Kingsley Usoh, former managing director of the Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC) and president of the Union of African Shippers Council (UASC), bares his mind to Assistant Editor, CHUKWUDI NWEJE, on quackery in the maritime industry, and how to reposition the sector for efficiency, among other issues.
Maritime as alternative revenue earner
Transport in general is a carrying trade. The economy has to produce before you start transporting.
Therefore, those talking about maritime serving as an alternative revenue earner to crude oil are just joining the bandwagon. Maritime will help if those things that need transportation are developed.
You have to industrialise. The colonial masters knew what they did when they used Nigeria as farmlands to feed their factories. They did not build the factories here.
They planted crops here to get them harvested and shipped to Europe for the factories to work on them, and the factories employed their own people. The people they employed helped raise the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of their own country.
The colonial masters only used Nigeria as a feeder service.
Maritime will only yield revenue if there is industrialisation. The people who talk about maritime yielding revenue do not consider these things. Unless Nigeria industrialises, we will only feed foreign factories and will continue to have unemployment.
Agriculture and mineral resources must be developed. Our universities should find a way to adapt home-grown technologies to produce semi-manufactured goods from mineral resources and from the harvest we have.
If we follow the argument to continue to produce and produce, it will not help us. Go to the markets and see how much of tomatoes we waste.
We do not even have enough storage facilities to store our excess produce. What we waste in Nigeria due to non-availability of storage can feed the country for two years.
So maritime can help but it will not do the quick fix.
Port congestion
Nigeria had the problem of port congestion when I was at the University of Wales where I did a postgraduate course in port and shipping administration.
I went to one of my professors and told him that I was worried about the congestion going on in Nigeria.
He said to me, ‘if you want to decongest your ports then you have to put other modes of transportation into consideration. The rail, the light gauge system, the road and others, what you now call logistics, for goods coming into the ports for shipment.
‘You have to consider air transportation, inland waterways, and you must know how they work.’
The thing is that the port is as a big basin filled with water. There are inlet and outlet pipes attached to it.
Ships bring in goods, discharge them, and then take away goods brought in by other means. Therefore, balancing the inward and outward movements of goods must be such that there are no leftovers. Congestion occurs when leftovers build-up.
My professor told me that if I wanted to tackle congestion at the ports that I needed to study transportation engineering. Transportation engineering is part of civil engineering.
That was how I went back to do transportation engineering up to Master’s level at the University of Newcastle.
Freight forwarders
We have many people in Nigeria today who call themselves freight forwarders.
It is unfortunate that all one needs to become a freight forwarder in Nigeria is to have enough money in your pocket so that when the Customs cough, you bring out money and give them.
We need a system where Customs officers do not need to see the individual who puts in the entry. This is part of the window the government is trying to put in place. You do not need to see the individual putting in the entry; he does not need to know you.
What we have now is that people who do not even understand how to fill the Customs entry call themselves freight forwarders or claim they are into shipping.
A freight forwarder is supposed to be a go-between the owner of the cargo and the Customs. He should be an expert who understands how to fill the Customs papers and gets out the goods for the owner.
The freight forwarder is just an agent. The owner of the goods can do that job if he understands how to do it and has the licence.
The law of agency requires that after the job, the agent pulls out and the contract becomes between the owner of the goods and the Customs, not the clearing agent.
Quacks in clearing and forwarding
Here in Nigeria, anybody sacked from his job ends up a clearing agent, anybody who leaves his village and finds his way to the ports calls himself a clearing agent because they think it is where to undercut the government and the owner of goods.
So many of these clearing agents come and tell you that the Customs said this or that; they want us to pay this or that amount of money. The Customs did not say any of these. That is corruption and immediately you allow it, it sticks.
I am not saying that the Customs is innocent. In those days, you had well trained Customs officers but today some of them do not even know what you are talking about. They think the Customs is where to collect huge money.
Freight forwarding should be learnt
I went to school to learn the procedure but today you have people that call themselves clearing agents. All they know is this is the amount.
Anybody who wants to become a clearing agent should go to school. There should be a technical school for them and they must pass before they become licensed clearing agents. The Customs authorities should certify them.
I am a Fellow of the British Institute of Freight Forwarders but I hardly say anything about it, because the way we practise it in Nigeria is disgraceful and I do not want to get myself involved in it.
Government approved freight forwarders
Government approved freight forwarders in Nigeria is just a political tool.
They gather themselves together, those in favour and those against face each other, and somebody is in the middle taking advantage of their inability to come together and sort out themselves as a profession.
Until freight forwarders are well trained this will continue.
There should be technical colleges to train these people and if they do not pass and get a licence, they should not practise.
There are so many graduates in Nigeria and clearing and forwarding should be made an honourable profession where graduates can key in.
Bane of clearing and forwarding
Many of these foreign companies in Nigeria have clearing and forwarding agencies because the parent company back in their country makes sure the logistics chain is not broken.
Their ships carry the goods, they own the terminals, and they get another arm of their company to do the clearing job and carry the goods.
You have to understand that clearing is different from haulage. Haulage is the carrying and it could be by railway, road, air, water or any other mode.
But these foreign companies have the vehicles to carry their goods to their final destination and we are talking about unemployment. Why would there not be unemployment. We allow our laws to be infringed by outsiders because they are bringing foreign exchange.
They say they are investing in Nigeria but they make sure the chain is not broken. They maximise their profit and you accept whatever price they give you because they have a chain.
