Nigerian ports collapsing, need rehabilitation — Oyetola

• Demands report on the collapsed quay walls, others
• Says infrastructure needed to drive the Marine and Blue economy
  

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The Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Adegboyega Oyetola on Monday lamented the dilapidating state of the Lagos ports and called for urgent rehabilitation of the infrastructures and facilities.

Speaking in Lagos while on a tour of the Lagos Ports, Oyetola said that the infrastructure is collapsing adding that the government will engage the terminal operators to see how the rehabilitation of the ports can be funded.

The Minister also said that he would engage the Minister of Works on the also rehabilitating the port access road which are also in a dilapidated state.

He said: “I intend to go around and see things for myself and I have seen a lot of things, the challenges, need to activate a lot of things about our ports.

The infrastructure is almost collapsing from what I have seen. So it is a major rehabilitation that has to be carried out. However, I am impressed with the management of the Nigerian Ports Authority but we need to support them. I am looking forward to a situation where the terminal managers will be willing to contribute to the rehabilitation of the ports, it is important, if you do that they are going to make more money for themselves. So it is going to be a collaboration between the government and the terminal operators.

I have asked them to let us have the report regarding the collapsed quay walls and what they have done so far. We need to know so that once we get approval from Mr. President, we will move to fix the quays.

We need infrastructure to drive the Marine and Blue economy, if we have the right infrastructure in place, it will diversify the economy. We rely so much on oil. There are a lot of other opportunities that remained untapped for so many years. I must commend the President for thinking along this line. I believe we can do it.

I think to avoid the collapse of the ports, we need to rehabilitate as a matter of urgency then dredging has to continue and then we can put all the other things in place.

Access roads believe it is proper to look at it and I am going to be engaging the Minister of works and see what we can do together with the Minister of Transportation and with all these things, we are good to go. We are looking at the totality of the ports in Nigeria.