The Board of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) has approved a new organisational structure and the commencement of a Business Process Re-engineering initiative that will create synergies to improve efficiency. It has also approved the redistribution of all General Managers in its employ.
The far reaching initiatives which are aimed at making the NPA a truly professional and performance driven organisation, were approved at a board meeting which held at Eko Hotel and Suites on July 27, 2017.
The management notes that this review has become important because NPA’s structure has remained the same in spite of the 2006 concession which changed the Authority status from owner/operator to landlord.
This change in status brought about the concession of cargo handling operations to the private sector; outsourcing of dredging, towage services and vessel maintenance, use of contractors to build infrastructure.
Changes approved by the board include: the reduction in the number of General Managers from 25 to 22; the upgrade of the Hydrography and Dredging Department into a Division status to be headed by a General Manager in recognition of its strategic importance to the Authority; the upgrade of the Information and Communications Technology Department into a Division to take more responsibilities from Departments like Utilities; the creation of a new Monitoring and Regulations Division; the merger of the Capital Projects and Maintenance Divisions into a single Engineering Division to eliminate redundancies; the scrapping of the Special Duties Division; scrapping of the zonal office structure such that departments in the ports will now report directly to the head office.
Other decisions taken include: a change in the nomenclature of nine departments and divisions including Public Affairs, which will now be known as Corporate Communications; Overseas Office (London Office) into International Liaison Office; Capital Projects and Maintenance Divisions now to be known as Engineering Division; Hydrography & Dredging Department now Hydrography Services Division; Monitoring and Compliance Division now Monitoring and Regulation Division; Commercial and Port Promotion Services Department now Tariff & Billing Department; Secretary/Legal Services now Legal Services; Insurance & Risk Management Department now Enterprise Risk Management Department and the Business Development and Joint Venture Department into Public Private Partnership Division.
The Authority is convinced that this new structure will enhance its capacity to:
- To meet its new mandate and strategic direction,
- Improve allocation and optimization of resources;
- Eliminate the duplication of resource and work duplication and
- Reduce cost to income ratio to the advantage of all stakeholders and Nigerians as a whole.
In addition to the above, the initiative will specifically forestall:
- the duplication of responsibilities across divisions
- the unnecessary bottleneck currently created by the zonal office structure
- redundancies created by the transfer for certain core function of the Authority to third party contractors and
- The multiple reporting relationships and attendant red tape.
The business process re-engineering process is the next phase of the re-organisation and it will detail work procedures that will enable the Authority take full advantage of the technology that has already been deployed and terminate the low capacity utilization engendered by manual processes.
The NPA is mindful of the welfare of its employees and has assured them that no job will be affected by this process. Staff of departments that have been scrapped or merged will be deployed to newly created departments fitting their competences
The Authority assures that the ultimate goal of this initiative is to institute a transparent and efficient system which will deliver the best dividend to Nigeria and its citizens. We solicit the support of all Nigerians to the achievement of these goals.
