Journal of Coastal Zone Management

Abstract

Challenges of Multimodalism in the West Africa's Trade Corridor

Chinedum Onyemechi

The work surveys the intermodal improvement models applied in modern times to improve port supply chain systems for world’s busiest ports and assesses how West African ports especially the overtly congested port of Lagos can benefit from these improvement models. Different aspects of the port operations drivers were considered including the land side, the sea side and digital technology business ecosystem. An assessment of developmental pursuits of Nigeria’s central government for the port sub sector was analyzed and criticized. The findings shows that a system of development that fails to consider logistics and supply chain improvement models will achieve limited development. The work hitherto assessed Nigeria’s freight and passenger transport development models and found absence of linkage between the various modes, thus the proposal of an intermodal development option that links the road the rail and barge transportation alternative. The focus of the work not only proposes methods for the reactivation of the unctionality of the Niger river presently dredged but unutilized, but goes ahead to design an intermodal alternative incorporating both road and rail transport alternatives. International best practices of countries already applying this model were applied. A model was built from the work based on multinomial logit model explaining the dependence of cargo throughput on two other variables drawn from Nigerias’ economy namely consumer price index and gross domestic product. An exponential increase was found in the variable gross domestic product based on multinomial logit model. The West African economy of Nigeria was advised to go multimodal based on the findings.

Published Date: 2020-09-07; Received Date: 2020-08-05