Business
GHOST BERTHS AND EMPTY DEPOTS: HOW THE DANGOTE REFINERY AND FUEL SUBSIDY REMOVAL ARE RESHAPING NIGERIA’S ECONOMY — AND DEVASTATING THE DOWNSTREAM SECTOR
GHOST BERTHS AND EMPTY DEPOTS: HOW THE DANGOTE REFINERY AND FUEL SUBSIDY REMOVAL ARE RESHAPING NIGERIA’S ECONOMY — AND DEVASTATING THE DOWNSTREAM SECTOR
By Oghenewoke Onoriode| Maritime & Energy Correspondent | March 15, 2026
THE VIEW FROM THE CREEK
A boat tour along the Lagos creeks and lagoon this week paints a picture few government economists would want to acknowledge. The berths that once teemed with product tankers — vessels loaded with imported petroleum offloading into an armada of tank farms along Creek Road, Kirikiri, Apapa and the Ojo waterfront — now sit idle. The vessels are gone. The jetties, quiet. And in what may be the most dramatic commercial signal yet, dozens of tank farms that once formed the backbone of Nigeria’s petroleum distribution value chain are now listed for sale.
This is the new reality of Nigeria’s downstream sector — a sector caught between two seismic forces: the removal of the fuel subsidy in May 2023 and the full ramping up of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery.
THE REFINERY: AN INDUSTRIAL COLOSSUS WITH A DISRUPTIVE WAKE
The Dangote Refinery, located in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, finally reached full operational capacity of 650,000 barrels per day — the world’s largest single-train refinery — marking an important milestone in Nigeria’s efforts to cut reliance on imported fuel. By January 2026, it was supplying 62% of the country’s Premium Motor Spirit, overtaking fuel importers for the first time in the country’s history.
Projections indicate the country could save up to $10 billion annually in foreign exchange previously spent on fuel imports, with petrol imports falling by more than 54% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 as local supply increased. Beyond the domestic market, diesel and jet fuel shipments have reached Ghana, Togo, and Cameroon, positioning the facility as a regional export hub.
But every revolution has its casualties, and the casualties along the Lagos waterway are visible and verifiable.
TANK FARMS FOR SALE: THE EVIDENCE ON THE WATER
The evidence is not anecdotal. It is documented in hard numbers, in regulatory data, and in property listings that any journalist can verify today.
No fewer than 70 tank farm owners have been compelled to cease operations, leaving their facilities abandoned and idle as retailers and station owners increasingly bypass the storage facilities. These dormant farms represent 65% of the total 120 approved facilities, with operators turning to alternative trucking options instead.
On Nigeria Property Centre alone, 48 tank farm properties are currently listed for sale, with facilities in Kirikiri, Dockyard Apapa, and surrounding maritime zones — some priced at ₦18 billion each — offering private jetties, multiple loading gantries and Certificate of Occupancy titles. These are not speculative land plots. They are fully operational, licensed petroleum storage facilities now without a buyer.
The business closure was primarily driven by the removal of the fuel subsidy, which led to a 488% increase in petrol prices, affecting the purchasing power of fuel marketers and fundamentally changing the economics of tank farm operations.
AN INDUSTRY BUILT ON IMPORTS — NOW STRANDED
The import data tells the full story of why the berths are empty. Bloomberg, citing data from analytics firm Vortexa Ltd., reported that fuel shipments into Nigeria stood at approximately 110,000 barrels per day in the first weeks of 2025 — the lowest since 2017, when imports regularly exceeded 200,000 barrels per day and sometimes reached 400,000 bpd.
By early 2026, the collapse had deepened further. Shipping data from Kpler showed petrol imports into Nigeria fell by more than half in February 2026 to around 50,000 barrels per day — a drop of nearly two-thirds compared with the same period the previous year.
As CORAN, the Coalition of Refineries and Associated Industries, noted in January 2026, Nigeria’s downstream sector for much of the past 30 years was shaped by an import-led trading model — one where fuel importation became profitable due to price differences, access to foreign exchange, and subsidy reimbursement systems, with no reinvestment into refining capacity. That model is now obsolete.
The diagnosis from industry insiders is frank. Captain Emmanuel Ihenacho, Chairman/CEO of Integrated Oil & Gas and CEO of Genesis Shipping, warned that “Job losses and slump in investment is bound to happen if tank farm owners are no longer being able to sell.”
He did not mince words on the scale of disruption: “What is happening currently in the downstream sector is something we have never seen before. It’s a complete emasculation of a class of business people.”
THE SUBSIDY REMOVAL: THE ACCELERANT
Layered onto this structural disruption is the shock of fuel subsidy removal. On May 29, 2023, President Bola Tinubu declared in his inaugural speech that the subsidy was gone. The result was a petrol price hike of nearly 488% in Africa’s largest oil producer by October 2024, with electricity costs also rising multifold because more than 58% of Nigerian households — off the national grid — rely on petrol and diesel generators.
