Onne: A Dispute Over Roads, Levies and Holding Bays That No Court Will Hear

On 12 August, freight forwarders, maritime workers and community representatives at Onne Port held a joint press conference and gave the Nigerian Ports Authority four days to act. Their ultimatum expired on Monday 17 August, from which date they said they would shut the port down.

The grievance is instructive, because it is the kind that almost never reaches a courtroom and yet costs the sector real money.

What the stakeholders say

The Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents, the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria, the Onne Youth Congress and other port stakeholders issued a joint communiqué read by the ANLCA Onne chapter chairman, Ifeanyi Isikaku.

Their complaint has three strands. The first is the state of the roads. Isikaku described the port roads as death traps and warned of risks to truckers, port users and the host community. The stakeholders cited a lack of adequate holding bays, indiscriminate parking of trucks and frequent vehicle damage, and said freight forwarders and importers were losing money when trucks carrying consignments fell or were involved in accidents along the corridor.

The second is the electronic truck call-up system. The associations rejected what they called arbitrary and bogus payments associated with the e-call-up, and said the system should be suspended until sufficient holding bays exist to accommodate the trucks operating at Onne. Isikaku accused the NPA of failing to honour an earlier commitment to provide holding bays and other facilities before implementing the system.

The third is where the money goes. Isikaku called on the Federal Government, through the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, to allocate a fraction of the revenue realised from Onne Port between January and July 2026 — which he put at more than N487 billion — to fixing and maintaining the internal access roads.

Uche Ogbu, chairman of the MWUN Onne Seaport chapter, confirmed that maritime workers would join the action, saying his members carry the burden of the e-call-up financially. Obari Johnson of the Onne Youth Congress said the state of the roads had cost lives in the community.

What the NPA says

The Authority has not accepted the account. Its Traffic Manager at Onne has said truckers deliberately shun the port parks provided, and indicated that a meeting with stakeholders operating at the port had been scheduled to discuss the issues and agree possible solutions.

A sharper counter-claim has also been made, though not on the record. Sources described as close to the NPA at Onne told Daily Sun that the agitation may be driven largely by the freight forwarding associations and the transport union seeking to have their own revenue integrated into the e-call-up system by issuing tickets to truck operators.

NTMR has not verified that allegation and reports it as what it is: an unattributed claim by sources on one side of a live dispute, published by another outlet. It is recorded here because it identifies what the parties may actually be arguing about, which is not the same as what the communiqué says.

Why this matters beyond Onne

Strip away the language and this is a commercial dispute about charges and service standards. Users are paying a levy under a system they say was introduced without the infrastructure that was promised alongside it, and they are being charged whether or not that infrastructure exists.

There has been no forum in which that question could be determined. It is not a contract claim a trucker can conveniently take to court. It is a dispute about whether a charge is justified by what is delivered for it — which is the definition of economic regulation, and precisely the class of case the Nigeria Ports Economic Regulatory Agency has been established to decide.

In the absence of such a forum, the available remedy has been the one the Onne stakeholders reached for: a press conference, an ultimatum and the threat of a shutdown. That is an expensive way to resolve a question about a levy, and everyone in the chain pays for it.

What NTMR is following

NTMR has not established whether the shutdown took effect on 17 August, what came of the scheduled stakeholder meeting, or whether the e-call-up arrangements at Onne have changed since. We are seeking that information from the NPA, the terminal operators at Onne and the associations involved, and will report what we find.

Parties to this dispute are invited to respond. NTMR will publish substantive replies. Write to editor@nt-mr.com.