The difficult cargo clearing process at the port has resulted in shippers abandoning their cargo at the port following accumulated demurrages.

Vanguard Maritime Report gathered that it is the cumbersome cargo clearing procedure that led shippers moving their consignments to the neighboring ports in the first place.

Speaking on the issue, President of the Shippers Association of Lagos State, SALS, Jonathan Nicol, said most importers that abandon the goods do so when the demurrage that they are to pay is more than the value of the consignments at the port.

He noted that apart from the importer, end-users of such goods, industry and the economy lose out.

According to Ahim: “When an importer now knows that what he is going to pay on demurrage is more than what you can afford or more than the value of the goods, he will abandon these goods and once he does that everybody is losing.

“The people, who have used those goods, will not have those goods to use. So that is what we call a kind of strategy in materials in the system. Strategies in revenue, both ways, and at the end of the day, you will see the whole of the port littered with abandoned goods helplessly.

“If the government is doing what is right, I believe we will be able to make so much money but government has to put a lot of things right for the users of these facilities, if there are no facilities then the problems will continue.

“Our duty is to bring in the cargo, and we have so many cargoes to control,” he noted

On what the nation gets as revenue from the port, he said “It is evolving and since it is evolving it is something that is continuing and regularly; microseconds of the day.

“So every microsecond of the time someone is getting paid. It’s either Nigeria Customs Service, NCS, terminal operators, the shipping lines or the transporters because the goods are coming in and are supposed to go out.

“When the cargoes are stacked, there will be a breakage, even though the money is there but you cannot have complete bookkeeping, what it is supposed to take in for instance; N10 billion, you cannot get N5 billion,” he concluded.