“Expansion of necessary infrastructure will bring sanity and orderliness on our road not setting up a task force, not dislodging vehicles, not fines.
“As at now within the port environment you will see authorities coming to tow vehicles and slamming N100,000 or N200,000 as fines.
“It is not the solution; rather they are compounding the problems of the truck owners
“Because the money we are supposed to use to maintain these trucks are being taken away directly or indirectly under the flimsy excuses that they are trying to bring sanity on our road.
“Sanity cannot come in an environment like that. We need expansion. It is expansion of necessary infrastructure that can bring the expected sanity,“ Ogungbemi said. He expressed dismay at the increasing number of tank farms on the roads, saying that they had created congestion on the Apapa access road thereby hindering the free movement of vehicles.
“I want to say that even the tank farms are the major contributing factor to the traffic gridlock that we are experiencing within Apapa.
“I will not even blame the tankers; I will blame the people that sat down somewhere to approve the citation of those tank farms in the first place.
“Under normal circumstances we are not supposed to have all those tank farms around Apapa at the port. It has choked up every environment.
“They should have used a pipe to pump the product outside Lagos either Ibadan express road or any other place but to allow all these tankers to come to Apapa area is not the best.
“So I am putting the blame on the people that approved the citation of those tank farms within the port environment.
“Pipes would have been used to pipe the petroleum products outside the port environment so that trucks can go there and lift their fuel.“
Ogungbemi, however, called on the Minister of Transport, Sen. Idris Umar, to support the truck owners by creating a parking space for them to enable them to continue to move cargoes out of the ports. (NAN)
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