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Charting the Course: How Hydrography Powers Nigeria’s Blue Economy, Ports Efficiency and Maritime Safety
Charting the Course: How Hydrography Powers Nigeria’s Blue Economy, Ports Efficiency and Maritime Safety
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News | LAGOS — June 21, 2026
Beneath every cargo ship gliding into Apapa, every fishing canoe pushing off from a riverine jetty in Bayelsa, and every barge moving petroleum products up the Niger, lies a science that rarely makes headlines but quietly decides whether that journey ends safely or in tragedy. That science is hydrography.
Today, as the global maritime community marks World Hydrography Day, Nigeria joins the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) and its member states to spotlight a discipline that has become inseparable from the country’s ambitions for its ports, its blue economy and the safety of its waterways.
A Theme Built for the Moment
This year’s global theme, “Transforming How Ocean Data Is Shared,” centres on the rollout of the IHO’s S-100 universal hydrographic data standard, particularly the S-101 Electronic Navigational Charts and S-102 Bathymetric Surface products now approved by the International Maritime Organisation for use in next-generation Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS).
Nigeria held its official commemoration in Lagos on June 20, ahead of the global observance, with the National Hydrographic Agency (NHA) leading the charge. The Hydrographer of the Federation and NHA Chief Executive, Rear Admiral Olumide Fadahunsi, told reporters in Abuja that the theme, though technical at its core, was deliberately framed in plain language to draw in policymakers, port operators, freight forwarders, researchers and the wider public — the very audience that depends on accurate ocean data without ever necessarily seeing it.
Hydrographer of the Federation and CEO of the National Hydrographic Agency (NHA), Rear Admiral Olumide Fadahunsi
Fadahunsi described hydrography as the bedrock of maritime safety, ocean governance and environmental protection, noting that standardising and sharing ocean data more efficiently would help Nigeria cut navigational risk and strengthen the efficiency of both regional and global sea lanes.
From the Navy to a Dedicated Agency
For decades, hydrographic and charting responsibility in Nigeria sat with the Nigerian Navy Hydrographic Office (NNHO), operating under the 1999 Constitution and the Armed Forces Act. That changed in 2022, when an Act of Parliament established the NHA as a standalone civilian agency, formally taking over hydrographic, oceanographic and tidal functions while continuing close cooperation with the Navy on survey operations and national security.
The NHA’s mandate now spans production of digital and paper navigational charts, broadcasting of maritime safety information, tidal prediction, regulation of all surveying activity in Nigerian waters — including offshore and inland areas — and support for the Blue Economy through marine data services. Earlier this year, the agency commissioned the International Centre for Electronic Navigational Charts (IC-ENC) West African Regional Office and Training Centre in Abuja, positioning Nigeria as a regional hub for ENC production, validation and hydrographic training across West Africa.
Surveying the Seabed That Carries the Cargo
Nowhere is the link between hydrography and commerce more direct than at Nigeria’s ports. Every dredging campaign, berth expansion and channel deepening at Apapa, Tin Can Island, Onne, Calabar, Warri, Port Harcourt and the new Lekki Deep Sea Port depends on bathymetric survey data, much of it processed through the Nigerian Ports Authority’s own Hydrographic Services department working alongside the NHA and Navy.
That underwater groundwork is now showing up in the numbers. The NPA’s Q1 2026 Operational Performance Review recorded a 19.5 per cent jump in gross registered tonnage for ocean-going vessels calling at Nigerian ports, to 46.75 million, alongside an 11.6 per cent rise in cargo throughput to 32.38 million metric tons. Outward laden container traffic surged 67.6 per cent year-on-year, while transshipment container activity climbed by 83.1 per cent — gains the NPA’s Managing Director, Dr Abubakar Dantsoho, has linked to terminal efficiency improvements and the growing pull of larger vessels into deeper, better-charted channels, including at the Lekki facility.
