- 159 Power Equipment Containers Stranded at Seaports – TCN
About 159 power equipment containers of various power equipment abandoned by contractors are still stranded at various seaports across the country, the Transmission Company of Nigeria has said.
The TCN stated that in the last one year, it had been able to clear 550 power equipment containers out of a total of 759 that were abandoned by contractors at seaports for several years.
The Interim Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, TCN, Usman Mohammed, disclosed this at the January 2018 Power Dialogue organised by Nextier Power, a power consultancy firm, in Abuja on Wednesday night.
He said, “We discovered that most of the original equipment manufacturers abroad are interested in supplying equipment to Nigeria but they are not interested in participating in the implementation of projects inside Nigeria because of the bad news they hear. So what they do is that they enter into contracts with some local people, whether these local partners have capacity does not matter to the OEMs.
“Now, it is the local parties that are meant to do the installation. Most of the time, the equipment are shipped to the ports but the local parties do not clear them. And that is why the TCN has the highest number of stranded containers in the ports.
“I think that at the last count, we had 758 or 759 containers at the ports. We’ve actually cleared about 550 in the last one year that we’ve been here, but we still have 159 containers that are in the ports.”
Mohammed also revealed that some of the containers were being auctioned, adding that the TCN had to buy back the equipment from the auctioneers.
He stated that the firm was also working to clear the remaining stranded containers, as it had commenced the process of clearing about 45 of them.
Mohammed said, “The containers were not cleared even before I came to head the TCN. So these are not containers that I created, they were all stranded before I came. Some of the containers were actually being auctioned, we had to go to the auctioneers to buy them back.
“Another thing is that even among the 159 that are at the ports, I think that about 45 are in the process of being removed and so it is about 112 or 113 that are remaining, which we have not completed the process. However, we are working to remove all of them because we can’t leave them there.”
