Abidjan's Import Boxes Now Sit 22 Days: West Africa's Bottleneck Moved Ashore

Abidjan has an odd kind of congestion. The ships are fine: vessels holding scheduled berthing windows wait three to four days. The containers are not. Hapag-Lloyd's 6 November operational update puts import container dwell time at the Ivorian gateway at 22 days, against five days in the carrier's previous bulletin. A fourfold jump, in the part of the chain shippers rarely price.

Port by port, on that same reading:

• Abidjan: import dwell 22 days; berthing delay for windowed vessels three to four days.
• Conakry: berthing delays of 16 to 20 days, the worst in the region on this measure. Monrovia: six to eight days. Tema: two to three days, with reefer plug utilisation above 85 percent.
• Dar es Salaam: 24 to 48 hours at the DP World terminal, up to 48 hours at the Adani facility. Mombasa: three days on the EA2 service, six days or more on others.
• Durban: Pier 1 improved to six to nine days from 10-12 in the 30 October update, but Durban Gateway Terminal is still at 12 to 14. Cape Town's container terminal runs up to 72 hours.
• Cross-check: Kuehne+Nagel's 27 October-3 November report reads Abidjan vessel waiting at 3.00 days on average, against Beira 9.71, Durban 7.54 and Conakry 7.38. Two measurements, one conclusion - at Abidjan the sea side works and the land side does not.

The service change shows how carriers are coping. Hapag-Lloyd's AS CYPRIA, voyage 2648N, will omit Banjul in The Gambia and make an ad hoc call at Monrovia in late November. Omitting a port is cheaper than waiting at it. It also relocates the cost: cargo that used to discharge direct now travels an extra leg, usually by truck or feeder.

Then comes the empty box. Containers sitting in an import yard cannot be exported, and West Africa is in the middle of the cocoa, cashew and rubber season. Free time is the second bill, and the one most often missed. Published import free days around the region run about a week: in Guinea, Hapag-Lloyd allows eight days of demurrage-free time on a 40ft import box and Maersk nine, with Maersk's detention free time at five. At 22 days of dwell that allowance was exhausted long ago, and it rarely surfaces in a CIF or DAP quotation until the invoice lands.

Carriers are not retreating from the continent. Hapag-Lloyd says African volumes passed one million TEU for the first time in 2026 and targets 1.7 million a year by 2030 across 27 countries; its South African office opened in 2006 and now employs 52 people. Ambition on that scale, against terminal performance on this scale, squeezes yards and shippers in that order.

Three things worth doing now. Put free time and detention rates in the contract annex instead of negotiating after the invoice arrives. Book seasonal export equipment four weeks ahead, and consider 20ft boxes where a 40ft high cube is not essential. And run the destination pickup appointment and the customs file in parallel, because every day of paperwork is a day of storage. West African gateways and routings are listed on our Africa route page.

Source: Based on Hapag-Lloyd's 6 November operational update as reported by Africa Ports & Ships and FIDI Focus, and Kuehne+Nagel's 27 October-3 November port report.