By Steve Agbota
The Truck Transit Parks Limited (TTP), owners of Eto, the electronic call-up system for trucks has said that road construction; three-entry point to the port are hindering smooth operations of the system.
Chief Operating Officer, TTP, Mr Temidayo Adeboye, who disclosed this to newsmen in Lagos, said that heavy concentration of oil and gas tank farms that are not onboard Eto platform added to the high volume of traffic witnessed on a daily basis by motorists on the Mile 2-Tin-Can Island Port axis.
According to him, the TTP was perfecting plans to bring major and independent oil marketers onboard Eto App to further drive down the gridlock in Apapa.
He added that the Nigerian Port Authority (NPA) had met with Federal and Lagos state governments to ask the contractors involved in the construction to make palliatives on the road to help reduce the madness in that axis.
He said that at the Apapa axis, there are up to five-entry point while that of Tincan has three, namely Abuja, first gate and second gate.
“The aim of our journey into this project is to maintain sanity caused by indiscriminate parking of trucks and tankers on the road. We went into looking for possible way to house all these trucks and make it easy for people to pass, and so the need to get parks.
“In trying to address the traffic, we found out that NPA had 50 per cent of the traffic; oil and gas, 30; Fast moving consumer goods and others 20 per cent coupled with the extortion going on at the port corridor,’’ he said. He noted that extortion happen because everybody was using their power, influence to try and get into the port and thereby breaking all rules by parking by the road side.
Adeboye refuted the claim of people saying that the Eto app had been hacked, adding that the app had a very good security features on it.
“The only thing that had happened was people taking the ticket in the past to business centres to go and photocopy, edit and use. But we have gone around these things, even the edited tickets can no longer work, it worked before because of human interface so with the technology deployed it has cleared everything,’’ he said.
He appealed to all stakeholders to stop being in a hurry but be orderly and follow the process so that things would move smoothly.
“Today, trucks must enter the transit parks to be able to access the port and we are using timing belt to batch and schedule different categories of trucks.
“This is partly the reason why trucks that pay their ways to the port do not have access because the access barriers will not open for them,” he said.
Head of Corporate Development, Mr Bolaji Akerele, alluded to the fact that efficiency of Eto App had reduced the cost at which trucks enter into the port down to between N15, 000 to N25, 000 from between N100, 000 to N150, 000. He added resistance to change was one of reasons some truckers are finding it difficult to abide by the rule and procedure of moving into the port under Eto platform.