Transporters under the aegis of Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO) recently protested the alleged poor facilities at the nation’s ports and incessant harassment of its members by operatives of security agencies.
The protest by truck owners who refused going into the ports between the hours of 2 and 5pm caused slight delays in the movement of outward bound cargoes at the nation’s premier port of Apapa.
Chief Remi Ogungbemi, President of AMATO who spoke to The Tide in a telephone interview over the protest, said it is not a strike but a slight withdrawal of services by members of his association over poor facilities and conditions at the ports needed for effective haulage and logistics services.
He decried the absence of commensurate port infrastructure with the increasing volume of cargo and vehicular traffic as according to him; the ports access roads being used forty years ago are still in use now with very little improvement to meet the current realities of the industry.
He also frowned at the dehumanizing way his members are treated as according to him they are dumped inside mobile detention facilities, otherwise called Black Maria.
Ogungbemi said “there is no place earmarked as truck terminal for our members to park and in the process of coming into the ports if a vehicle stays on the  queue for two or three days before entering the ports and develop a flat tyre, security operatives sometimes impound such trucks and slam a bill of aboutN200,000 or N250,000 on the truck owner, depending on the mood of the officers.
Black Maria vehicles are parked around the ports and most of these drivers are being picked and dumped inside them in a dehumanizing state.”
Ogungbemi added that government and private sector stakeholders should be involved in the process of addressing the challenges and that his organisation is in touch with the Port Manager and other stakeholders, while also blaming some of his members for not keeping to the law in cases of wrongful parking and other misdemeanor  .
In the immediate, he said government should urgently designate some space as truck terminal where vehicles will be parked and move into the port only when called up.
Only vehicles that are called up as against a situation where the trucks are forced to be on the queue for days.