Commentaries

SON’s despicable desperation to return to port.

The Director General of SON, Mallam Farouk Salim

On October 26th, 2011, there was a Presidential directive that pruned down the mushroom government agencies at the ports to only eight.

The directive issued by Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the erstwhile Minister of Finance, was consequent upon the multiplicity of agencies whose operations made clearance procedures at the ports painfully slow, cumbersome, and unwieldy.

During this period, there were government agencies in excess of 14 in number whose operations made the Nigerian ports the most expensive and inefficient on the African Continent.

So, the 2011 presidential order recognised the following government agencies to domicile at the ports. The Nigerian Ports Authority(NPA), Nigeria Customs Service, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency(NIMASA), Nigeria Police, Department of State Security((DSS), Port Health, Nigerian Drugs Law Enforcement Agency(NDLEA) and Nigerian Immigration Service.

While others not mentioned on the list were consigned outside the ports, those whose services are still required among them in the course of port processes such as the Standards Organization of Nigeria(SON) and National Food and Drugs Administration Control(NAFDAC) are to be called in whenever the need arises.

However, this Presidential directive was obeyed in the breach as those evicted agencies stayed put at the ports.

In February 2018, as a result of its desire to ease the cumbersome nature of doing business at the ports, the Federal government, through its committee charged with sanitising the operations at the ports, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) headed by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, gave the Nigerian Ports Authority(NPA) the matching order to enforce the 2011 Presidential Directives.

So all the outlawed government agencies were effectively weeded out of the ports.

But because of the allure of the filthy lucre at the ports, the evicted agencies launched aggressive lobbying, using instruments of blackmail, half-truths and outright lies to get the sympathy of the government in their bid to return to the ports.

Both the NAFDAC and Immigration used these tools of blackmail and lobbying to get themselves smuggled black into the port.

A few months after this directive, the NAFDAC lobbied the presidency and succeeded in its plan when the Federal government recalled the agency to be part of resident operatives at the ports.

The Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON), one of the evicted agencies, is currently taking this same inglorious route to come back to the port where their operatives have regarded it as a honeycomb.

This development has therefore emboldened the SON to step up its own campaign to return to the port.The agency, in recent times, has tried all the tricks in the book to gain the sympathy of stakeholders and the government to regain its entry into the ports.

It is on this plank we are advising the Federal Government not to once again succumb to the antics and yield to the pressure of SON and its paid agents.

It is unfortunate that the government allowed itself to be hoodwinked by NAFDAC and Immigration.Falling for the same gimmicks by the SON would be most grievous that will give other evicted agencies justification to also want to come back to the ports.

As it were, those numbers of agencies permitted to be at the ports are still unwieldy as the processes at the ports have not significantly improved to the point all stakeholders would have wanted them to be.

Allowing SON to join the fray will further compound the problems.

We are yet to see any reason why SON is making subterranean moves to come back to the ports.The excuses being bandied about by its paid agents are as ludicrous as they are ridiculous.

The agency claimed that their absence at the ports has allowed fake and sub-standard products to gain access to the ports and same cleared into the market.

This argument flies away in the face of the component of the presidential directive that any of the agencies not resident at the ports should be called whenever their expertise is needed in the course of goods clearance procedures.

We, therefore, have no reason not to believe that the Nigeria Customs Service, which is the lead agency at the ports and goods clearance procedures, does not heed this aspect of the directive.We also strongly believe that SONCAP, a pre-shipment verification exercise adopted by the agency should have detected and taken care of such sub-standard products at the point of shipment.

SONCAP is a pre-shipment verification of conformity to standards process used to verify that products to be imported into Nigeria are in conformity with the applicable NIS or approved equivalents, and technical regulations before shipment.

Under the SONCAP regime, imports are required to undergo verification and testing at the country of supply (Exporting) and a SONCAP Certificate (SC) issued demonstrating that the products meet the applicable standards and regulations or a Non-Conformity Report (NCR) where the goods do not comply.

The conformity assessment elements undertaken in SONCAP include but are not limited to physical inspection prior to shipment, sampling, testing and analysis in accredited laboratories, audit of production processes and systems, and documentary check of conformity with regulations and overall assessment of conformity to standards.

Having gone to this extent to profile all imports at the points of supply to make sure that fake and sub-standard products are not even shipped into the country, this extensive procedure has nullified any need for SON to come back to the ports.

We can safely conclude that their passion to come back despite the stringent conditions of SONCAP is simply to engage in other uncharitable activities such as extortion.

We also want to believe that the deluge of the Nigerian markets with fake and sub-standard products is a screaming testimony that the SONCAP regime of the SON has failed.

