Editor's Choice
CRISIS AT TIN CAN: How MSC’s Mounting Empty Containers Are Choking Nigeria’s Busiest Port
CRISIS AT TIN CAN: How MSC’s Mounting Empty Containers Are Choking Nigeria’s Busiest Port
Truck drivers shun MSC boxes as haulage costs skyrocket to N1.5m per trip; ANLCA demands vessel deployment while NPA security officials allegedly exploit the chaos for illegal levies; tariff battle simmers in the background
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News, Lagos
A deepening operational crisis is unfolding at the Tin Can Island Port in Lagos as the mass accumulation of uncollected empty containers belonging to the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) — the world’s largest container shipping line — continues to overwhelm terminal capacity, throttle cargo movement and inflict severe financial pain on freight stakeholders across Nigeria’s most active port corridor.
Waterways.ng can report that the situation, which industry insiders describe as systemic and long-festering, has now reached a critical inflection point, with multiple terminals refusing to accept MSC empty containers, haulage prices surging to record levels, and truck operators openly boycotting MSC boxes to protect their businesses.
TERMINALS SLAM THE GATE SHUT
The Tin Can Island Container Terminal (TICT), Ports and Cargo Handling Services Terminal, and Five Star Logistics Terminal have all stopped accepting empty MSC containers, citing acute shortage of yard space. The move is a direct response to a persistent surplus of MSC empties that has accumulated over months — a consequence, stakeholders say, of a fundamental imbalance in the shipping line’s vessel operations at Nigerian ports.
According to the National Publicity Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Mr. Emmanuel Onyeme, the root of the problem lies in MSC’s habitual practice of arriving at Tin Can with approximately 1,000 containers per vessel call but departing with only around 500 — leaving a structural deficit of empties at every port call with no viable evacuation plan in place.
“MSC Shipping vessels come to Nigerian ports with 1,000 containers and leave with only 500, leaving a deficit on the port. They are making Nigeria a dumping ground,” Onyeme added.
He said the consequence is now visible and visceral: yards overflowing with idle MSC boxes, export cargoes loaded in MSC containers stranded inside port premises, and a haulage ecosystem increasingly unwilling to touch anything bearing the MSC name.
HAULAGE COSTS EXPLODE AS DRIVERS STAGE QUIET BOYCOTT
The financial fallout for licensed customs agents has been severe. Moving an MSC container from TICT or Five Star Logistics Terminal to a warehouse within the Tin Can Port complex now attracts a charge of N500,000, while a trip to Ikeja — previously a routine haul — now commands N1.5 million.
“This week has been hectic. To move a container of vehicle from TICT Terminal or Five Star Logistics Terminal to a warehouse in Tin Can is N500,000. After this, it takes you two weeks to return the empty container. Daily you are being charged on the empty container,” Onyeme said.
The compounding effect is particularly punishing for customs agents who hold valid Terminal Delivery Orders (TDOs) but cannot execute them because truck drivers are actively avoiding MSC containers. The combination of high haulage fees, prolonged truck turnaround times and ongoing demurrage charges — which ANLCA says exceed N100,000 per day on unreturned MSC empty boxes — means that loading an MSC container now carries near-certain financial loss.
The National Secretary of the Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO), Comrade Muhammed Bala Sanni, confirmed the boycott, saying his members had taken a collective decision to steer clear of MSC containers until the shipping line deploys vessels to clear the backlog.
“If you load MSC containers, you would lose revenue. MSC Shipping is not deploying ships to receive their empty containers. All the terminals are telling us there is no space. Nobody is willing to take the risk of loading an MSC container — at the end of the day, you would lose revenue and also lose your client,” Sanni said.
He noted that trucks are lining the access roads and holding bays of affected terminals at full capacity, worsening congestion across the port corridor stretching from Mile 2 to Tin Can Island.
THE GHOST OF MEDLOG: A HOLDING BAY THAT EXISTS ONLY ON PAPER
Central to the crisis is what stakeholders describe as MSC’s failure to provide a functional holding bay for its empty containers in Nigeria. While MSC has pointed to its logistics arm, MEDLOG, as the designated depot for returning empties, both licensed customs agents and truck operators say no such facility has materialised in practice.
“MSC Shipping would tell you they have MEDLOG as their holding bay, but we have not seen anywhere to drop their containers,” Onyeme said.
The absence of a working depot has, in effect, forced the port’s terminal yards and Nigeria’s truck fleet to serve as MSC’s de facto container storage infrastructure — without compensation. AMATO’s Sanni was blunt: “The shipping companies are not ready to pay us for using our trucks as a holding bay.”
