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AMAE, NGA Partner to Bring Maritime Awareness to Lagos Coastal Youth Through Art
AMAE, NGA Partner to Bring Maritime Awareness to Lagos Coastal Youth Through Art
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
The African Maritime Art Exhibition (AMAE), in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art (NGA) and other partners, is set to launch Paint Your Coast 2026 — a maiden maritime art training initiative and coastal communities’ art competition designed to deepen ocean literacy, maritime awareness, and cultural storytelling among young people in Lagos waterfront communities. The programme will be hosted at two locations: Akodo-Ise in Ibeju-Lekki on Wednesday, June 24, and Makoko on Friday, June 26, 2026.
Each session is expected to draw approximately 70 participants, including students, community leaders, government representatives, maritime stakeholders, and development partners. Participants will receive hands-on training in drawing, painting, visual storytelling, Batik/Adire-inspired textile art, and mixed-media techniques, drawing on their immediate coastal environment as subject matter.
Through guided tours of the waterfront, they will be encouraged to interpret themes spanning coastal livelihoods, fishing communities, waterways, ports, shipping, maritime heritage, and blue economy opportunities.
Organisers note that while young people in coastal communities often have intimate, lived experience of the sea and waterways, they typically have limited exposure to the broader maritime industry and its career pathways.
” Paint Your Coast is about helping young people see their communities through a new lens,” said Ezinne Azunna, Convener of AMAE and Creative Director of Maritime TV Africa. ” Through art, participants are encouraged to document their environment, celebrate their heritage, and reflect on the role of coastal communities in shaping Nigeria’s maritime future.”
Participants at both training sessions will subsequently qualify for the Paint Your Coast Art Competition, with outstanding entries to be exhibited at the 2026 African Maritime Art Exhibition later in the year.
AMAE describes itself as a platform dedicated to promoting maritime awareness, ocean literacy, and blue economy conversations through art, education, and cultural engagement.
Nigeria Watch
The Paint Your Coast initiative may be modest in scale, but it touches a nerve that Nigeria’s maritime establishment has long struggled to address: the disconnect between coastal communities and the formal blue economy they physically inhabit but rarely benefit from.
Makoko and Akodo-Ise are not peripheral to Nigeria’s maritime story — they are literally embedded within it. Makoko sits on Lagos Lagoon, one of the most trafficked inland waterways in West Africa. Akodo-Ise lies within the Ibeju-Lekki corridor, the same coastline that hosts the Lekki Deep Sea Port, the Dangote Refinery’s marine jetty, and the proposed Lekki Free Trade Zone marine infrastructure. Yet the young people growing up in these communities are largely invisible to maritime sector planning, recruitment pipelines, and policy conversations.
AMAE’s approach — using art and creative expression as an entry point to maritime education — is unconventional, but it reflects a broader truth: ocean literacy in Nigeria cannot be built through technical curricula alone. It requires cultural anchoring, and coastal communities have cultural connections to the sea that are far richer than any formal training manual.
For NIMASA, the NPA, and other maritime agencies pursuing Nigeria’s blue economy agenda, initiatives like Paint Your Coast deserve more than passive goodwill. There is a legitimate case for structured agency support — whether through NIMASA’s Maritime Safety, Security and Environment (MASSE) department, the agency’s existing public sensitisation mandates, or through dedicated CSR frameworks by terminal operators and port concessionaires.
If Nigeria is serious about building the next generation of maritime professionals from within its coastal communities, the pipeline must start here — on the waterfront, not in a boardroom.
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The Criminalisation of Waste Dumping on Lagos Roads and Why it should be Extended to the Waterways
The Criminalisation of Waste Dumping on Lagos Roads and Why it should be Extended to the Waterways
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
The Lagos State Government has inaugurated a special enforcement task force to combat indiscriminate waste disposal across the metropolis, deploying what amounts to a criminalisation of illegal dumping on public roads and spaces — a move that is generating fresh questions among maritime and waterway stakeholders about whether similar enforcement authority should be extended to Lagos’s vast network of inland and coastal waterways.
The initiative follows mounting public outcry over the proliferation of refuse at roads, motor parks, bus stops and garages across Lagos, with attendant public health consequences. At an emergency stakeholder meeting held at Alausa, Ikeja, the Commissioner for Transportation, Mr Oluwaseun Osiyemi, explained that the crackdown became necessary due to persistent abuse of public spaces by residents and operators. He framed the initiative as part of renewed efforts to restore cleanliness and environmental order in Africa’s most populous city, noting that Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has directed a 24-hour scale-up of waste evacuation operations statewide.
Lagos State Commissioner for Transportation, Mr Oluwaseun Osiyemi
Central to the enforcement model is a collaboration between the state government and transport unions, who will work alongside the Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) as what the commissioner described as “waste police” — embedded enforcers drawn from union membership with strategic presence across the city’s transport corridors.