Yet Dantsoho has been candid about how much room remains. Nigeria currently handles only about 25 per cent of West Africa’s cargo traffic despite accounting for more than 60 per cent of the sub-region’s GDP — a gap he attributes partly to infrastructure and efficiency constraints that ongoing port modernisation, digitalisation and private-sector project financing are meant to close.
A Blue Economy Finding Its Depth
The Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy has tied much of this momentum to its broader reform agenda. Revenue from agencies under the ministry rose from N700.79 billion in 2023 to roughly N1.83 trillion in 2025, according to Minister Adegboyega Oyetola, as Nigeria pushes port modernisation, a Trade Single Window, a Port Community System and new deep seaports to position itself as West Africa’s maritime hub under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Accurate, current hydrographic data underwrites nearly all of it: from charting new deep seaport approaches at Ibom, Badagry and Bonny, to supporting offshore oil, gas and renewable energy exploration, to guiding the siting of fishing and aquaculture zones. As the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Emmanuel Ogalla, noted earlier this year, more than 85 per cent of Nigeria’s trade by volume moves through its waters — making the seabed beneath that trade a strategic national asset in its own right.
Safety Beneath the Surface
Maritime safety gains have followed a similar pattern of quiet, data-driven progress. Nigeria has now gone more than four years without a recorded piracy incident in its waters, a run security analysts attribute to the Deep Blue maritime security programme and tighter surveillance, complementing the navigational-hazard data that hydrographic surveys feed into ENC updates and wreck-clearance operations.
Inland, the picture is more sobering. Recurring boat mishaps on rivers such as the Benue continue to claim lives each rainy season, prompting the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau’s ongoing probe into a recent fatal accident and renewed federal distribution of life jackets to riverine communities. Much of inland Nigeria’s waterway network still lacks the dense, modern bathymetric coverage available in Lagos Harbour and the Lower Niger corridor between Lokoja and Onitsha, where the NHA has produced new paper charts in recent years. Officials argue that extending S-100-standard charting inland — covering shifting sandbanks, siltation and submerged hazards — is as much a safety imperative as a commercial one.
Charting Sustainability
Hydrography’s environmental dimension is increasingly explicit in Nigeria’s official messaging. The NHA has linked this year’s WHD observance to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 on life below water and the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), framing better ocean data as essential to conservation, sustainable resource use and coastal climate resilience. That thinking dovetails with Nigeria’s wider decarbonisation push in the sector — from electric ferry financing on the Lagos waterways to growing interest in wave and offshore renewable energy — all of which require precise seabed and current data to plan safely and sustainably.
Nigeria Watch
For an industry audience used to tracking freight rates, concession terms and CVFF disbursements, hydrography can look like background infrastructure — invisible until something goes wrong. But the figures above tell a different story: every gain in cargo throughput, every additional point of GDP the blue economy captures, and every life saved on an inland waterway traces back, at some point, to a sounding line, a survey vessel or a chart update most stakeholders will never see.
The risk is that hydrography remains underfunded precisely because its returns are diffuse rather than headline-grabbing. The NHA’s 2022 founding, its new West African ENC training hub and the Navy’s recapitalised survey fleet are real progress. But with Nigeria still trailing its own cargo-traffic potential, and rural waterway accidents recurring with painful regularity, the case for treating hydrographic capacity — survey vessels, trained personnel, inland river charting, S-100 adoption — as core blue economy infrastructure, not a technical afterthought, has rarely been stronger. On a day set aside to honour the science behind safe seas, that is the investment case Nigeria’s maritime stakeholders should be making to the National Assembly and the wider industry alike.
Raymond Gold is a Co-publisher and Research Reporter with Waterways News (waterwaysnews.ng), covering Nigeria’s ports, blue economy and maritime regulatory affairs.
NIMASA Bets on Youths to Power Nigeria’s Blue Giant Ambitions
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has restated that the country’s push to become Africa’s “Blue Giant” will rise or fall on how well it equips young Nigerians for the blue economy, with the agency’s Director-General, Dr Dayo Mobereola, describing youth capacity-building as the engine room of the National Marine and Blue Economy Policy.
