West Africa's Port Gridlock: 13-Day Waits in Conakry as Megaships Keep Coming

Space is not the binding constraint on West Africa trades this month — berths are. Waiting times that used to be a Tema-specific headache are now a coast-wide pattern, and the numbers from the first two weeks of October make that hard to argue with.

The numbers

• Conakry, Guinea: 13.33-day average wait in the week of 7-13 October (World Ports); berth allocation is first-come-first-served and capped at one vessel per shipping line.
• Freetown, Sierra Leone: 11.36-day median wait in the week of 4-10 October (Portcast), rated high congestion alongside Conakry at 11.7 days.
• Tema, Ghana: median wait up from 3.17 to 4.56 days week-on-week; October average around 5.8 days.
• Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire: average wait climbed from 0.4 days in February to 2.2 days by end-August; the terminal recovery programme runs through end-October.
• Beira, Mozambique: 9.33 days. The outlier is Douala at 0.56 days — but it ran at 102% utilisation last year with volumes up 48%, so its headroom is thin.

Why it's happening

• West African container throughput grew 19.4% year-on-year in 2025 (Drewry).
• MSC's Africa Express loop has been deploying 24,000-teu vessels since April, calling at Lome, Tema, Abidjan and Kribi — bigger ships discharging larger parcels into the same yards.
• Drewry's ports chief Eirik Hooper puts it plainly: investment inside the terminals has outpaced the roads, rail and storage behind them. Conakry, Dakar, Lome and Pointe-Noire all ran at 81-84% utilisation; cranes don't help if boxes can't leave the gate. Ghana Customs also tightened monitoring of container movements in October after reports of missing cargo, adding clearance friction.

What ports are doing about it

• Ghana's Railway Development Authority reported on 12 October that roughly 220 containers a day are moving by rail from Tema to the Kumasi inland terminal — above the 200-per-day target — to drain the yard without trucks.
• DP World's $340m Dakar modernisation lifted throughput from 265,000 teu in 2008 to 850,000 teu in 2025, with vessel waits cut from 35 hours to near zero; the $1.2bn Ndayane deepwater port next door is designed for 1.2m teu in phase one.

Shipper checklist

1. Pad your lead times. Add one to two weeks minimum for West Africa-bound cargo; budget two weeks or more for Conakry and Freetown, and re-read the demurrage clauses in your contracts before, not after.
2. Consider Lome as an alternative gateway. It handled 2.4m teu in 2025, up 16%, serves as the transit hub for the Sahel states, and its infrastructure sits ahead of regional peers.
3. Count congestion costs and surcharges together. CMA CGM's peak season surcharge on China-West Africa bookings ($350-$550 per box) takes effect 22 October. At ten-plus days of waiting, demurrage and inventory carrying costs routinely outweigh the ocean leg itself.

Yufeng International Logistics operates dedicated Africa services covering the major West African ports with FCL, LCL and inland options — see the Africa routes page or write to sales@ruixincargo.com.

Sources: Based on reporting by Africa Ports, Portcast, World Ports and The Loadstar.