It, unfortunately, gives credence to the widespread belief that the SONCAP Certificates are not necessarily issued to importers on merit but given to the highest bidders.

We advise SON to shelve its ambition of coming back to the ports but instead concentrate on performing its statutory duties at the ports on demand.

The agency should also insist on strict enforcement of the SONCAP regime to stem the high tide of the influx of harmful products into the country.

Government should make it mandatory for customs to call operatives of SON whenever regulated products are being examined and also to ensure that they have the exclusive right to determine the genuineness of any SONCAP Certificates submitted by importers.

This is imperative because it is not within the competence of customs officers to detect fake or genuine SONCAP Certificates.

On Thursday, April 14th, 2022, SON however took its desperation to a dizzying level when it gathered stakeholders in Apapa, Lagos to renew its incessant calls to return to the port.

The gathering, which was ostensibly meant to sensitise stakeholders on the evil of fake and substandard products, was used by SON to demonise the Customs which it accused of blocking the agency from receiving alerts on fake and substandard products and gain the sympathy of gullible stakeholders who began to campaign for the return of SON to the ports.

The Director-General of SON, Mallam Farouk Salim, had at the forum, accused the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) single-window portal of blocking SON from registering alerts on suspicious imported items.

Salim had claimed that the inability of SON to trigger alerts through the Nigeria Customs Integrated System (NICIS II) portal to stop a suspected cargo has exacerbated the influx of fake and substandard products into the Nigerian market.

Dr. Salim declared that the only solution to the problem is for the agency to return back to to the Port.

Curiously, all the stakeholders in the forum, including the two leading freight forwarding associations, the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) and the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF), all chorused the banal reasons why SON should return to the port.

We are aware that NAGAFF has been the campaigner- in Chief of SON’s desperate bid to stage a comeback.

But in recent times, the agency has recruited more stakeholders into its large army of lobbyists.

The latest is the ANLCA which has joined in the fray to railroad SON back to the port.

Curiously, these same associations have accused SON in the past of its unwholesome practice of illegal taking product samples for examination.

“Other agencies and parastatals of government in the ports like Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) among others, operate outside their mandates as stipulated in the various acts establishing them. In fact, it has been a whole lot of confusion in the ports and their environment.

“This ensuing confusion over the years has been capitalised on, to rip off port users, consequently, this makes Nigerian ports most expensive and unfriendly in sub-Saharan Africa,” NAGAFF once said of the activities of SON

The Coordinator of its 100 percent Compliance team, Ibrahim Tanko, in 2021 has accused the same SON of indiscriminately taking product samples for examination.

If the agency that hasn’t been permitted into the port could be behaving in this manner, what happens if it is eventually readmitted into the Port.

We are also curious about the sudden love of SON by NAGAFF which has vilified the reckless nature of the SON’s officers at the port.

We are equally miffed at ease with which the ANLCA bit the bait of SON’s inordinate campaign.

We believe that SON’s clamour to return to the port is self-serving and uncharitable.

The return of the agency will further complicate the cargo clearance procedure and encumber the cargo examination process which the government is assiduously trying to unbundle and simplify through the use of scanners.

Concerned stakeholders, who are not among the paid agents of SON, have queried the continuous and almost unending clamour of SON to come back to the port.

Eugene Nweke, the former National President of NAGAFF, has described the clamour of SON to come back to the port as unnecessary, distractive, uncharitable and unnecessary.

He said the agency should rather channel its energy and focus on how to discharge its core mandate.

We advise the management of SON to deploy into good use the scarce resources it was wasting on lobbying and campaigning for its inordinate ambition of coming back to the port

Rather than allow SON to come back through the back door to further muddle up the already complicated processes at the ports, it won’t be out of place if the government finds a way of removing any resident agency whose functions could be carried out from outside the port.

It is through this that Nigerian ports will become more efficient, cost-effective, competitive and gain ascendancy on the World Bank Ease of Doing Business index.

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Commentaries

National Single Window: Beyond analogue horizon

Ibrahim Nasiru

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It must extend to the hard, physical operations on the ground.

You cannot claim to build a modern maritime gateway while thousands of diesel-guzzling trucks remain trapped in manual bottlenecks along the Apapa and Tin Can access corridors.

Tomorrow, we look past the paper declarations and audit the raw infrastructure execution required to save our maritime future.

Lock your dials on this platform: The clock is ticking.

Commentaries

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Ibrahim Nasiru

President Bola Tinubu’s assent to the Nigerian Ports Economic Regulatory Agency (NPERA) Bill, 2026, is the single most consequential legislative event in the modern history of our maritime domain.