Mobereola made the point at the 10th Taiwo Afolabi Annual Maritime (TAAM) Lecture at the University of Lagos, where he was represented by NIMASA’s Director of Reforms Coordination and Blue Economy, Mrs Nneka Obianyor. He linked the agency’s youth agenda directly to President Bola Tinubu’s economic diversification drive, noting that the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola, has directed NIMASA to prioritise skills development and job creation for young Nigerians in the sector.
Director-General of NIMASA, Dr. Dayo Mobereola
To back that up, Mobereola pointed to a cluster of NIMASA programmes already running: the long-standing Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP), a newly launched Blue Economy Accelerator Initiative, skills acquisition centres spread across the six geopolitical zones, and the rollout of Institutes of Maritime Studies in select Nigerian universities. He framed these as deliberate interventions meant to build capacity, generate employment, and spur innovation among the country’s youth population.
Separately, NIMASA used the UNILAG engagement to go beyond ceremony, running an interactive session with doctoral and master’s students on shipping development, maritime logistics, cabotage implementation, and maritime labour regulation. The session was led by the agency’s Director of Cabotage Services, Ms Gloria Anyasodo, and was pitched as part of a broader effort to strengthen ties between academia and industry in tackling the maritime sector’s practical challenges.
Nigeria Watch
The optics are good; the test, as always, will be delivery. NIMASA has no shortage of youth-facing initiatives on paper. The NSDP has existed for years, skills centres have been announced before, and Institutes of Maritime Studies have been floated in past budget cycles. What’s new here is the Blue Economy Accelerator Initiative, and it arrives with the same vagueness that has dogged similar rollouts: no disclosed funding envelope, no timeline for the six geopolitical zone centres to be fully operational, and no public framework for how graduates of these programmes are absorbed into shipping, logistics, or cabotage jobs afterward.
That absorption question matters more than any lecture-hall soundbite. Nigeria’s maritime training pipeline, from MAN Oron to the seafarer certification backlog that this publication has tracked, already produces more qualified hands than the domestic fleet and port ecosystem can currently employ. This is a mismatch tied directly to the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund’s decades-long disbursement failure and the slow pace of indigenous vessel acquisition. Training more youths without fixing that bottleneck simply shifts the frustration downstream, from unemployment to underemployment.
There’s also an accountability gap in how these announcements are made. They are usually made through a lecture delegation rather than a costed policy document. If NIMASA and the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy are serious about youths driving the Blue Giant ambition, the next disclosure should include enrolment numbers, the accelerator’s funding source, and most critically, the placement data showing how many NSDP and skills-centre graduates have actually found sea-time or shore-based maritime employment. Until then, this remains a well-intentioned promise stacked on top of several older, still-unfulfilled promises.
Drowning in Wealth: How Nigeria Turned a Water Fortune Into a National Liability
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
Nigeria is a country naturally endowed with water. The lakes, rivers, lagoons, the tributaries within the delta, the entire coast line and many other water bodies. Nigeria is not a country lacking water. Nigeria is a country hemorrhaging water wealth, deliberately, repeatedly, and almost without shame.
The Niger. The Benue. The Cross River. The Niger Delta. The Atlantic coastline. This is not a modest endowment. This is the kind of natural inheritance that other nations would kill for and build empires on. Most countries handed rivers, deltas, and coastlines like these would construct entire economies around them. Food systems, transport corridors, tourism belts, fishing fleets, energy grids and many more. Nigeria built none of it. Nigeria imports fish in a country stitched together by rivers. Fish is one thing the rivers were built to give Nigeria for free.
And then the rains come, as they always do, and the same tired script plays out on cue. Communities vanish underwater. Homes, farmland, market stalls, entire neighborhoods, gone in a season. Families displaced, livelihoods erased, and somewhere in Abuja, a press statement goes out calling it a “natural disaster.” As if decades of unmanaged waterways, abandoned drainage infrastructure, and regulatory paralysis had absolutely nothing to do with it. As if the flooding were an act of God rather than the predictable outcome of a government that has spent generations looking away.
