Has the Buhari administration, like previous ones, quietly joined in playing chop-I-chop politics with the Onitsha River Port project? The nagging feeling grew stronger after reading something that Transport Minister of State, Ms. Gbemisola Saraki, said. Saraki was one of two ladies that I was excited to read of their nomination by President Muhammadu Buhari. The other is Sharon Ikeazor. Soon after their swearing in, however, both ladies disappeared completely from public view. In Saraki’s case, this could have been the effect of hanging out with controversial Minister Chibuike Amechi. The cultured lady that I met briefly during Atiku Abubakar’s presidential campaign in 2006 cannot compete at the jaguda level. It therefore took Amechi leaving the Ministry to pursue his presidential quest for her to pop into view. And she may remain in the spotlight for 11 months.
Is Ms Saraki perhaps looking for something to signpost her brief sojourn in the spotlight by visiting Onitsha? Last week, she made a startling statement about the viability of the port, which government plans to concession. She wagered that the facility could generate N23 billion revenue in 30 years. This revelation makes one wonder whether this port is cursed as a white elephant, given two previous false starts. The difference is that, this time around, government plans to concession the facility. Still there are two troubling aspects of this confident pitch. One is what the figure actually says about the project’s viability. The other is inconsistent representations of its earnings potential. Before we interrogate this, a brief background on the port will expose why Onitsha port leaves one with a nagging feeling of chop-chop politics constantly playing out.
Nigeria’s river ports
Nigeria manages four river ports at Onitsha (Anambra), Oguta (Imo), Lokoja (Kogi), and Baro (Niger). According to the ICRC, the Ports are to serve as alternative sources of transporting goods from and to the seaports. National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), a parastatal of the Federal Ministry of Transport manages all four ports. The Onitsha port, in particular, was set up to manage general cargo such as containers, bulk cargo, and other packaged freight. It has a land area of over twelve hectares with a wharf 324 meters long, expandable by another 234 meters. Other port facilities at Onitsha include storage workshops and parking areas to cater for operations.
There is little or no activity taking place at the Onitsha River Port. It’s like a bride all dressed up with no wedding to attend. But it shows up every now and then in federal budgets when millions and billions of Naira are pumped into it. This is why one can’t shake-off the feeling that successive administrations play chop-I-chop politics with the Port.
President Shehu Shagari built and commissioned the port with fanfare in 1992, three decades ago. Officials promptly abandoned it because of natural and man-made challenges. It was left for dead, underutilized and helpless, until two decades later when the Jonathan administration remembered it. The administration subsequently pumped billions of Naira to rehabilitate the port. According to ex-Minister Amechi, Jonathan “wasted” N34 billion to dredge the river and the free waterways for vessels from the sea to navigate into the hinterland. Jonathan re-commissioned the port in 2012, with another big noise of achievement. President Buhari is now on a second rehabilitation effort. Experts say that this administration may have already poured over N70 billion into the latest effort. This amount includes a humongous vote for security of the waterways.
Viability Questions
The Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) is making efforts to lease the port to a private firm. Understandably, the agency promotes it appear as a viable investment. It projects that the concession will generate over N50 billion for government, create thousands of direct and indirect jobs, and facilitate “efficient trade within the country.” This efficiency will come from “cheaper, easier, and cleaner methods of transporting goods and services,” the agency said. If these were to happen, the Buhari administration will receive plaudits for making the Port come alive after decades of neglect.
Marketing the port’s concession and eventual sale is a good enough reason for officials to hype it as a viable business. But can they succeed in closing the deal or will this turn out to be a hard sell? Are we likely to see another administration after Buhari pumping more billions of Naira into Onitsha? The answers may come from paying close attention to contradictory figures bandied about by top officials on the port’s viability.
