PRESIDENTMuhammadu Buhari will officially commission the $1.5 billion Lekki Deep Seaport, in Lagos State on Monday.
President Buhari will during the two-day working visit inaugurate the Lekki Deep Seaport to be the largest seaport in Nigeria and one of the biggest in West Africa.
Other projects slated for commissioning are the Lekki Deep Sea Port; the 32-metric tons per hour Lagos Rice Mill; the 18.75-kilometer six-lane rigid-pavement Eleko Junction to Epe Expressway; the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, and the iconic Lagos Blue Line rail project and the MRS Lubricant factory, in Apapa.
The port’s main breakwater is 1.5 km long. The turning circle is 600 meters, enough for a vessel up to 16,000 standard containers (teu). The approach channel is 11 km long.
The port has three terminals: the container terminal, the liquid terminal and the dry bulk terminal.
The container terminal has an initial draft of 14 metres, with the potential for further dredging to 16.5 metres. The terminal is able to handle 2.5 million twenty-foot standard containers per year.
The deep-sea port of Lekki is the first port in Nigeria with ship-to-shore cranes. It has three of these container gantry cranes; they belong to the “Super-post-Panamax” group – this means that they can reach and unload the rearmost row of containers even if the container ship is wider than the Panama Canal (49 m or 160 ft maximum boat beam).
The STS cranes have a fixed rail at the quayside. They can lift 65 tons in twin-lift mode, 50 tons in single-lift mode or 85 tons under a hook.
The port’s computerised system will allow container identification and clearance from the office, and human interaction will be minimal in the physical operations.