The part that actually hurt is that none of those had to happen. The potential was never in doubt. It has been sitting here all along, waiting, inside rivers this country has never bothered to properly manage.
The Benue-Niger confluence at Lokoja, Kogi state.
Food production: Waters capable of feeding this country several times over, left fallow while the food import bill climbs.
Water transport: Inland waterways that should be moving people and cargo at a fraction of road cost, still underused despite NIWA’s mandate and the billions loaded into the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund.
Tourism: A coastline and riverine landscape other countries would package and sell as a premium destination, left to rot in obscurity.
Fishing: An entire industry hollowed out by pollution, oil spills, and institutional neglect.
Trade: River and coastal corridors that could anchor Nigeria’s leverage inside the AfCFTA arrangement, sitting idle instead.
Energy: Hydro and blue economy potential that the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy has, so far, only managed to describe in speeches.
Let’s look at countries that have done their waters right. The Netherlands built an entire nation’s worth of infrastructure below sea level and turned water management into a global export industry. Vietnam clawed its economy back from the wreckage of war. Bangladesh, a country poorer than Nigeria, more flood-prone than Nigeria, turned water into the backbone of its economic survival strategy. Every one of these countries had less to work with than Nigeria does. Every one of them did more with it.
Meanwhile, Nigeria keeps bleeding wealth, year after year, in exactly the same places: floods that arrive on schedule and are met with the same shock each time. Pollution that goes unpoliced until a river is functionally dead, jetties and terminals commissioned with fanfare and then abandoned to rust and regulatory systems frozen in place while the world moves on.
The rivers were never the problem. They never asked to be mismanaged. The failure which has been total, sustained, and entirely avoidable, has been ours.
Nigeria Watch:
If you strip away the outrage, what remains is a management problem, not a natural one, and management problems have solutions. The NIWA-LASWA jurisdictional standoff needs to end, not to be repeated again and again in court filings while investment stalls on the water. The CVFF needs to reach the small operators actually moving people and goods on these rivers, not just the well-connected few who keep making headlines for the wrong reasons. Inland waterways safety needs to be treated as core infrastructure policy, funded and enforced before the next capsizing, not mourned after it. And the blue economy agenda coming out of the Ministry needs to start producing jetties, ferry routes, and functioning fish markets, not just another communiqué. Nigeria does not have a water problem. It has a governance problem wearing water as a disguise. Until that changes, the rivers will keep doing exactly what they have always done, and Nigeria will keep watching its own wealth wash out to sea, one flood season at a time.
AFRICA MOVES TO PLUG MARITIME SKILLS GAP WITH PROPOSED REGIONAL MARITIME UNIVERSITY
A feasibility study has laid out plans for a Regional Maritime University (RMU) to serve Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa, aimed at closing a widening shortage of certified maritime professionals across the region through stronger training, deeper research capacity and better access to compulsory sea-time.
The study, carried out by Professor Anish Hebbar, an Associate Professor at the World Maritime University (WMU), reviewed maritime education and training systems in member states of the Maritime Organization for Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa (MOESNA). It examined existing institutions, training capacity, infrastructure, regulatory compliance and industry demand to test whether a regional university is viable.
Presented to industry stakeholders for validation, the study envisions an institution capable of producing seafarers, marine engineers, port specialists and maritime policy professionals who can compete internationally, while boosting the region’s share of the global maritime labour market.
Despite the MOESNA region hosting roughly 731 universities and higher institutions overall, only 21 are recognised Maritime Education and Training (MET) centres. Kenya leads with 11, Tanzania has four, Ethiopia and Uganda have two apiece, while the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi have just one each. Botswana, Burundi and Zambia have none.
