Blue Economy
Oyetola Rallies States, Private Sector to Unlock Nigeria’s Marine and Blue Economy Potential
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
Oyetola Rallies States, Private Sector to Unlock Nigeria’s Marine and Blue Economy Potential
The Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr Adegboyega Oyetola, has called on state governments, private investors and development partners to deepen collaboration with the Federal Government to speed up execution of Nigeria’s National Policy on Marine and Blue Economy, insisting that sub-national buy-in is essential to unlocking the sector’s full economic value.
Oyetola spoke on Thursday in Lagos at the Second Quarter 2026 Citizens’ and Stakeholders’ Engagement of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy, held at Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island. The event, themed “From Policy to Action: Mobilising Sub-National Governments for Effective Implementation of Nigeria’s National Policy on Marine and Blue Economy,” drew government officials, diplomats, development partners, industry players, academics and state government representatives.
The minister said Nigeria has moved past the policy-formulation stage and must now concentrate on execution that yields measurable economic returns. He noted that many of the country’s blue economy assets, oceans, inland waterways, fisheries and coastal resources, sit within states and communities, making sub-national governments critical partners in driving investment, job creation, food security and environmental sustainability.
Oyetola credited reforms under President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda with boosting stakeholder engagement, investment inflows, maritime safety and port competitiveness. He pointed to the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 2025 Container Port Performance Index, which placed Tin Can Island Port as the tenth most-improved port globally and Lagos Port Complex, Apapa, as the twelfth most-improved between 2020 and 2025. Ongoing port modernisation and planned new deep seaports in Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Lagos and Ondo states, he added, would further cement Nigeria’s status as West Africa’s preferred maritime hub.
He also linked improved port operations to Nigeria’s consistent national trade surplus since 2024. On waterway safety, Oyetola said the ministry has stepped up cooperation with relevant agencies and states, distributed life jackets nationwide, and is pressing states to phase out unsafe wooden passenger boats in favour of modern fibre vessels. He urged coastal states to align their development plans with the national policy and to attract private investment into fisheries, aquaculture, maritime transport, tourism, shipbuilding, renewable energy and marine biotechnology.
Delivering the keynote, Bayelsa State Governor Douye Diri commended President Tinubu for creating the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy, calling it a strategic move to diversify the national economy. Bayelsa followed with its own state-level ministry in June 2024 to anchor the blue economy component of its ASSURED Prosperity Agenda. Diri said the state has begun major fish production at the Bayelsa Aquaculture Village in Yenegwe, where a functioning hatchery is breeding catfish fingerlings and juveniles, expanded its marine transport fleet, and is pushing ahead with the proposed Agge Deep Seaport as a new maritime gateway for the Niger Delta.
The governor outlined five pathways for coastal states to capture blue economy opportunities: setting up dedicated marine and blue economy ministries, passing enabling legislation, mapping and securing their maritime domains, investing in credible data systems, and building skills, markets, innovation hubs and logistics infrastructure.
Presenting on private sector investment, Aliko Dangote, represented by Dangote Port Operations Managing Director Simeon Akin Omole, said the policy’s success hinges on sustained private participation. He noted its targets of three million jobs within four years, seven per cent annual sectoral growth, and at least 50 per cent of new jobs reserved for youths aged 18 to 35. Industrial transformation, he said, requires policy consistency, quality infrastructure, financing access and investor confidence, resting on three pillars: infrastructure-led industrialization, value-chain development and stronger public-private partnerships.
He said federal approvals for new deep seaports would spur industrial clusters spanning agro-processing, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, cold-chain logistics and maritime technology. On fisheries, Dangote noted that Nigeria still spends close to a billion dollars annually on fish imports despite rising local output, and argued that investment across the value chain, aquaculture, hatcheries, feed production, processing, cold-chain and export infrastructure, could cut imports, save foreign exchange, generate over 500,000 jobs and position Nigeria as a fisheries export leader. He called for public-private partnerships that go beyond financing to become strategic collaborations involving government, investors, researchers and coastal communities.
Goodwill messages came from Akwa Ibom Deputy Governor Akon Eyakenyi, chairman of Senate Committee on Marine Transport Wasiu Sanni Eshinlokun, representatives of the Ondo and Borno state governors, and private sector operators, all pledging support for the policy’s implementation.