Onyeme’s demand was unambiguous: MSC must immediately deploy a minimum of five vessels to Tin Can Port specifically to evacuate the backlog, and the shipping line must establish a verifiable, functional holding bay or face escalating institutional resistance.
ALLEGED EXTORTION AT THE GATE
The congestion has reportedly spawned a secondary crisis: the alleged exploitation of the situation by security personnel of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) at the second gate of Tin Can Island Port. Onyeme alleged that NPA security officials have been chaining trucks attempting to drop MSC empty containers and demanding N50,000 per truck for their release.
“NPA security personnel are now taking advantage of the situation and chaining trucks who come to drop MSC empty containers. They are collecting N50,000. For any transporter to load or drop an MSC container, he has to pay N50,000 — meanwhile MSC Shipping is also charging demurrage daily for the container not dropped,” he alleged.
If the allegations hold, truck operators are being squeezed from two directions simultaneously: extorted by port security for attempting to return containers, and simultaneously penalised by MSC in daily demurrage charges for not returning them. Stakeholders say the situation demands urgent regulatory intervention.
Waterways.ng contacted the NPA for reaction to these allegations but had not received a response at the time of publication. MSC Nigeria was also contacted but did not respond before deadline.
ANLCA FIRES FORMAL LETTER TO SHIPPERS’ COUNCIL
In a sign that informal complaints have escalated into official channels, the Secretary of ANLCA’s Tin Can Island chapter, Mr. Franky Paul Nwegbe, confirmed that the association has drafted a formal letter to the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) on the matter.
“The letter is going out on Monday to the Nigerian Shippers’ Council. MSC is not taking export containers. This is leading to a hike in transportation and congestion at the port,” Nwegbe added.
The move carries weight. The NSC demonstrated its regulatory muscle in March 2026, when it formally directed MSC to suspend a unilateral tariff increase — a directive the shipping line ultimately complied with, reverting to its previous tariff regime pending broader stakeholder consultations. Industry observers say the ANLCA letter could reignite that regulatory tension if the Council takes up the empty container issue with equal resolve.
NO INVESTMENT, NO JUSTIFICATION — ANLCA ON TARIFF HIKE
The empty container crisis has also reinflamed the ongoing debate about MSC’s proposed tariff increases. Onyeme mounted a forceful economic argument against any hike, contending that MSC has failed to demonstrate the operational investment or value addition that could justify higher charges.
“MSC Shipping is not adding any value to this country. It is the terminal operator that handles and loads containers. Shipping companies don’t have any equipment, no operational vehicles, they don’t contribute or invest in our ports, they add no value. They are supposed to have holding bays but they don’t — and that is why we insist they cannot increase charges,” he said.
The position mirrors the broader industry coalition that forced the NSC’s intervention in March 2026. The regulator’s April 2026 stakeholders forum on the tariff question ended inconclusively, with the NSC insisting no increase would take effect without comprehensive stakeholder engagement — a process still unresolved.
A STRUCTURAL PROBLEM WITHOUT A STRUCTURAL FIX
The MSC empty container crisis at Tin Can is not an isolated incident. Nigeria’s port infrastructure has long grappled with a chronic imbalance between import and export container traffic. Industry data shows that empty containers accounted for approximately 80 per cent of outbound traffic from Nigerian ports in 2023 — a ratio that reflects the country’s import-heavy trade profile and the limited competitiveness of Nigerian exports in containerised formats.
The result is an environment structurally prone to exactly the kind of accumulation crisis now playing out at Tin Can. Until Nigeria’s export capacity meaningfully closes the gap with its import volumes — or until shipping lines are held to firmer regulatory standards on container evacuation — the empty box problem will continue to recur.
As of the time of this report, no terminal at Tin Can Island Port had reversed its refusal to accept MSC empty containers, no evacuation vessel had been announced by MSC, and AMATO’s informal boycott of MSC boxes remained in effect. The ANLCA formal letter to the Nigerian Shippers’ Council was expected to be delivered on Monday.
KEY FIGURES
- N500,000 — Haulage cost from TICT/Five Star to Tin Can warehouse
- N1,500,000 — Haulage cost from Tin Can to Ikeja
- N100,000 — MSC’s daily demurrage on unreturned empty containers
- N50,000 — Alleged NPA gate levy per truck dropping MSC empties
- 500 — Estimated net empty containers surplus per MSC vessel call
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.
