Executive Order: NPA evicts agencies in presidential power-play

Investigations have revealed that there is currently power play at the Presidency level between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and some evicted agencies at the seaports following the refusal of these evicted agencies to vacate the ports despite a Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) directive sacking them.

Recall that the NPA Managing Director, Hadiza Bala Usman, while playing host to the leadership of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), threatened to report sacked agencies that have refused to vacate the ports to the Presidency.

Speaking with the Nigerian Tribune exclusively, a senior official of one of the sacked agencies stated that the NPA MD cannot threaten sister agencies with the Presidency.

According to the official who declined to have her name in print as she is not authorized to speak on the issue, “It is not only the NPA that has close connections in the Presidency.

“If media reports over the weekend are true that she wants to report supposedly sacked agencies to the Presidency, what gives her the impression that those agencies themselves are not already waiting for her at the Presidency?

“There is no agency of government that operates in the port today without Presidential backing. Why would a fellow agency of government just wake up one day, and ask other agencies of government to leave the ports?

“If the Presidency wants some agencies of government to leave the ports, there is an already structured communication channel that can be exploited to that effect.

“Asking government agencies with critical responsibilities at the ports to leave would be suicidal to the development of the nation because we all cannot just rely on the Nigerian Customs Service to call us all the time when our attention is needed.

“Like NPA, the Nigerian Customs Service is also an agency of government, and has its roles and responsibility to play at the ports. Most officials of these so called agencies of government have hidden motives at times, and we cannot just leave the safety of the entire nation in the hands of just one or two agencies of government.

“We know how many number of dangerous cargoes officials of these agencies, that have been asked to leave the ports, have intercepted on the streets of Lagos. So for NPA to ask one agency or the other to vacate the ports would be a disservice to the nation.

Like I said earlier, agencies of government have their communication channel with the Presidency, and no such order has been communicated to us, that we should leave the ports. If the NPA wants to take it up at the level of the Presidency, then there is absolutely no problem with that. We will all thrash it out at the Presidency when the issue comes up.