Nigeria Watch
The minister’s push for sub-national ownership speaks to a structural gap that has long shadowed Nigeria’s blue economy ambitions: a national policy is only as strong as the states willing to enforce and fund it locally. Bayelsa’s example, a dedicated state ministry, an operating aquaculture hatchery, and active pursuit of the Agge Deep Seaport, offers a template other coastal states, including Lagos, Ondo, Cross River and Akwa Ibom, could replicate rather than waiting on federal capital alone.
For NIWA and LASWA, Oyetola’s renewed call to replace wooden boats with fibre vessels reinforces a safety conversation that has dominated inland waterway coverage this year, particularly given recurring capsizing incidents. The gap remains implementation and financing, the kind of gap operators have long argued the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund could help close if disbursement moves faster.
Dangote’s fisheries import figures are also worth flagging for the Nigerian Shippers’ Council and port community: nearly a billion dollars a year leaving the country for fish imports is a logistics and cold-chain infrastructure story as much as an agricultural one, with direct implications for port-adjacent cold storage investment at Apapa, Tin Can and the emerging deep seaports.
Blue Economy
Water Transport Operators Push For Recognition At The Table As FTAN Demands Tourism Policy Reforms
Water Transport Operators Push For Recognition At The Table As FTAN Demands Tourism Policy Reforms
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
Nigeria’s tourism sector needs urgent policy reform, stronger collaboration and fresh investment to compete globally and water transport operators who are members of the Federation of Tourism Associations of Nigeria (FTAN) want that conversation to include the boats, ferries and waterway routes that move millions of Nigerians and could move even more tourists.
That was the underlying idea raised by Comrade Babatope Fajemirokun National President of Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN) represented by Chief Raymond Gold, National PRO of WABOTAN, at the ninth Nigeria Tourism Investors Forum and Exhibition (NTIFE), held over two days in Abuja under the theme “Tourism Transformation Through Collaboration, Policy Alignment and Investment.” The events took place between Thursday 30 to Friday 31 of July 2026. Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN), is a corporate member of FTAN
The forum drew policymakers, investors, tourism operators and development partners.
FTAN President Dr Aliyu Badaki used his welcome remarks to press the Federal Government to overhaul tourism-related laws and regulatory frameworks that he said breed duplication, institutional conflict and legal uncertainty for operators. He said the federation’s newly developed Tourism Transformation Mandate (TTM) is meant to unify every segment of the tourism value chain.
Babatope Fajemirokun, through Chief Gold emphasizes the fact that this value chain for Nigeria’s coastal cities, riverine communities and inland waterway corridors, runs directly through water transport.
Badaki argued that fragmented efforts and weak coordination have held back the sector for years, and called for regulation that enables rather than inhibits growth.
Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, who declared the forum open, described tourism as a strategic pillar for economic diversification. She said government cannot finance tourism transformation alone and that private capital must lead, with government’s role limited to creating an enabling environment for investors.
In his keynote address, Sen. Ibrahim Ida called for stronger collaboration among government, the private sector and host communities, saying tourism can generate jobs, foreign exchange and diversification if properly harnessed.
Panel sessions, moderated by Justina Ovat of Calabar Hospitality House Limited, featured Nigeria Tourism Development Authority (NTDA) Director-General Dr Ola Awakan, who called for policy consistency and investor-friendly incentives, and Dr Philip Maga of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR), who flagged the need for stronger workforce training to close skills gaps across the hospitality industry.
Hospitality entrepreneur Lanre Balogun urged investors to prioritise disciplined, long-term planning.
Nigeria Watch
For Nigeria’s water transport sector, NTIFE’s reform push is not a side conversation. Rather, it is a direct stakeholder issue. FTAN’s corporate membership includes Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN) and the Association of Tourist Boat Operators and Water Transporters of Nigeria (ATBOWATON), both drawn from the ranks of operators who run the boats, ferries and water taxis that already serve Lagos’s creeks, the Niger Delta’s riverine towns and coastal leisure routes. Their presence inside FTAN means the federation’s demand for regulatory clarity and coordinated policy carries an inland-waterways and blue-economy dimension that goes beyond hotels and heritage sites.
That matters because water tourism sits at an awkward regulatory junction in Nigeria. A tourist boat operator answers not only to tourism authorities but potentially to NIWA, LASWA (in Lagos) and NIMASA on safety standards, and state government tourism boards, precisely the kind of overlapping jurisdiction Badaki described as breeding “duplication, institutional conflicts… and operational uncertainty.”
