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By Steve Agbota
The Sea Empowerment and Research Centre (SEREC) has said that the cargo delay in Nigeria is largely a documentation and governance problem, not a physical capacity problem.
In its latest policy bulletin titled “From Port Congestion to Documentation Congestion: Rethinking Nigeria’s Trade Delay Narrative,” released by its Head of Research, Dr Eugene Nweke, revealed that Nigeria’s persistent cargo clearance delays may have been misdiagnosed.
SEREC indicated that the dominant constraint within the nation’s port and trade ecosystem is not physical congestion, but documentation processing within a multi-agency, human-dependent system.
According to the research centre, this position aligns with broader assessments by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which consistently emphasise procedural inefficiencies as key barriers to trade facilitation in developing economies.
However, SEREC described documentation as the primary bottleneck fueling cargo delay in the nation’s ports, saying a strong consensus across stakeholders identifies documentation inefficiencies as the single largest contributor to cargo delays.
“Empirical data show that approximately 60–73 per cent of total cargo dwell time in Nigeria is tied to transaction processes, documentation, customs procedures, and regulatory approvals.
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This confirms that delays occur largely before cargo movement, reinforcing that inefficiencies are embedded within administrative systems,” SEREC said.
“A critical comparison of the Nigeria vs global and regional dwell time reality, SEREC highlighted that current performance indicators reveal a significant competitiveness gap: Nigeria (Apapa & Tin Can Ports) experienced between 8 and 16 days average dwell time.
The centre said that the good news is that the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) one-stop shop, advance ruling trade facilitation tools, fast track clearance/AEO, is changing the narrative.
On the global best practice, SEREC said that cargo dwell time is between 3–5 days (benchmark), with 4 days widely accepted, saying at Lomé (Togo), 2–3 days vessel turnaround; ~7–10 days cargo dwell time, and Tema (Ghana): ~3–4 days turnaround; ~7–10 days cargo dwell time.
More critically, the centre said that Nigerian ports have been found to record cargo dwell times up to 475% higher than global averages, adding that this gap is not marginal—it is structural and systemic.
SEREC asserted that Nigeria’s port inefficiency is fundamentally an execution-layer failure driven by documentation congestion and institutional fragmentation.
However, SEREC said that unless documentation processes are streamlined and execution discipline is enforced, Nigeria risks sustained high trade costs, reduced competitiveness in West Africa, and underperformance of major reforms like the National Single Window. It said that Nigeria’s cargo does not wait because ports are full—it waits because processes are slow, saying that the future of trade facilitation lies in execution discipline, system integration, and documentation efficiency.
