Ayodele Olalere
In order to reduce traffic gridlock on Apapa corridor, the Lagos State government is set to deploy 500 officers of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority, LASTMA, to the axis so as to ensure free flow of traffic.
The State governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, while on an inspection tour of the construction works in Apapa on Monday, said apart from the LASTMA officers, a team of dedicated police officers from the Area B Police Command would also be deployed.
“The State government is to set up a seamless operation to have a team of LASTMA about 400 to 500, dedicated to Apappa gridlock, and have a team of policemen from Area B dedicated to the same gridlock.
This is not the first time, certainly not the second and in fact this is about the third or the fourth time in my government that we are trying to see how we bring a better solution to apapa gridlock,” the governor said.
He added: “On all of the time we have come we knew that we are having a road construction but you can see now that inside Apapa, there is significant progress in this area particularly on the road construction site. A lot of roads has been done.
Today even being the public holiday it is even difficult for us to say that we have achieved a 100 per cent traffic free flow into Apapa.
And we have all heard all the complaints from the various stakeholders, the Unions, freight forwarders, drivers, everyone has said their own side of the story and you can see that it is multifaceted.”
The governor lamented alleged cases of extortion of truck owners by some port officials, adding the state government would investigate the allegation.
He urged truck owners to be law-abiding by continuing to make use of the truck park provided by the government.
“There have been accusations around cabal collecting money from operators and accusations around being hijacked by some people and there has also counter-accusation.
We are trying to bring about a cohesive metrics where all the stakeholders in Apapa understand and appreciate the various role that everybody needs to play and let everybody identify and solve it.
You’re are aware that since last year the presidential task force had been working. Now, there is a process that is starting in which the state government need to take over that task force.
One of the reasons for this trip is to start that process, to see things for me.
More importantly, be able to speak to all the big men in the office, the Shipowners, the Port terminal operators, Freight forwarders, who are not here with the port drivers, who we see that they are the one carrying the brunt.”
“So when somebody is supposed to deliver a container and he is being charged demurrage, that cannot be a working operation.
When it takes eight to ten hours for the operation to handover to another team.
For that whole eight to ten hours the ports are locked, the trucks cannot come in because someone is just trying to take over
For me, is to be in the heart of it, be inside and understand what the issues are and I have seen it again and go back to see and plot a template, escalate some of this things to the IGP, have a conversation with Minister of Transport get NPA to understand what their roles are.
As a government, we don’t own the Port, but we have a responsibility to our citizens. I am hoping that this trip will give us another opportunity to resolve this issue, identify the roadblocks.”
He further stated: I have said to them(truck owners) to give me the evidence of those people that are collecting money from them. That is also important.
We are going to make people as a scapegoat. It is part of ensuring that we reduce the ease of doing business. If businesses are expensive to run they will pass on the cost to the customers.
It is a process and we will not say we have all the solutions but we have seen the process again, we have seen that we can improve this process and we have identified the Stakeholders.
We need to also go back and see how we can normalize those things and bring about especially these people in the offices and understand that we have a problem here and we have to solve the problem.”