Even where MET institutions exist, the study found they are struggling to turn enrolment into certified, employable graduates. Limited access to mandatory sea-time, weak practical facilities and thin ties to shipping companies were identified as the main reasons students fail to complete certification. Of 26 maritime agencies and institutions surveyed, 84.6 percent said training infrastructure, particularly simulators, workshops and sea-time placements, needs significant upgrading to meet the practical training standards under the IMO’s STCW Convention.
The report argues that a shared regional university would let member states pool resources for costly assets such as simulators, training vessels and engineering labs that individual countries cannot afford alone, and recommends the RMU build long-term partnerships with shipping lines, port authorities and maritime administrations to lock in cadet placements and improve graduate employability.
The push comes against a global backdrop of officer shortages. BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping project a worldwide shortfall of 39,100 certified officers by 2026, even with a surplus of ratings. Researchers say Africa, where over 60 percent of the population is under 25, is well placed to help fill that gap, yet the continent supplies only about 4 percent of the world’s seafarers. Within MOESNA specifically, the region contributed just 4,947 seafarers in 2021, or 0.26 percent of global supply, with Tanzania accounting for nearly 90 percent of that figure while Kenya, despite having the most MET institutions, supplied only 185.
Higher-level maritime education is another weak point. Out of the 21 MET institutions, only five offer bachelor’s degrees, one offers a master’s, and none offers a doctoral programme, limiting research and the pipeline of future maritime educators. The proposed university would offer degree and postgraduate programmes alongside certification and specialised training in marine engineering, maritime law, port management, logistics, environmental protection, safety, digital technologies and the blue economy, with stakeholders pushing for added focus on AI, automation, green shipping, maritime cybersecurity and alternative fuels.
International recognition remains limited too. Only Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia sit on the IMO White List, and only Ethiopia is recognised by the European Maritime Safety Agency. The study argues a single regional university could harmonise standards and improve the mobility of African seafarers internationally.
Gender representation was flagged as another gap, with women making up about 23 percent of enrolment at selected African maritime institutions and roughly 1 percent of the global seafaring workforce. The study recommends scholarships, mentorship, affordable tuition and stronger welfare support to widen access for women and disadvantaged students.
Overall, the study concludes an RMU would strengthen training, research and regional harmonisation, but cautions its success will hinge on sustained political will, predictable funding, sound governance and durable industry partnerships to guarantee graduates the practical exposure they need for certification and jobs.
Nigeria Watch
Nigeria is not a MOESNA member, but the story lands close to home. The skills and sea-time crisis the study describes in Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa is, almost point for point, the same crisis Nigerian maritime training has wrestled with for years at the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron. Crises such as inadequate simulators, thin industry linkages, and cadets who complete coursework but stall at the certification stage for want of guaranteed sea-time berths.
The MOESNA study’s core diagnosis, that no single country can afford the full suite of simulators, training vessels and labs needed to meet STCW practical standards, so nations must pool resources, is a direct echo of arguments Nigerian stakeholders have made about NIMASA’s Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) and the long-running push to secure guaranteed cadet berths with international shipping lines. It also reinforces a point Nigerian commentary has made repeatedly that certification without sea-time is a dead end, and no amount of classroom capacity fixes that on its own.
There is a regional-diplomacy angle too. As West Africa’s Maritime Organization for West and Central Africa (MOWCA) region watches ECOWAS states debate similar training and cabotage-financing gaps, the MOESNA initiative is a useful comparison for how a regional bloc can formalise shared training infrastructure rather than each country building parochial, underfunded institutions. Nigeria’s own Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF) debate, where small operators struggle to raise capital for modern vessels, mirrors the MOESNA study’s finding that individual states cannot shoulder capital-intensive maritime infrastructure alone.
The gender and youth findings also resonate. With women accounting for a small share of enrolment and an even smaller share of the seafaring workforce globally, and with Nigeria’s own maritime training bodies facing similar underrepresentation, the MOESNA recommendations on scholarships and welfare support add to a growing continental case for deliberate inclusion policy in maritime education, one Nigerian regulators and training institutions would do well to track as they shape their own reform agendas.
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