The 2026 Supreme Court ruling affirming NIWA’s regulatory authority over inland waterways nationwide, following the NIWA-LASWA jurisdictional dispute, is a live example of the kind of institutional friction FTAN’s Tourism Transformation Mandate is meant to resolve, at least on the tourism side.
Musawa’s call for private capital to lead tourism investment also lands squarely on water transport operators’ desks. Vessel acquisition, safety retrofitting, jetty infrastructure and life-jacket compliance all require capital that small-scale operators, including WABOTAN’s member-cooperative structure, have struggled to access, a gap that echoes the long-running CVFF disbursement failure in the cabotage shipping sector and underscores why financing bottlenecks are not unique to cargo and passenger shipping alone.
If FTAN’s push for policy alignment succeeds in drawing water transport formally into Nigeria’s tourism investment architecture, operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON could gain a stronger claim to inclusion in infrastructure programmes such as the Omi-Eko electric ferry project and LASWA’s ferry safety development initiatives, turning routine commuter water transport into a recognised leisure and tourism asset, not just a transportation afterthought.
For a sector accustomed to being regulated but rarely consulted, this call by Babatope Fajemirokun is a modest but meaningful call.
Blue Economy
NIMASA Deepens Seafarer Welfare Push, Signs Off Renewed Mission to Seafarers Collaboration
NIMASA Deepens Seafarer Welfare Push, Signs Off Renewed Mission to Seafarers Collaboration
By Ighoyota Onaibre | Waterways News
The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has restated its commitment to improving the welfare of Nigerian seafarers, pledging deeper collaboration with the Mission to Seafarers (MtS) as part of ongoing reforms in the sector.
The commitment came as the Director-General, Dr Dayo Mobereola, received a delegation from the Mission to Seafarers at the agency’s Lagos headquarters, led by the Chairman of MtS Lagos, Chief Adebayo Sarumi, alongside the Regional Director for Africa, Reverend Cedric Rautenbach.
Speaking on behalf of the DG, NIMASA’s Executive Director for Operations, Engr. Fatai Taiye Adeyemi, said the agency would continue tightening certification processes, expanding capacity development programmes, and strengthening welfare policies for seafarers both at sea and in port, in partnership with stakeholders such as the Mission to Seafarers.
Chief Sarumi commended NIMASA’s ongoing reforms and expressed confidence that closer collaboration would translate into tangible welfare gains for Nigerian maritime professionals. Reverend Rautenbach, for his part, clarified that while the Mission to Seafarers and Nigeria’s Port Welfare Committees pursue a shared objective which is the the wellbeing of seafarers. The two bodies operate on distinct, complementary mandates, making coordination between them essential to strengthening on-ground support at Nigerian ports.
The meeting covered decent working conditions, welfare service gaps, and areas of mutual collaboration. NIMASA said the engagement aligns with its obligations under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) 2006, and forms part of a broader push toward stronger regulatory oversight and stakeholder engagement on seafarer rights.
Nigeria Watch
Beyond the courtesy-visit optics, this meeting lands on a fault line that has dogged Nigerian seafarer welfare for years: fragmented institutional responsibility. NIMASA regulates and certifies; Port Welfare Committees are meant to deliver frontline services at berths; the Mission to Seafarers, a faith-based international NGO, fills gaps neither statutory body always reaches. These gaps are chaplaincy, shore leave support, emergency assistance, and advocacy for stranded or abandoned crew.
Rautenbach’s point about “distinct but complementary mandates” is worth pressing on, because in practice that distinction has often meant duplication in some areas and total absence in others.
Nigerian seafarers have long reported patchy access to welfare facilities at ports like Apapa, Tin Can Island, and Onne. Such reports include inconsistent internet access, poor rest facilities, and slow response to cases of wage default or abandonment by errant shipowners, issues MWUN has repeatedly raised in past CBA compliance disputes.
NIMASA’s MLC 2006 framing is the right one, but enforcement, not policy language, remains the industry’s persistent complaint. If this renewed MtS partnership is to mean more than another photo-op at headquarters, it should translate into a documented, port-by-port welfare service map: which ports have functioning seafarer centres, which Port Welfare Committees are actually active, and where the Mission to Seafarers’ Flying Angel network is present versus where seafarers are effectively on their own.
Nigerian crews calling at their own national ports deserve better than welfare support that depends on which NGO happens to be in town.
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.
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