port. Olorunfunmi confirmed it, but still blamed it on bad roads, rather than the menace of tankers waiting to load petroleum products from the farm tanks, which many stakeholders finger as a principal culprit in the traffic problem.  
The federal government is already hearkening to advice like Mr. Olorunfunmi’s to work on the bad road. It has taken the road’s rehabilitation contract off Borini Prono, the construction company hitherto given the job and transferred it to Julius Berger. After the construction giant set to effecting an emergency repair job on the road, the gridlock had thawed by last week. Users of the road and transport experts are, however, not convinced there won’t be a return to the bottleneck, as has perennially been the situation. To Mr Chigozie Chikere, a transport expert and member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport, it will take more than just rehabilitating that four-lane carriageway to permanently address the problem. There are, he asserted, more germane transportation logistics the federal government must address.
Indeed, the traffic gridlock on the Tin Can Island road has become a perennial headache, as the number of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) unceasingly using it increases, rendering it inadequate to cope with usage and, worse, resulting in constant deterioration that government’s occasional repair intervention has not been able to permanently address.
The federal government commissioned the Tin Can Island port on 14 October, 1977 to complement the Apapa port as shipping and import activities exponentially intensified. With the port came the Tin Can Island dual carriageway to aid cargo evacuation from the new port towards the old, existing routes of Apapa-Ijora-Western Avenue and the Mile 2-Oshodi/Mile 2 Badagry expressway.
However, as government’s planning in Nigeria goes, there was no rail network factored into the new port’s cargo evacuation modal. To president of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Alhaji Remi Bello, speaking who spoke in Lagos at the LCCI’s 2014 quarterly press conference on the economy, LASTMA’s Bello, Olorunfunmi and some Tin Can Island port users like Kola Olabode, an Administrative Officer with Mid-Maritime Services, who this publication spoke with, this planning myopia was the major lapse that is now at the heart of the Apapa/Tin Can Island traffic gridlock. They all argued that a rail system would have been the perfect form of transportation to handle the spiralling volume of business, not only at the TCIP, but also at the neighbouring Apapa port, whose access roads equally suffer from the kind of excruciating traffic bottlenecks that afflict the TCIP.
The business volume seems to have been mounting beyond what truck cargo freighting can handle since 2006 when the federal government concessioned the ports to private investors. Josepdam Port Services Ltd which controls Terminal A which covers berths 1, 1A and 2 and specialises in bulk and general cargo delivery.
Tin Can Container Terminal Ltd, operates on Terminal B, covering berths 3, 4, 4A and 5 and is a major container handling operator. Port and Cargo Handling Services Ltd is on Terminal spanning berths 6, 7, 7A and 8 and handles both bulk and containerized cargoes.
Five Star Logistics Ltd, handlers of both containerized and general cargos and located at Terminal D, operates from berths 9 and 10, while Port and Terminal Multi-Services Nigeria Ltd (PTML) controls terminal 11 and 12 and handles containerized and general cargoes. Many concessionaires operate the Kirikiri Lighter Terminals 1 & 2 (KLT) of containerized, bulk and liquid bulk cargoes.
The volume of containers and liquid bulk that these operators cleared among themselves at the TCIP increased from 159,980 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent unit, being the standard unit for describing a ship’s cargo-carrying capacity) in 2005 to 709,880 in 2011. While they cleared only 714 vessels in 2005, the figure jumped to 1,857 in 2011. Liquid bulk (petroleum products mostly) handled in 2011 also went up to 6,874,027 metric tonnes, from 1,070,352 metric tonnes in 2005.
Increase in the number of vessels and containers has naturally translated to increase in number of haulage trailers and tankers, with more pressure on access roads from the HGVs, but no corresponding expansion in, and solid maintenance of the affected road infrastructure. By this year, the Tin Can Island road stretch, as well as the access roads to the Apapa port had broken down and are making smooth vehicular movement very difficult.
The increase in number of trucks has since also created a problem of parking; while drivers wait endlessly to load whatever kind of cargo from the ports and the tank farms, with no designated vast parking bays, they simply hang their vehicles on any road shoulder and lane, on the expressways and inner roads, from Apapa to Mile 2. The result is the debilitating stress and the eyesore that the Apapa-Tin Can Island-Coconut bus stop traffic is presently in.    
Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, apparently disturbed by the nasty traffic situation, had once applied the stick by ordering LASTMA to impound illegally parked trucks, albeit with ineffective results. Now, he is applying the carrot. Since 2011, LASTMA officials have been impounding trucks that are considered to be illegally parked anywhere from the Agboju-Amuwo end of the Mile 2-Oshodi expressway, up to Apapa.  In December 2011, after the Lagos State government had declared zero tolerance for illegal truck parking on the expressway and LASTMA officials backed it up with impounding and towing away some trucks, petroleum tanker drivers reacted violently by parking tankers indiscriminately on both sides of the dualised expressway and completely blocking traffic flow, daring the government. The drivers also razed a LASTMA towing van. The gridlock their action created lasted till the next day and the governor had to quickly intervene to resolve it to free up movement.
In May, the following year, the state government had to resort to the same punitive measure when traffic bottlenecks in Apapa up to the Mile 2 area again became pronounced.  In one day alone in the month, LASTMA officials impounded 63 trucks. The agency’s General Manager, Mr. Babatunde Edu confirmed to journalists then that HGVs parked along the Wharf, Creek, Liverpool and Tin Can Island roads were impounded and towed away to ensure free flow of traffic in the Apapa-Tin Can-Mile 2 axes.
But this year, Fashola has rather been interacting with the truck drivers more, discussing solutions. At the peak of the Tin Can Island road traffic jam last month, Gov Fashola visited the sore spots three Sundays consecutively, monitoring the unimproved development and consulting with stakeholders, especially the truck drivers. When he visited on July 21, his third visit, the governor accused the federal government of playing politics with solid rehabilitation of the expressway from Apapa to Oshodi. Fashola maintained that if the Federal Ministry of Works “repairs its roads like the Creek Road, Apapa-Oshodi and Tin Can Island among others, clearly people living and working in this area will feel some relief.” He wondered why the country’s leadership “continues to allow this kind of eyesore in Apapa and its environs.”
The governor declared, “Clearly, this is a government that is losing touch and that is not showing empathy for the pains the people of Lagos are going through under its watch. The problem of Apapa is clearly a multi-agency problem. Probably, many agencies of the federal government are not talking to one another or not coordinating.”
He promised the Lagos State government would find a lasting solution to the gridlock. “This is our job. This is why we are in government here. We will continue to bring to their attention the pains they are inflicting on our people here,” he quipped. Corroborating Olorunfunmi’s assertion that the problem is for man to solve, Fashola told his audience, “A citizen sent a text last week that the Apapa problems cannot be remedied. I sent a text back to him that it was a problem created by men, and it will also take men and women to solve it. We will not give up, but we will continue… We are working on inner roads. About seven or eight roads are under construction. It is now a problem even for Julius Berger, our contractor, to get equipment in to supply materials and construct inner city roads to which we are committed. It is a problem, simply because of the failure of the federal government.”
To handle the parking problem, the Lagos State government, in 2007, donated 11.422 hectares of land covering 114,219.760 square meters to the PTD as parking bay at Orile-Iganmu off the Badagry expressway. The bay, named the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Truck Terminal, which is estimated to accommodate about 3,500 trucks at once, was commissioned by Gov Fashola on November 6, 2007.
Commissioning the facility, the governor was optimistic it would “put an end to the menace of indiscriminate parking on highways, flyovers and overhead bridges and deliberate spillage of petroleum products on the roads causing environmental degradation,“  and make “the avoidable carnage on our roads, loss of precious lives and valuable properties a thing of the past.”
Seven years after, the governor’s optimism remains a dream. For one, tanker drivers complained that the ongoing 10-lane Orile Iganmu-Badagry expressway and metrorail project the Lagos State government is executing has eaten into half of the parking bay and reduced its capacity. Olorunfunmi told Sunday Trust it has become imperative for the state government to donate to the drivers a much bigger space if the parking problem is to be decisively tackled.
For another, many of the depots across the country are not operating at maximum capacity and trucks are compelled to come to Lagos to load petroleum products. Chairman of the South-West chapter of NUPENG, Comrade Nojeemdeen Korodo had explained in 2011 that apart from the Badagry road/rail project’s infringement on the parking space, the massive rush of trucks to Lagos cannot but create a huge parking problem.
“Depot operations in the North and the other parts of the country are no longer effective, so tanker drivers have decided to come to Lagos where product is available, and you see many of them sleeping in their trucks parked on the road. They need to park in a more conducive environment but the terminal no longer contains its capacity,” he said. LASTMA’s Bello buttressed the statement. Pointing to the long queue of trucks, he mused, “Those truck drivers have their clothes and their toiletries with them in there. Sometimes, they can be on the line for four days waiting to load petroleum products.”   