Announced on August 13, 2026, by the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), Dr. Pius Akutah, this law marks the definitive end of regulatory hesitation at our Port gates.

For over a decade, the Nigerian Shippers’ Council operated under a crippling structural handicap.

Drafted as an interim economic regulator by policy directive in 2014, the Council was essentially a referee without a whistle.

It relied heavily on moral suasion, diplomatic mediation, and advocacy to get things done.

Multinational shipping lines and terminal concessionaires knew this systemic weakness and exploited it.

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The Nigerian Shippers’ Council has officially been weaponized into an independent, executive umpire backed by the full raw enforcement powers of an Act of Parliament.

The immediate message to the maritime community is loud and direct: the era of arbitrary tariff regimes and parallel pricing structures is officially dead.

Under the new NPERA framework, the agency holds exclusive statutory powers to approve, review, or freeze Port costs.

Any shipping line or terminal manager attempting to introduce unapproved local handling fees or manipulative demurrage timelines will face immediate, binding legal sanctions.

Crucially, this new law draws a hard line under the chronic agency supremacy tussles that have choked national productivity for years.

The operational boundaries are now mathematically clear. The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) remains the technical landlord. NIMASA retains control over safety and marine security. NPERA steps in as the supreme financial and economic regulator.

Furthermore, the introduction of specialized administrative arbitration tribunals means shippers no longer have to endure years of delayed litigation in civilian courts to resolve commercial disputes.

Wrongful container detentions and predatory monopolies can now be penalised within a specialized regulatory framework.

However, stakeholders must understand that this transition operates on a tight bureaucratic clock.

While the policy freeze on unapproved tariffs is immediate, the next 90 days will see the formal gazetting and full asset migration into the new legal structure.

By late 2026, mandatory statutory registration for all active maritime service providers will become an unyielding reality.

The signature on the bill is a massive victory, but paper alone cannot clear a port corridor.

The newly empowered leadership of NPERA must immediately deploy these legal teeth to smash the manual bottlenecks and parallel checkpoints that undermine our trade velocity.

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Chief Ibrahim Nasiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja

Commentaries

Two years of Dantsoho at NPA: The architecture of efficiency boom

Ibrahim Nasiru

This July, Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho marks exactly two years as the Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), providing a vital opportunity to separate institutional noise from actual structural progress.

For decades, Nigeria’s maritime gateways were plagued by massive infrastructural deficits, manual gridlocks, and fragmented policies.

Today, through a deliberate blend of home-grown institutional experience and top-tier academic expertise in maritime technology, Dantsoho is rewriting that narrative from the inside out.

He has successfully shifted the NPA away from reactive firefighting and anchored it firmly on aggressive, infrastructure-led growth.

His two-year legacy is anchored on absolute automation and massive capital injection.

By securing a landmark $1 billion in dedicated modernization funding for the comprehensive rehabilitation of aging gateways and aggressively spearheading the National Single Window infrastructure, his office is systematically eliminating the human bottlenecks that feed desk corruption at the Ports.

This structural renaissance is not just about aesthetics; it is about rebuilding the foundational complexes of Apapa, Tin Can Island, Onne, and Calabar to withstand the demands of modern global trade.

The financial reward for this fiscal discipline is already evident, with the authority confidently pacing toward an unprecedented ₦1.489 trillion revenue peak for the 2026 fiscal year.

This massive revenue trajectory cements Nigeria’s role as West Africa’s undisputed trade hub and proves that the administration’s fiscal leaks are being blocked effectively through digital transformation.

By driving the final operational phases of the Port Community System (PCS) to anchor the newly approved National Single Window, Dantsoho is systematically transforming the clearing ecosystem from a manual bureaucrat’s playground into a highly transparent, hyper-efficient digital gateway.

While local operators and stakeholders continue to demand closer engagement, Dantsoho’s strategic blueprint demonstrates that his focus remains entirely on delivering the long-awaited structural environment where every maritime stakeholder can seamlessly thrive.

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With automated transshipment channels opening up to landlocked neighbouring countries via Lekki Deep Seaport, the foundation for total ease of doing business has finally been poured.

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In an era where international shipping lines are highly sensitive to operational delays, the NPA has aggressively reduced ship turnaround times and improved cargo throughput.

This latest two-year milestone is a timely reminder that while maritime challenges are complex, the value of raw human integrity, deep institutional memory, and consistent high-quality output can never be replaced.

Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho has proven that he is not just a placeholder in office, but an architect building the future of Nigerian maritime trade.

Chief Ibrahim Nasiru, public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja