Blue Economy
FG Approves New Deep Seaports as Oyetola Flags Off PMAWCA Mid-Year Session in Lagos
FG Approves New Deep Seaports as Oyetola Flags Off PMAWCA Mid-Year Session in Lagos
Nigeria targets West and Central Africa’s top maritime hub status as minister unveils port expansion agenda, Single Window reforms, and Deep Blue security gains
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News Correspondent | Lagos
The Federal Government has approved the development of additional deep seaports across Nigeria as part of a sweeping maritime expansion drive aimed at positioning the country as the dominant trade and logistics hub in West and Central Africa, the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr. Adegboyega Oyetola, announced on Monday.
Oyetola made the disclosure while declaring open the Mid-Year Session of the Board of Directors of the Port Management Association of West and Central Africa (PMAWCA) at Victoria Island, Lagos. The three-day session, running from May 18 to 20, 2026, is themed “Ports of the Future: Combining Logistical Resilience with Inclusive Community Development.”
The gathering drew an array of senior stakeholders including the Taraba State Governor, Dr. Kefas Agbu; the Lagos State Commissioner for Transportation, Oluwaseun Osiyemi, representing Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu; Dangote Group Chairman, Alhaji Aliko Dangote; the President’s Special Adviser on Policy Coordination, Hadiza Bala Usman; NPA Managing Director and PMAWCA President, Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho; and Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy, Mrs. Fatima Mahmood.
New Ports, Channel Deepening on the Cards.
Announcing the expansion, Oyetola said approvals had been granted for the development of additional deep seaports across the country to complement existing infrastructure, strengthen supply chain resilience, and reinforce Nigeria’s position as the preferred maritime and logistics hub for West and Central Africa.
Beyond new port construction, the minister disclosed that existing seaports would undergo comprehensive upgrades, including channel deepening, to attract larger vessels, stressing that such upgrades are critical to ensuring that Nigerian ports remain globally competitive and capable of supporting larger volumes of trade.
He added that the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu remains committed to modernising the nation’s ports through infrastructure upgrades, digital transformation and improved operational efficiency, noting that coordinated policy interventions and stronger inter-agency collaboration had significantly reduced logistics bottlenecks at major seaports.
The results, he said, include improved cargo evacuation, reduced vessel waiting times, greater operational efficiency and a more predictable business environment for port users and investors.
Single Window Cited as Landmark Reform
Oyetola described the Federal Government’s National Single Window initiative as a major reform designed to streamline cargo clearance processes through the digital integration of government agencies and port operations. The platform, which went live earlier this year, has been at the centre of efforts to reduce dwell time and eliminate duplicated documentation requirements across Nigerian ports.
Deep Blue Project Credited with Ending Piracy
On the maritime security front, Oyetola said the implementation of the Deep Blue Project had eliminated piracy in Nigerian waters and drastically reduced maritime crimes across the Gulf of Guinea, an achievement he said had restored investor confidence and strengthened the region’s attractiveness as a secure maritime corridor for international commerce.
$27bn Investment Wave Sweeping Sub-Region — Dantsoho
In his welcome address, NPA Managing Director Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho painted a buoyant picture of the sub-regional investment landscape. He noted that West and Central Africa are witnessing a major resurgence in maritime infrastructure investment, with more than $27 billion worth of port projects underway or recently announced across the sub-region, citing major projects including the $20 billion Simandou-Morebaya Deep Sea Port in Guinea, the $2 billion Port San Pedro project in Côte d’Ivoire, the $1.5 billion Lekki Deep Sea Port in Lagos, and port developments in Ghana and Senegal.
Dantsoho also highlighted ongoing investments in Nigeria’s Apapa and Tin Can Island ports, alongside a $600 million investment by APM Terminals, and called on ports across the sub-region to move beyond their traditional role as cargo gateways and become drivers of broader blue economy growth.
Dangote Reaffirms Lekki Port Expansion
At the sidelines of the event, Dangote Group President Alhaji Aliko Dangote restated plans to deepen Africa’s maritime trade capacity through a new deep seaport project, disclosing that the Lekki Deep Sea Port is expected to become the largest and deepest seaport on the continent upon completion.
Dangote further disclosed that discussions had been concluded with the President of Tanzania on additional port development projects, and called for greater private sector participation in port development across Africa, stressing that governments should prioritise creating an enabling environment and revenue generation rather than directly engaging in port construction.
He warned that persistent infrastructure gaps and inefficiencies in some West and Central African ports continue to cause delays in cargo operations, affecting trade flows across the region.
Nigeria Watch
For terminal operators, freight forwarders, shipowners, and regulatory stakeholders, Monday’s announcements at the PMAWCA session carry significant operational implications.
The approval of new deep seaports — coming alongside channel deepening plans for existing facilities — signals that the Federal Government is responding to longstanding concerns about Nigeria’s capacity constraints, particularly as the Lekki Deep Sea Port ramps up operations and Apapa continues to handle the bulk of the country’s containerised cargo.
For freight forwarders, the commitment to the National Single Window, if implemented with full agency participation, could materially reduce cargo dwell times and eliminate the parallel documentation chains that currently add cost and uncertainty to port transactions. The question stakeholders will be pressing is when the new ports move from approval to groundbreaking — and whether the channel deepening schedule for Apapa and Tin Can Island has a firm timeline attached.
The Deep Blue Project’s reported success in suppressing piracy in the Gulf of Guinea is also commercially significant. Lower maritime insurance premiums for Nigeria-bound voyages would directly benefit shipowners and charterers, potentially making Nigerian ports more price-competitive against Lomé, Abidjan, and Tema in the battle for West African transhipment and gateway cargo.
With over $27 billion in sub-regional port investment in play, Nigeria’s window to consolidate its position as the hub of choice remains open — but the pace of domestic reform execution will determine whether Lagos or its neighbours capture the larger share of the coming trade wave.
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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