The Head Office of the Gambia Ports Authority (GPA) will be moved to the former GTTI Annex in Banjul, TAT can report.
It is yet to be officially announced when exactly GPA will be changing turf but the Managing Director of the ports, Ousman Jobarteh, confirmed the report as true.
He told TAT in a brief conversation that the move constitutes a component of the port’s efficiency improvement efforts.
The Banjul ports are currently losing millions of Dalasi to the Ports Autonome De Dakar as a result of several decades of underinvestment.
Container ships are taking advantage of the more competitive Ports Autonome De Dakar to offload their cargo.
Berthing issues for container ships and spaces for containers laid bare the several decades of under-resourcing faced by the country’s only ports where current levels of transactions have now outgrown the facility.
As a palliative measure, GPA has now acquired 22,000sqm in Half-Die to build an Inland Container Depots.
Meanwhile, the government has floated tenders for the expansion of the ports through Public-Private-Partnership in a bid to expand investment.
Ports digitization is also part of the efficiency improvement measures being devised.
The country is currently losing millions of Dalasi to Senegal and the ripple effects of the berthing and space problems for containers including the increase in the cost of living as surcharges are being pushed onto commodity prices in a downward spiral pushing skyrocketing inflation.
Last Sunday, President Adama Barrow expressed optimism that Inland Container Depots will significantly reduce congestion at the ports as he visited one of them in the capital’s Bund Road area.