“We cannot be on every road 24 hours a day. We are not abandoning this responsibility to you, nor are we doing it alone. What we are asking for is collaboration because this fight is not for the government alone, it is for all of us,” Osiyemi stated.
The commissioner warned that there would henceforth be consequences for anyone found engaging in illegal waste disposal, and urged transport union leaders to ensure their garages, bus stops and parks are clean and free from illegal activities.
Also addressing the meeting, the Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor, Mr Sam Egube, described transport operators as key stakeholders in maintaining public order, urging them to support environmental sanitation enforcement and to report suspicious activity observed in their parks and vehicles.
The Managing Director of LAWMA, Dr Muyiwa Gbadegesin, disclosed that Lagos generates approximately 13,000 tonnes of waste daily, underscoring the scale of the environmental management challenge the state faces.
Leaders of the National Union of Road Transport Workers and the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria pledged their cooperation, while calling for a structured engagement platform to enhance monitoring and response across transport corridors.
Nigeria Watch
What this means for Lagos waterways — and why maritime stakeholders should pay close attention
The Lagos State Government’s decision to criminalise roadside waste dumping and mobilise transport unions as environmental enforcers is, at its core, a governance decision: that indiscriminate waste disposal is no longer merely a sanitation nuisance but a matter of law and public order warranting arrest. The question that follows logically — and urgently — is why the same legal logic has not been applied with equal force to Lagos’s waterways.
The state’s creeks, canals, lagoons, and inland water channels have long served as open dumping grounds for refuse, effluent, and solid waste, with devastating consequences for waterway navigability, vessel safety, and the health of waterfront communities.
Waterlogged waste clogs channel approaches to ferry terminals and water transport corridors, compromises the structural integrity of landing jetties, and creates hazardous conditions for commercial and passenger vessels operating under NIWA and LASWA regulation. The Badagry Creek, Five Cowrie Creek, Lagos Lagoon, and the arteries feeding into Apapa port environs have all been repeatedly affected.
The enforcement architecture being assembled for roads — task forces, embedded union enforcers, 24-hour surveillance — is not theoretically difficult to replicate on the water. LASWA already has patrol capacity. LAWMA’s jurisdiction is not explicitly limited to land. The Lagos Environmental Sanitation Law contains provisions broad enough to encompass waterway dumping. What has been lacking is the political will to treat water pollution with the same urgency as road pollution.
There is a direct maritime economic argument here. Port logistics efficiency at Apapa, Tin Can Island, and the emerging Lekki Deep Sea Port complex is materially affected by the condition of the waterside environments through which cargo and personnel move. Ferry services — including the expanding water transport network that Governor Sanwo-Olu’s administration has promoted as a congestion solution — cannot thrive if the waterways they traverse are silted with refuse and industrial waste.
The €170 million Omi-Eko electric ferry financing from EIB Global represents a significant vote of confidence in Lagos’s blue economy potential; that investment deserves a clean operating environment.
Maritime and waterway operators, terminal concessionaires, ferry service providers and freight forwarders would do well to engage LASWA and the Lagos Ministry of Transportation on whether the current enforcement push can be formally extended to cover waterside and in-water waste disposal.
The moment is opportune: the state government is evidently in an enforcement posture. A coalition of maritime industry voices making the case for parity between road and waterway environmental standards would find receptive ears in Alausa. Water transport operators under the umbrellas of WABOTAN, ATBOWATON and Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) should all be involved in this advocacy.
The criminalisation of waste dumping on Lagos roads is welcome. Extending that same protection to the waterways is not optional — it is overdue.
Raymond Gold is Co-publisher and Research Reporter at Waterways News | waterwaysnews.ng
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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.
How Liberia Turn Its Flag into a Maritime Goldmine — But the Profits Keep Sailing Away
The world’s largest ship registry sits in a West African nation with a $670 per capita income. The ships are everywhere. The money, largely, is not.
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
In the high-pressure world of global shipping, few decisions carry as much financial weight as where a vessel is registered. And right now, more shipowners are making that decision in favour of Liberia than any other country on earth.
As of June 2026, the Liberia-flagged fleet stood at 307.3 million gross tonnage — making the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry (LISCR) the first registry in history to cross the 300 million GT threshold. It is the third consecutive year Liberia has held the title of the world’s largest shipping registry, widening its lead over its nearest rival by nearly 45 million gross tons.
The numbers are staggering. The Liberian Ship Registry now accounts for 17 percent of the global fleet, with 6,092 vessels flying its flag, and it represents 28 percent of global newbuilding gross tonnage — meaning more than one in four new ships entering the global fleet now does so under the Liberian colours.
But what pulls the world’s shipowners to a flag planted in one of West Africa’s most impoverished nations? And, critically, what is Liberia itself getting out of the arrangement?