The federal government, which has also initiated its own parking bay project across the road opposite the Tin Can Island port, last year expressed the same hope as Fashola that the parking worry would soon be history. The project is being executed by Borini Prono. Inspecting the project early last year, Minister of Works, Mr Mike Onolememen assured that the first phase of the truck park, which would remove a minimum of 500 trucks off illegal parking areas and ease the traffic gridlock on the Apapa-Tin Can Island-Mile 2 expressway, would be completed by May 2013.
Onolememe’s words have remained mere words. A Borini Prono official who spoke with this publication anonymously at the Tin Can Island parking site said the federal government has not been releasing funds as and when due both for the parking bay project and phase two of the Apapa-Oshodi rehabilitation expressway (Apapa-Mile 2) which it was handling before the federal government yanked it off its hand two weeks ago and directed Julius Berger to take it over.
The works minister admitted this much during the inspection when he said work on the project had been slow because of the poor budgetary allocation to the project in the current year (last year). With the virtual inactivity that Sunday Trust witnessed at the site a couple of weeks ago, nothing seems to have changed this year on budgetary allocation to the project.
Another contentious issue in the Tin Can Island traffic problem are the tank farms from where the tankers load petroleum products. Many transport experts and maritime stakeholders have called for the relocation of the farms if the traffic gridlock on that stretch must be firmly eliminated.  Chikere frowned at the concentration of so many tank farms in an area which has only one link road. The chartered transporter advised that the federal government build a new seaport mainly for evacuation of petroleum products in a remote seaside with low traffic density like Badagry and relocate the tank farms there.
Even Gov Fashola wanted the tank farms relocated, not just to address the traffic problem, but to avert a possible major fire or explosion disaster. The governor, speaking in the wake of an explosion which rocked a barge carrying petrol at the tank farms in February last year injuring a number of people, warned, “The nation presently does not have the wherewithal to contain any sort of fire incident involving oil installation facilities. I don’t think we should wait. This is enough.”
But some maritime operators have kicked against the suggestion, arguing relocating the tank farms would bring up all sorts of problems of its own.
Former Interior Minister and Chairman of Integrated Oil and Gas Limited, Captain Emmanuel Ihenacho argued that relocating the tank farm would simply be transferring a problem from a part of Lagos to another part of the state. Iheanacho maintained that rather than relocate the farms, government should compel the farms operators to invest heavily in safety measures and abide strictly by safety regulations. He pointed out that many tank farms have been operating in Apapa for more than 50 years without any incident because they have been observing safety procedures.
The federal government appears to have already directed the Nigerian Ports Authority to relocate the tank farms, although it doesn’t seem that will happen anytime soon. Senior Special Assistant to the President on Maritime, Mr Leke Oyewole, in April this year told stakeholders at an interactive forum in Lagos that the NPA had been directed to move the tank farms to the hinterland to avoid a major fire disaster in the area. Oyewole admitted it was dangerous for tank farms to continue to be at the Apapa port. He cited large expanses of land in areas like Mosimi, Ejigbo, Kwara, Ibadan and Ore that could be developed for tank farm owners.
As in other measures the federal government has been taking over the years to battle the Apapa-Tin Can Island  traffic scourge, the current Julius Berger road repair intervention is seen as a flash. The Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) Lagos Sector Commander, Mr Chidi Nkwonta told journalists last week that the measure can only be temporary.
Nkwonta said the relocation of the tank farms had become inevitable because of the increase in the number of tankers, the dilapidated condition of the roads and the negligence of the stakeholders in the oil and gas industry. He charged, “They (the tank farms) cannot be on the port roads in Apapa. The siting of the tank farms is inappropriate. It is in the heart of the town and it is unsafe; it is causing congestion. As such, it is endangering the entire environment. So, the tank farms must move at the long run, while the roads must be fixed. You cannot control the traffic on those roads when the roads are so bad.”
The sector commander also alleged dishonesty among stakeholders in coordinating the movement of the tankers in and out of the farms to resort to queuing on the access roads, a point Chikere also harped on.
In the final analysis, a rail line is what all the commentators Sunday Trust spoke with mentioned as the best alternative to evacuate whatever form of goods from both the Apapa and Tin Can Island ports, and consequently solve the traffic jam in those areas once and for all. Both Olorunfunmi and Bello wondered why, with the TCIP alone spinning about N2 billion every month for the federal government, the latter cannot deem it fit to construct a functional rail network for the two ports for cargo evacuation.