The Secretary General of the Ports Management Association and West and Central Africa (PMAWCA), Mr Michael Luguje, told the Graphic Business in an interview that some of those challenges were hampering the promotion of transit trade.

Mr Luguje stressed the need for national governments to weigh the cost of repairing and constructing roads against the benefits of being popular in the eyes of the truck owners and shippers.

“Each government should strictly enforce the axle load limits within their respective countries and once each country succeeds in doing this, the cross-border aspect will be addressed naturally,” he underscored.

He also emphasised that whereas individual efforts were being made by Ghana and Benin (they have mounted weigh bridges at their ports), ECOWAS ought to lobby road infrastructure funding organisations to list axle load limits enforcement as one of the conditionalities for grants and loans for road construction.

Higher costs in transit trade, he said, also contributed to lower the competitiveness of West Africa’s exports thereby making the region’s imports more expensive.

The prime objective of the load limitation, he suggested, was to protect the roads from being damaged from heavy loads. 

The axle load protocol standards, which came into effect in 2011, were aimed to protect West Africa’s road infrastructure from degradation by overloaded vehicles. Non-compliance ECOWAS member states were required under a proposed act to impose prohibitive sanctions for non-compliance.   

Presently, only Ghana has complied with weighbridges in ports and along the corridors thus limiting six-axle trucks to a load of up to 60 tonnes per transit journey.

The rest of ECOWAS countries, Mr Luguje said, were still at preparatory and initial stages of the policy.

Mr Luguje pointed out that overloading of transit trucks had seen most roads which were not built to contain such weights deteriorating faster than their normal lifespan. 

“The policy, if strictly implemented, would require two trucks to carry the loads presently carried by the big trucks,” Mr Luguje suggested.

Heavy trucks do not only hasten the destruction of the road surface which costs over $1 million per kilometre to replace but further increase road fatalities.   

Interest groups

Mr Luguje indicated that despite the political “will" on the part of most governments across the region to enforce the regulation, local interest groups, such as truck owners and shippers, continued to lobby against the axle load limitation.

Those interest groups, he said, had maintained that loading less did not maximise the space on the truck thereby making them incur huge losses.

“They lobby and sometimes embark on demonstrations to blackmail governments against the limitation of axle load, and this means that governments have to find money to repair and build the roads more frequently than normal,” Mr Luguje pointed out. 

He maintained that if all countries complied with the axle modalities, transit trade routes plied by cargo trucks within the sub-region would last longer and further save governments from borrowing to invest in road infrastructure.