A Nigerian who is a clearing and forwarding agent only has that agency and he wants to compete with the foreign counterpart that has the agency, the ships, and the clearing outfit.
What they do to kill the average clearing and forwarding agent in Nigeria is to make the clearing chain, which is part of the entire chain, very cheap to attract you.
However, they will now take whatever they are losing in the clearing chain and spread it in the haulage leg and the terminal leg where you are not competing. That is why you see many clearing agents not making a headway to keep afloat; they cheat the government.
Effects of poor infrastructure on haulage
Haulage is like you walking on the road. If the road is not tarred and filled with potholes and it rains, compare it with walking on a smooth tarred road.
You will be slower on the road with potholes than on the smooth road that flows. The timeframe for you to do your business matters a lot. Time, they say, is money.
From Lagos to Ibadan on a smooth road should not take more than two hours. The road, the way it is now, will take you four hours.
How much do you price a top executive per hour? If he makes a journey of two hours in four hours, the loss to national productivity is two hours.
Multiply two hours by the average income the person is supposed to earn, quantify it by the number of persons that use that product that day – that is the loss to the national economy.
If you hire a vehicle to move a container from here to Ibadan, the journey that will take two hours takes it four hours. If the road had been smooth, the driver would come back to Lagos to pick another container.
So, 12 hours during day time give him three hours per trip. He can do four trips, but now you have condemned him to, maybe, only one trip. That is money being lost.
Your background
My name is Kingsley Usoh from Mberi in Imo State, but I was born and bred in Aba in present day Abia state.
I was born into a family of businessmen; my father was an illiterate who was into different types of businesses. He was into product marketing, construction of houses from scratch to finish and then selling to people.
He was also into transportation, running his vehicles from Mbieri to Aba, Port Harcourt and other big cities.
He was also running seasons, that is harvesting seasons from the North. When farmers in the North harvest their produce they have to carry them to the cities. After my father established them, he got people to trade for him.
He told us that to succeed in business you have to do several businesses, so that when one is falling, the other may be picking up. This way, you will use funds from the one thriving to push up the one falling, and people will not even know that you have problems in one of the businesses.
Therefore, he spread his risk. Like the insurance people will say, he used an umbrella to cover his businesses.
I was very close to my father, and even while I was still in secondary school, he banked with my name and I was the one that handled his banking transactions. Therefore, business has been part of me.
Stint at NPA
I joined the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) in 1964. When I finished my secondary education, the ports authority took me as a footballer and the traffic section of the ports authority engaged me as a tally clerk.
While working as a clerk I saw many of my contemporaries travelling abroad. I saw many of my colleagues who did not have the financial background that I had travelling abroad, so I decided that I too would travel and study abroad.
Plan to study abroad
It was a difficult task convincing my parents that I wanted to travel abroad. I happened to be the fifth boy and eighth child in the family. So, if anybody was travelling abroad, it should not be me, because the feeling was that those who came first should go first.
I felt that if I presented the project to my father, he would tell me that those senior to me schooled in Nigeria and that those out of school were still in Nigeria working or doing something else.
I knew that the only way to overcome the challenge was to get an admission, pay for it, and then present it to my father.
I knew that under this circumstance he would not stop me from travelling abroad because he would not want me to lose the money I had already paid for the admission.
Raising funds
In order to raise funds for my admission, I started doing a lot of overtime at the ports. I was playing football but I was practically still working for the ports authority. Playing football brought me many fans in the ports authority.
I told my supervisor that I wanted to travel and needed to buy my ticket and still have some savings.
The ports authority agreed that even though I was playing football that I was still working. On football practice days, we closed by noon to prepare for football and then played from 4pm to around 7pm.
So they helped me by allowing me to do overtime like any other person that was not playing football.
Whatever number of hours I clocked after playing football counted as overtime for me. They knew that I was making sacrifices that would also improve the image of the ports authority.
That was how I raised the money for my ticket and paid for my admission in England.
It was after I had paid for my admission and bought my ticket that I went to my father and showed him everything. He said that since I had paid he would not want the money to be lost and that I would travel abroad even though he had some reservations.
I then travelled to England. Then it was not by air but by sea through either Orial or MV Apapa.
I studied freight forwarding, which is clearing and forwarding, at Thurrock Technical College, Grays Essex. Then, freight forwarding was not done in any school, it was learnt as a practical thing.
Thurrock Technical College was the first school to teach it as an academic field of study in Britain. I gained admission there and studied there from 1966 to 1968. I was in the second set trained at the college and I got the certificate in clearing.
Civil War and further studies
After I finished my course at Thurrock, I could not come back to Nigeria because of the Civil War.
The British government told us that those of us who had overstayed would go back home when the war ended. They said those of us in school or who had stayed the number of years required under the Commonwealth Treaty to become residents could stay.
I came from the Biafran side and we were not sure what was happening in Nigeria. The only stories we heard were this happened or that happened. The only way to stay safe was to engage in something serious.
I decided to acquire more knowledge while waiting to see if the road was clear to come home.
Therefore, I had to go and read business studies at Middlesex Polytechnic, Hendon London. I decided to do the higher diploma because my ambition was that when I came back to Nigeria I would become the commercial manager at the Nigerian Ports Authority.
My business studies opened the academic horizon for me because I started loving reading more than ever before. The commercial people in the ports authority just read with the Institute of Transport, and maybe added law to it.
With my clearing and forwarding already done, I felt that with my Shipping and Institute of Transport I would have an edge over those in the commercial department.