THE MAGNET: WHAT SHIPOWNERS ARE REALLY BUYING
Established in 1948, the Liberian Registry has built its reputation on maritime safety, environmental standards, and administrative efficiency. Yet the hard commercial draw has always been simpler than that: cost reduction on a massive scale.
Shipowners choose Liberia’s open registry for lower taxes and reduced registration fees that can significantly slash operational costs, alongside the freedom to hire multinational crews at competitive wages — bypassing the higher labour costs imposed by national registries in Europe, Asia, or the Americas.
There are no crew nationality restrictions on Liberian vessels, and taxes are assessed at conservative rates based on net tonnage. For owners managing fleets of dozens of vessels, the cumulative savings run into tens of millions of dollars annually.
The registry is administered from Vienna, Virginia, with offices in New York, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Piraeus, Tokyo, Zurich, Singapore, and Monrovia, providing clients with 24-hour service. The bureaucratic friction that delays other registries simply does not exist here — a Liberian ship-owning corporation can typically be formed on the same working day instructions are received.
THE CHINA CARD
Beyond the traditional cost advantages, a newer and increasingly consequential incentive has emerged. Under a renewed maritime agreement with the People’s Republic of China, Liberian-flag vessels now enjoy preferential tonnage dues rates at Chinese ports, alongside expedited customs procedures and simplified port formalities — advantages that competing flags such as the Marshall Islands do not enjoy.
In a global shipping economy where China handles a dominant share of cargo, this diplomatic edge is no small commercial consideration.
LIBERIA’S GAIN — ON PAPER
Proponents of the arrangement argue that Liberia benefits meaningfully from the registry’s prestige and revenue. The Liberia Maritime Authority has described holding the world’s largest registry title as both an honour and a responsibility, with Commissioner Neto Zarzar Lighe Sr. pledging commitment to innovation and best practices expected of a Category ‘A’ member of the International Maritime Organisation’s Council.
The registry is reported to generate approximately 25 percent of Liberia’s national income — a figure that, if accurate, would represent a remarkable dependency on a single offshore arrangement. Liberian-flagged vessels also carry more than one-third of the oil imported into the United States, giving Liberia an invisible but powerful role in American energy supply chains.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE ARITHMETIC
But the glowing statistics mask a deeply troubling reality.
According to the Liberia Revenue Authority’s own records, the country received just US$12 million in maritime revenue in the 2019-2020 tax year from LISCR — amounting to only 2.75 percent of its total domestic revenue. More recent estimates place Liberia’s annual take from the registry at approximately $20 million.
Against a backdrop where Liberia’s total GDP stood at $4.75 billion in 2024, with a per capita income of just $670, the question becomes stark: who is really benefiting from the world’s most powerful shipping flag?
When over 130 countries representing 90 percent of global GDP came together in 2021 to agree a historic minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent for multinationals, shipping alone was excluded — an arrangement that continues to shield the registry’s clients from the kind of global tax reform that would otherwise erode their savings.
The structural explanation is revealing. LISCR is a purpose-made limited liability company registered in Delaware and based in Virginia, with US nationals as exclusive investors under Liberian law — meaning the entity that manages the world’s largest shipping registry is legally and operationally American, not Liberian.
Even the United States Ambassador to Liberia has publicly acknowledged the gap, stating that “the revenue, jobs, and expertise generated by LISCR have the potential to benefit Liberia’s economy in nearly every sector” — while urging that maritime revenues be transparently incorporated into the national budget. The diplomatic phrasing barely conceals the implicit admission: the potential is there, but the delivery has fallen short.
A FLAG THAT FLIES EVERYWHERE, PROFITS THAT LAND NOWHERE NEAR MONROVIA
Liberian investigative voices have grown increasingly vocal, with local media questioning whether registry revenues are ending up in the pockets of a privileged few, including top officials and their political lawyers, rather than flowing into public coffers.
The ITF has long argued that the FOC system lets foreign shipowners use the Liberian flag to benefit from lax regulations and lower operating expenses, resulting in labour exploitation with little meaningful economic benefit returning to Liberia itself.
The paradox is stark enough to have earned a name in academic and policy circles. The downward drag that tax havens brought to government revenues worldwide was once commonly referred to as the “Liberian Problem.”
THE BIGGER PICTURE FOR AFRICA
For maritime-watchers across West Africa — and in Nigeria, where the inland waterways sector continues to seek investment and regulatory frameworks that actually serve national interests — the Liberian registry story carries a cautionary resonance.
A nation can sit at the centre of global maritime commerce, command the allegiance of 6,000 vessels flying its flag across every ocean, carry a third of America’s oil imports, and still struggle to translate that extraordinary leverage into domestic development. The ships sail. The registry grows. The flag waves on every sea.
The revenue, largely, waves goodbye with them.
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