Contradictory figures
As already mentioned, ICRC announced on 3 February that the project will deliver N50billion in earnings within 30 years. Last week, however, Ms. Saraki proposed N23 billion as potential earnings within the same period. How did ICRC’s original projection of N50 billion depreciate by 40 percent in just four months? Whose potential earnings figure should concession bidders believe since both Transport and ICRC are the authorities on the project? ICRC is executing the concession arrangement while Saraki’s Transport Ministry manages the facility through NIWA. At the end of the day, it may not matter whom we believe. What matters is that Ms. Saraki projection complicates the viability picture that government paints.
Broken down, the N23 billion from the Minister will return annual average income of N767million. If we factor cost of operations, how much can government and the “lucky” concession company reasonably expect to net as profit on the project? One way to judge this is to look at what the mother agency (NIWA) currently spends on its skeletal operations. Current figures are not available but the last time the agency spent N760million on operations was ten years ago! One can only speculate what NIWA is spending today, a decade after. For the concession company, the elephant in the room will be the cost of running the port.
Elephant in the room
On the matter of costs, there are three hindrances to smooth operations of the river ports – the navigation reliability of river routes, security along the sea routes, and the vessels to ply the routes.
For starters, the concession winner needs smooth access from Onitsha to Warri and Port Harcourt seaports. To achieve this requires dredging River Niger and River Benue to connect Baru, Lokoja, Onitsha and Oguta to the sea. Over time, this has become a drainpipe, a corruption enabler. President Jonathan allegedly awarded a dredging contract for N34billion during his time. Amechi pooh-poohed the contract as a bloody waste, and announced that got NIWA to do the job through direct labour for N100million. Marine experts however disagreed with the Minister. They said what he did was regular maintenance dredging to allow free flow of goods. Capital dredging would have cost billions more, the experts said. As they explained the difference between the two, maintenance dredging allows uninterrupted navigation and prevents a river from deterioration while capital dredging is inevitable if the river is allowed to deteriorate, as if often the case in Nigeria.
Before we could clap for Mr. Amechi over his frugality, he shut everyone up by a further disclosure. The President approved $186 million (over N60 billion) to fight “piracy and other criminalities on the waterways,” he said. Accordingly, his Transport Ministry used the funds to purchase “three helicopters, three aircraft, (and) 12 vessels stationed in the water.”
Chop-I-chop politics
So, there you have
it. In the case of Jonathan, N34 billion went into a dredging project to make the River Ports navigable. In the era of Buhari, over N60 billion went into protecting the river routes from pirates and kidnappers. To be sure, security is a principal factor in successfully lifting goods to and from the sea. In the past, NIWA failed in its efforts to hire barges to decongest Lagos Ports in 2021. No vessel owner was willing to risk having goods transported along the routes allegedly policed by fighter helicopters and sea vessels. However, although government may have purchased and deployed the heavy security infrastructure, it ignored the other the two other inhibitors. Onitsha River Port won’t become an off-taker for imported goods due to the river terrain and the absence of vessels.
Interestingly, Mr. Amechi said nothing about investment in needed lighter vessel before he left. He may have understood that NIWA is hopeless when it comes to craft maintenance. According to the BPE, of the thirty-five vessels owned by the agency since it’s establishment, only three were serviceable as at 10 years ago. NIWA cannot lift cargo to and from the seaports and there will be no vessels to bequeath Onitsha it it were to finally take off.
Assuming that NIWA has this transportation capacity to bequeath, the nature of the river would still make this a hazardous business venture. Silting is a big problem for vessels that ply the creeks of the Niger Delta. Again, River Niger would by now have deteriorated to the level where another capital dredging has become mandatory. Who will bear the cost of billions of Naira for capital and regular maintenance? Is it the concession firm or the Government? On what return on investment?
Condemned to die?
Unfortunately, it looks as if the Onitsha River Port will remain as a quiet marine post for chop-I-chop politics. Ms. Saraki’s recent visit to should have opened her eyes to the impossibility of making something meaningful out of the project. Unless she wants to join the politics of chop-I-chop, she should not in any way use her time to raid the treasury in another quixotical effort on this 30 year-old stillbirth. Instead, she will do well to face the planned concession and make the appropriate noises until 29 May 2023.
Chop-I-chop politics with Onitsha River Port project
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