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Oman, Iran Propose a Service-Fee Plan for the Strait of Hormuz
Oman, Iran Propose a Service-Fee Plan for the Strait of Hormuz
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
Oman and Iran are edging closer to a formal arrangement under which shipping companies transiting the Strait of Hormuz could be charged service fees, in a development that has set global shipping circles on edge and could carry knock-on consequences for Nigeria’s crude export trade and freight costs.
According to a proposal Muscat is reported to have delivered to Washington, ships passing through the strait would pay for navigational aid, environmental protection and emergency-response services, with Iran and Oman jointly collecting the payments. The proposal is said to be partly modelled on arrangements in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, where a private foundation in that Asian waterway collects voluntary contributions toward safe navigation.
The framing matters. Rather than a toll on passage itself, which would imply territorial control over an international strait, the proposal is being pitched as payment for discrete services rendered, an arrangement its backers argue sits more comfortably within the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr al-Busaidi, drew that distinction explicitly, stressing that Muscat opposes any toll on transit passage but is open to discussing maritime, environmental and navigational service fees on a voluntary basis with the states and companies that benefit from them, citing the Malacca and Singapore model as precedent for fees that fund navigational safety, pollution control and accident preparedness.
Oman’s Foreign Minister, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al-Busaidi
Where Tehran and Muscat Differ
The sharpest disagreement in the talks is not over whether fees should exist, but whether ships would be compelled to pay them. Iranian officials have signalled the charges would be mandatory, while Omani officials have described them as voluntary, a gap a regional diplomat said remains unresolved even as both sides move the framework forward.
That gap has produced a confusing run of public statements over the past several weeks. Oman’s Transport Minister, Said al-Maawali, told the Shura Council that no fees could legally be imposed on transit through the strait, describing it as a natural passage governed by international agreements Muscat has signed, and noting pointedly that Iran and the United States are among states that have not signed those same agreements, a gap he called a legal grey area. Days later, however, al-Busaidi appeared to back Iran’s service-fee plan in remarks carried by Oman’s Foreign Ministry, following the first meeting of a newly formed Iran-Oman joint committee on Hormuz governance.
Washington’s position has hardened against any payment scheme. United States President Donald Trump dismissed the idea of tolls on the waterway as unacceptable, insisting the strait must remain a free international route, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a fee regime would make a diplomatic deal unfeasible if Tehran continued to pursue it, and separately argued the dispute over charges amounted to little more than semantics given no Gulf state supports tolls. French President Emmanuel Macron met Sultan Haitham bin Tariq in Paris to press the case for free and unconditional passage through the strait, reflecting European unease, even as Brussels has focused more on ensuring any eventual fee structure does not breach international law than on blocking it outright.
The Numbers Behind the Proposal
Reports of the fee structure under discussion have varied. Earlier this year, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was reported to be preparing charges of roughly one dollar per barrel on tankers passing through the strait, with Tehran said to be willing to accept payment in cash, goods, Chinese yuan or even cryptocurrency. Iran has since set up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which has defined a “management supervision area” within the strait and indicated vessels would require permits to transit the controlled zone, while Iranian state media has described a mechanism for charging vessels for specialised services.
Maritime legal analysts cited in US reporting note that fees calibrated to genuine services rendered to a vessel could be defensible under international law, but caution that Iran would face scrutiny over whether its charges are, in substance, transit tolls dressed in different language.
The dispute sits inside a fragile wider truce. A Pakistan-brokered memorandum of understanding between Tehran and Washington reportedly commits Iran to toll-free passage for commercial vessels for at least 60 days, with full restoration of traffic within 30 days, while leaving both sides to begin a dialogue on what happens once that window closes.
The Strait of Hormuz, roughly 33 to 34 kilometres wide at its narrowest point between Iran and Oman, carries close to one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade, alongside significant liquefied natural gas volumes, making any disruption or new cost layer there a matter of immediate concern for energy markets, shipowners and insurers worldwide.
Nigeria Watch: Why a Gulf Fee Fight Should Matter in Lagos and Abuja
For a country whose economy still leans heavily on crude oil revenue and whose import bill rides on global freight costs, the unfolding fee dispute over Hormuz is not a distant Gulf curiosity. It is a live variable in Nigeria’s energy and shipping cost equation, one our maritime authorities and the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy would do well to track closely rather than treat as background noise.
The connection runs through several channels. First, even though Nigeria’s own crude does not transit Hormuz, the strait’s roughly 20-percent share of global seaborne oil flows means any sustained disruption, fee regime, or insurance repricing there moves the benchmark price of crude that Nigerian exports are priced against, with consequences for federation account revenue projections and naira exchange-rate pressures alike. A fee system, even a modest one, that becomes embedded in shipping economics through the strait could nudge global freight and insurance costs upward in ways that eventually filter into the landed cost of refined products and other imports moving through Apapa, Tin Can Island, Onne and Nigeria’s other gateway ports.
Second, the episode is a live case study in how a coastal and littoral state can attempt to monetise navigational services within an international waterway without crossing into an outright claim of sovereignty over passage, precisely the kind of legal and policy tightrope Nigeria itself has had to walk in disputes over jurisdiction across its inland waterways and territorial waters, including the Supreme Court’s recent intervention in the NIWA-LASWA jurisdictional contest. Oman’s effort to frame its proposed charges as payment for navigational aid, pollution control and emergency response, rather than a toll on the right of passage, is a model worth studying as Nigeria continues to refine how it prices and justifies levies, tariffs and charges across its own waterways and ports.
Third, war-risk insurance premiums tied to Gulf tensions have already shown how quickly geopolitical risk in one chokepoint can ripple into shipping costs elsewhere, a dynamic Nigerian importers and exporters have felt before during earlier Hormuz flare-ups, and one that deserves closer monitoring by the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) and the Nigerian Shippers’ Council, given how thinly Nigerian businesses are insulated from global freight and insurance shocks originating thousands of kilometres away.
The lesson for Nigeria’s blue economy planners is not that Hormuz fees will directly tax our shipping lanes. It is that the underlying principle now being tested there, that a state bordering a strategic waterway can lawfully charge for defined navigational and safety services without asserting sovereignty over transit itself, is a template increasingly relevant to debates closer to home, from the unresolved Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund disbursement question to how Nigeria eventually prices security and safety services along its own piracy-exposed Gulf of Guinea corridor.
Whether Oman and Iran ultimately settle on a voluntary or mandatory scheme will be instructive either way.
This is a developing story and Waterways News will keep tracking the development to keep our readers informed.
Raymond Gold is Co-publisher and Research Reporter at Waterways News, Nigeria’s foremost digital publication covering ports, shipping, inland waterways, and the blue economy.© Waterways News | www.waterwaysnews.ng | All rights reserved
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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