The news has not been taken lying down in the offices of the Djibouti Port Authority. At the beginning of June, the World Bank ranked Djibouti’s terminals 379th out of 405 in its 2023 Container Port Performance Index—a staggering fall of 353 places in 12 months, which continues to dismay the small republic.

President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh (IOG) even lashed out at the authors of the report, accusing them in a speech on 16 June of indulging “in ridicule by spreading assertions that are quickly contradicted on the ground.”

Even more vexing, the port champion of the Horn of Africa has been relegated far behind its main regional rival, Berbera, which was ranked 106th, 38 places higher than a year earlier. The Somaliland port now leads all sub-Saharan African ports, replacing Djibouti, which had held the top spot for the past three years.

This year, for the first time, Djibouti has been grouped with Port Sudan among the ports of the Middle East and the Indian peninsula (in the West, Central and South Asia category).

A move that World Bank experts did not see fit to explain, while Berbera and Mogadishu remain listed among the continent’s ports. “This gross geographical error casts doubt on the credibility of the study as a whole and raises many questions about the methodology employed,” says Aboubaker Omar Hadi, chairman of the Djibouti Ports and Free Zones Authority (DPFZA).

Sharp increase in containers handled

This geographical inaccuracy is not the most important issue for Djibouti’s port officials, who were quick to express their “indignation”. Aboubaker Omar Hadi doesn’t understand the reasons for such a plummet, even though the facilities of the Société de Gestion du Terminal à Conteneurs de Doraleh (SGTD) had a banner year, handling a total of 827,672 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), an increase of more than 40% in one year, thanks mainly to transshipment activities.

Last year, as in previous years, the port of Djibouti continued to work to improve its performance, say its boosters. “We achieve an average of 120 container movements per hour, which is still exceptional in Africa,” says the head of the Djibouti ports, noting that the time taken for a truck to pass through the terminal has been reduced to just over an hour.

Even the arrival, at the end of 2023, of four new gantry cranes at the terminal cannot explain such a collapse, even if that “may indeed have had an impact on activities during the few months it took to install them,” concedes Abdillahi Adaweh Sigad, Managing Director of SGTD.

Tension in the Red Sea

Has the current situation in the Red Sea—taking into account the port passage times for ships from the harbour—influenced this ranking?

The World Bank suggested as much in a press release published on 18 June, following a visit by a delegation led by Nicolas Peltier-Thiberge, Global Director of Transport for the Bank: “This decline appears to result, to a large extent, from external factors independent of the port and could be linked, for example, to the security situation in the Red Sea and the exceptional and additional verification, inspection and authorisation procedures required for cargoes to Yemen, which were strengthened from September 2023,” the document explains, before adding: “Concerning the performance of the port of Djibouti, this drop must therefore be interpreted with caution.”

But here again, the reasoning does not hold water for Djibouti’s officials. Only the UN resolution adopted in 2015, which obliges goods destined for Yemen to transit through Djibouti before reaching the port of Hodeïda, could provide the beginnings of an explanation, given that it imposes numerous inspections on arrival in the harbour, at the quayside, and on departure from the harbour.

“There is no reason why this should be felt more in 2023 than in the previous eight years,” say the Djiboutians. “If that were the case, it should not be taken into account by the World Bank, since the port is responding to demand from the international community.”

Taken together, these various factors could justify a slight reduction of around 30 places, “but no more than that,” according to Abdillahi Adaweh Sigad, who is fairly confident about the reaction of shipowners and other users “who know and appreciate our ports”.

Transnet also not happy

Djibouti is not the only country to question the work carried out by the study’s authors: South Africans from Transnet also pointed out several factual errors, which they complained about to World Bank experts on 10 June.

In its press release of 18 June, the World Bank sought to provide reassurance and “reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the port of Djibouti,” which it said was “known for its performance and its importance for global trade and connectivity with the African continent.”