Mrs Dabney Shall-Holma, Chairperson, Sealink Implementation Committee, says the Sealink Project will commence operation in the last quarter of 2021.

She made this known while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Abuja.

NAN reports that the Sealink Project is a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement established to promote the development of a regional maritime company.

It is aimed at removing the bottlenecks and non-tariff measures along the ECOWAS trade corridor.

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Conceived in 2011, it was billed to begin operations in 2020 but was delayed due to COVID-19 pandemic disruptions.

According to Shall-Holma, a lot of things that should have been achieved in 2020 were not and this caused a setback. She said that the pandemic was a major disruption, but that the organisation was resilient in achieving its aim.

She added that Sealink was avoiding a rush in the commencement of operations. This, she said, was to avoid mistakes as maritime transportation was a long gestation business and investment in it had no shortcut on return on investments. She said there had been so many avoidable mistakes in the past because they thought they had gotten everything together.