Editor's Choice
RUSSIA’S ARCTIC OIL GAMBLE: WHAT AN ICEBREAKER FLEET TEACHES A REGION THAT STILL FIGHTS PIRATES WITH GUNBOATS
RUSSIA’S ARCTIC OIL GAMBLE: WHAT AN ICEBREAKER FLEET TEACHES A REGION THAT STILL FIGHTS PIRATES WITH GUNBOATS
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
Russia has just done something no country bordering the Gulf of Guinea could attempt: it built an entire alternative shipping corridor, armed it with nuclear icebreakers, and is now using it to route around the world’s most contested waters. For West African maritime observers, the story is not really about oil. It is about what state capacity buys a country when global shipping lanes turn hostile and what its absence costs one.
A CONVOY BUILT TO DODGE THE WORLD’S HOTSPOTS
More than a dozen Suezmax, Aframax and Medium Range tankers are currently transiting or staged along Russia’s Northern Sea Route, carrying crude that analysts estimate at roughly 8 million barrels, already more than half the total volume Russia moved during the entirety of last year’s four-month Arctic navigation season. The largest cluster has formed in the Kara Sea, where the Suezmax Dinasty and five Aframax tankers are holding position, likely awaiting nuclear icebreaker escort or better ice conditions before pushing east toward Asian buyers.
Independent tracking data corroborates the scale of the buildup. Vessel-tracking figures show at least seven tankers involved in Russia’s eastbound Arctic crude campaign, with five Aframax tankers and another vessel holding position while one tanker had already begun its eastbound transit, together capable of carrying roughly 5 million barrels of crude. Russia shipped 4.16 million barrels a day of crude in the four weeks to July 26, with tankers beginning to use the Northern Sea Route to China as Arctic ice retreats, part of a broader pattern of Russian crude sidestepping Red Sea risk.
THREE NUCLEAR ICEBREAKERS, ONE STRATEGIC CALCULATION
Moscow has deployed three nuclear-powered icebreakers, Sibir, Yakutiya and Ural, along the route this season, with Ural stationed near Wrangel Island, a choke point that has slowed convoys for two consecutive summers. The route shaves thousands of nautical miles off the journey between northwest Russia and Asia compared with the Suez Canal, but it is navigable to conventional tankers only for a few summer months, and even then only with heavy icebreaker support.
Russia is leaning on that seasonal window precisely because its conventional options have narrowed. The push helps Moscow sustain historically high export rates while avoiding the pitfalls of sailing through Houthi-threatened Red Sea waters, on top of continuing tension around the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine’s demonstrated reach against Russian energy infrastructure and tankers.
It is worth noting, however, that the Arctic route has not been Russia’s unqualified success story. An analysis published earlier this year found that cargo volumes on the Northern Sea Route actually fell for the first time since 2022, dropping to 37 million tons in 2025 against an official target of 80 million tons, a reminder that ambition and icebreakers alone do not guarantee results, even for a state willing to spend billions building Arctic infrastructure.
THE GULF OF GUINEA COMPARISON NO ONE IS MAKING
Here is the part of the story West African readers should sit with. Russia’s answer to shipping-lane insecurity was to engineer an entirely new corridor, pouring state capital into a fleet of nuclear icebreakers so that geography itself becomes a strategic asset. Nigeria and its Gulf of Guinea neighbours face a comparable insecurity problem, but with none of that infrastructure to fall back on.
Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea has fallen from its mid-2010s peak, credited in part to Nigeria’s Deep Blue Project, NIMASA’s expanded intelligence and patrol capacity, and coordination among regional navies. Yet the region accounted for 92 percent of all crew kidnappings recorded globally in 2025, with 23 seafarers taken hostage, up from 12 the year before, and analysts still point to limited naval patrols and porous coastal borders as unresolved weaknesses.
Nigeria has responded this year by deepening security partnerships, including a new naval cooperation arrangement with the United Arab Emirates covering intelligence sharing, technology transfer and indigenous shipbuilding, while regional navies have moved to activate a Combined Maritime Task Force for the Gulf of Guinea.
Those are real steps. But they remain fundamentally reactive, protecting an existing corridor rather than building an alternative one. Russia’s Arctic convoy shows what the other end of that spectrum looks like, a state treating maritime routing itself as a lever of economic survival, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars and a fleet of icebreakers most nations could never justify.
THE TAKEAWAY FOR NIGERIAN MARITIME POLICY
The lesson is not that Nigeria should chase Arctic-scale infrastructure as geography and economics make that irrelevant here. The lesson is narrower and more urgent. Global shipping is entering an era where major exporters are actively re-routing around instability rather than simply insuring against it. If the Gulf of Guinea’s own security gaps persist while global shippers have more alternative corridors than ever to choose from, the region risks losing traffic not because vessels were attacked, but because they were rerouted before they ever arrived.
For a corridor that already competes with Russian, Gulf and North African crude for the same Asian buyers, that is not an abstract risk. It is a market-share question with a naval-capacity answer.
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.
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