The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC), Captain Adamu Biu, took some time off at the weekend to speak on the Council’s renewed efforts to bring down the prices of goods in the nation’s markets through a significant reduction of the cost of doing business at Nigerian ports, in this interview with Dele Aderibigbe, in Lagos.

If you take a bird’s eye view of the maritime industry now, you may discover that it has witnessed arbitrary shipping charges over the years. It has been a regime of companies and terminal operators operating different high tariffs which have cumulatively and negatively impacted on the economy. Do you, as head of the NSC, have any strategies to manage these unwholesome developments?
 It is true that there has been some arbitrary increase across the board by terminal operators; especially over the last two three years or so. But we have now tried as much as we can, within the enabling act, to sit with all the complainants. I mean the complainants who are the shippers and also the terminal operators, as well as the shipping companies so as to work out a strategy.
The key word is consultation. Shipping is dynamic, everybody understands that, but arbitrary increases or charges being imposed on cargoes is certainly not acceptable anywhere. We are happy that, to a certain extent, majority of the stakeholders in the industry, especially terminal operators and shipping companies, have seen reasons in what our argument has been.

   We have also set up a special unit directly under my office called Shippers Complaints and Monitoring Unit (SCMU) whose primary responsibility is to go out into the field, check on all the charges that are causing problems, like where there are increases and so on and so forth; and then sit with those people,  deliberate and report to my office. It is true in most cases that there were increases.

   But what we have done was talk to them. We can only talk to them and make them understand because like I keep saying, our enabling act makes it impossible for us to take any punitive measure with regards to someone who does not discuss with us and increases its rate arbitrarily. Of course, (the enabling Act) that has been our biggest problem.

    We are not saying we want to be the policeman of the industry as such, but we want to be the effective arbitrator in the system.

We have introduced a synergy between the shippers, the shipping companies and the monitoring unit which has been able to effectively reduce to a reasonable extent instances of such arbitrary increases in rate and the complaints. And where people have been charged excessively, refunds have been made. We have successively been able to make such recoveries totaling well over N200 million in the first six months of the 2011.

We don’t have statistics between June and December last year yet. We haven’t collated that, but in the first six months, we were able to make a savings of N200 million for the economy from activities of this unit. This is the extent to which we are intervening and we have also been able to sit down and try to draft  a MoU. Why we are drawing a MoU between us and shipping companies in the first instance is to try to have a working, respectable relationship where we can sit with them and discuss with them before increases are effected.  That is the extent to which we have gone and we intend to carry this through this year to even greater height.

You know, as I said earlier, the industry is a dynamic one you cannot say because we have solve the problems today, there can’t be another problem because shipping is dynamic  and it has got an international character.

Laudable as it may be to have saved shippers the loss of over N200 million last year, industry watchers say there has been nothing on ground this year to sustain this feat; what can you say to this?
Definitely the SCMU is still alive and is very much under my direct supervision. We have also learnt a few more lessons from the exercises we carried out last year and we intend to improve on it. You know when you practise something new for a period of time, there are teething problems. We probably would have saved much more than what we had been able to save in the Nigerian economy. We are still collating the figures for the subsequent six months before December. So, I can assure you that we have learnt a lesson that will definitely be addressed and value will be added to the functions of the SCMU. So we intend to do even better this year by the special grace of God.

We learnt that your council was working on a bill at the National Assembly to secure the power to punish anyone who failed to comply with your mandatory rule. Would that help you to finally curb the growing waves of arbitrary charges we are talking about, especially where any of them refuses to comply?
 I don’t like the term punish; like I said, we are not trying to be the policeman of the industry. It is better you get better result when you have mutual respect. You get better result when people understand that you do have the powers to impose sanctions, but you are not doing so, you are using it sparingly and in a matured version.

If the man knows that you have the power, the terminal operator or the shipping company in this case knows that he cannot increase any charges without reference to you by statutes. He knows it is the law of the land; and so he knows there are penalties specified also where it is proven that he has bridged the statutes. I think you may really not need to raise the stick and hit him; it may not be necessary. We do want the powers, but we are not looking for the powers because we want to exercise the powers, no. But, we want sanity in the industry.

The bill is not the old bill as submitted by the then Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) which was the National Transport Commission Bill. That bill had a lot of problems in it and I think that is the reason why it never sailed through because it was infringing on functions of various agencies of government. It is not supposed to be so. It is supposed to address particular and specific issues and that is why the bill did not sail through.

There were so many amendments, but by the grace of God, we do hope that this year, the bill will sail through and we do hope that it will be the Nigerians Shippers Council that will emerge as the new regulator in the maritime transport sector.

How has the industry stakeholders been reacting to this bill?
They have been part and parcel of it because the MoU we are setting up is also being handled by a committee which comprises members of Nigerians shippers’ council, members of the shipping companies and all the other stakeholders being represented by one or two representatives.