Research presented at a stakeholders’ dialogue in Abuja by Mohammed Shuaibu of the University of Abuja found that poverty rose from a baseline of about 50% to 63% after subsidy removal, before moderating slightly to 56.2% when limited cash transfers were introduced. The national poverty gap — measuring the depth of poverty — also widened from 31.6% to over 45%, meaning many poor households became even poorer.
The human sentiment data from Afrobarometer’s March 2025 national survey is equally stark. More than nine in ten Nigerians (93%) say the country is going in the wrong direction. Nearly nine in ten (88%) describe the country’s economic condition as “fairly bad” or “very bad.” Three-fourths report poor personal living conditions, and 95% say they or someone in their household went without a cash income at least once during the previous year. A large majority — 85% — disapprove of the government’s decision to remove the fuel subsidy, and 58% say it should be reinstated even at the cost of reductions in health or education spending.
A TALE OF TWO ECONOMIES
The paradox is glaring. At the macro level, Nigeria is being celebrated. The refinery is generating foreign exchange, stabilising the naira, and exporting fuel to markets from West Africa to the United States. At the micro level, millions of Nigerians cannot afford to eat. The World Bank projects 139 million Nigerians will be living in poverty by the end of 2025 — a nearly 60% increase from 87 million in 2023.
A 2024 Afrobarometer survey found that 62% of Nigerians believe the removal of the petrol subsidy has worsened their living conditions, while only 18% think the savings are being used effectively.
Meanwhile, along the Lagos waterways, the human cost of creative destruction is written in rusting jetties and “For Sale” signs on facilities that once employed dockhands, surveyors, product inspectors, clearing agents, vessel operators, and thousands more in ancillary maritime services.
MONOPOLY CONCERNS IN THE DOWNSTREAM
The restructuring has also raised legitimate concerns about market concentration. An operator who sought anonymity expressed concern over the direction of the sector: “The NMDPRA has not issued any licence for petrol imports this year. Dangote is gradually enjoying a monopoly in the downstream, and we all know that this is not healthy for any sector.”
The NMDPRA noted that a sharp reduction in imports caused overall fuel supply to decline significantly in February 2026, recording a drop of 25.4 million litres per day due to the sudden fall in imports — suggesting the market may not yet be ready for a single-source supply model.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
Aliko Dangote has initiated plans to expand the refinery’s capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day, which would further consolidate the facility’s dominance over Nigeria’s fuel supply chain.
Industry voices are increasingly proposing a structural separation of functions: the Dangote Refinery should refine and sell through ships to tank farm owners, who in turn distribute to retail outlets by truck — preserving the role of existing storage infrastructure. Without such a framework, the emptying of Lagos’s berths is likely to continue.
For now, as one moves through the Lagos creeks and lagoons, the answer blowing in from the idle berths is unambiguous: the transformation of Nigeria’s energy economy is real, historic, and irreversible — but for the workers, marketers, and investors built on the import model, no managed transition plan yet exists.
Blue Economy
Cargo Before Ships: Olubowale Tells Dangote, Big Shippers to Anchor Nigerian Fleet Growth With Long-Term Contracts
Cargo Before Ships: Olubowale Tells Dangote, Big Shippers to Anchor Nigerian Fleet Growth With Long-Term Contracts
Indigenous shipowners have again pressed major Nigerian cargo owners, especially the Dangote Group, to underwrite the growth of a domestic fleet by signing long-term Contracts of Affreightment (CoAs) for petroleum products, cement, fertiliser and other bulk commodities.
The renewed push rests on a simple argument from the shipowners: cargo drives trade, trade attracts financing, and only predictable cargo contracts give shipowners the bankable footing to acquire vessels and grow sustainable fleets.
Captain Ladi Olubowale, former President of the Nigerian chapter of the African Shipowners’ Association and Group Managing Director/CEO of Seamate Maritime Integrated Services Limited, made the case at a Public-Private Dialogue with CEOs organised by the Nigerian Chamber of Shipping in Lagos. The event, themed “Unlocking Efficiency in the Marine and Blue Economy Value Chain,” drew industry leaders, cargo owners, terminal operators and policymakers, with Dangote Group’s Group Vice President, Edwin Devakumar, attending as guest CEO.
Olubowale argued that Nigeria’s maritime strategy has spent too long fixated on vessel ownership in the abstract, when the real task is building the commercial conditions that make indigenous vessel acquisition bankable in the first place. His formulation: give credible Nigerian shipowners long-term CoAs, and those contracts become the foundation on which vessels are financed, acquired and deployed.
He flipped the conventional sequencing — instead of waiting for indigenous firms to buy ships before handing them cargo, he proposed securing the cargo and the contract first, structuring finance around it, and letting qualified Nigerian operators acquire vessels against that guaranteed revenue.
For Dangote specifically, whose refinery, cement, fertiliser and industrial operations already generate heavy maritime cargo volumes, Olubowale sees an opening to become a genuine catalyst for Nigerian fleet development by allocating portions of its cargo requirements to qualified indigenous operators under structured, multi-year CoAs. Such arrangements, he said, would let Nigerian shipowners walk into banks, development finance institutions, export credit agencies, leasing firms and international vessel financiers with something concrete: identifiable cargo, predictable revenue and long-term contracts to show for it.
He extended the argument to crude and refined product haulage, noting that foreign-controlled vessels, including Suezmax tankers, still dominate lifting at Nigerian terminals such as Forcados, Bonny and Escravos, pocketing freight earnings generated by Nigerian-origin cargo. The policy question, in his view, is how Nigeria converts the movement of its own cargo into domestic assets, jobs, technical capacity and long-term economic value.
“There is no structural reason why Nigerian companies should not ultimately own and operate Suezmax tankers and other large commercial vessels,” Olubowale said, framing the goal as deliberate commercial capacity-building rather than protectionism without capability.
He set out a four-pillar model of Cargo, Contract, Finance and Vessel, in which cargo owners supply volumes, long-term CoAs convert those volumes into bankable paper, financial institutions fund the vessel purchases, and Nigerian shipowners supply the ships, crewing and technical management. He said this model would complement, not replace, government-backed tools such as the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF), keeping the commercial engine in private hands while government sticks to enabling and regulating.
Olubowale called for sustained dialogue among policymakers, cargo owners, shipowners, terminal operators and financiers, arguing that Nigeria’s cargo base — spanning petroleum products, cement, fertiliser, agriculture and industrial goods, and set to grow further under AfCFTA-driven intra-African trade — is large enough to build a genuinely competitive indigenous shipping industry, if it’s deliberately harnessed rather than left to foreign carriers.
“If we connect Nigerian cargo to Nigerian maritime capacity, we will not merely acquire ships. We will build a sustainable shipping industry,” he said
Nigeria Watch
Olubowale’s cargo-first pitch lands in a familiar gap for Waterways News readers: the distance between policy rhetoric on indigenous fleet-building and the commercial reality that keeps foreign tonnage dominant on Nigerian trade lanes. His four-pillar model is, in effect, a private-sector workaround for a problem the CVFF was meant to solve through government-backed financing and his explicit framing of it as complementary to, not a substitute for, the Fund is notable given how long CVFF disbursement has stalled.
The specific call-out to Dangote is also worth watching. A company generating that volume of captive cargo including refined products, cement and fertiliser could, if it acted on this, become one of the few private actors with the scale to single-handedly seed a viable indigenous tanker or bulk fleet, something years of NIMASA reform announcements have yet to achieve for the sector’s informal and small-scale operators tracked closely in this publication (WABOTAN and ATBOWATON). Whether Dangote or any major shipper, actually commits to multi-year CoAs with Nigerian carriers, rather than continuing to charter foreign tonnage on the open market, will be the real test of whether this dialogue moves beyond another CEO forum.
Blue Economy
STAY AFLOAT, GO ROGUE: INSIDE THE “ALARM BLOW” ECONOMY QUIETLY RUNNING NIGERIA’S OFFSHORE WATERS
STAY AFLOAT, GO ROGUE: INSIDE THE “ALARM BLOW” ECONOMY QUIETLY RUNNING NIGERIA’S OFFSHORE WATERS
By Okeoghene Onoriobe| Waterways News
Long before a vessel drops anchor off Lagos, Bonny, Escravos or Warri, another economy is already at work in the water around it with no manifest, no customs entry, and no line in any government ledger, yet moving real cash, real fuel and real goods every day.
Locally, the traders behind it are called “Alarm Blow.” They ride dinghies far out to meet ocean-going vessels, scale rope ladders and makeshift gangways once alongside, and sell seafarers whatever a long stretch at sea has run short of. These include provisions, cigarettes, recharge cards, drinks, spare parts, personal effects. Payment comes in whatever form the moment allows: naira, dollars, or, notably, litres of PMS and AGO drawn off the vessel itself.
There is no license behind any of it, no manifest, no insurance, no safety gear, and in most cases no name that appears in any official register. Yet the trade has persisted for decades, sustained by a seafarer’s need and the absence of anyone else positioned to meet it offshore.
A GAP THE LICENSED SECTOR LEFT OPEN
Nigerian law already assigns this ground to someone: licensed ship chandlers operating under the Customs and Excise (Ship Chandlers) Licensing Regulations are the only parties permitted to trade with vessels and crews offshore. But the country’s chandling industry has spent years arguing that the formal channel has failed to hold its own ground. Industry figures and successive reports have put the annual capital flight from foreign dominance of ship chandling anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion, with the Nigerian Licensed Ship Chandlers Association and allied bodies blaming outdated 1968-era regulation, high terminal charges, and weak enforcement of the local-content rules that were meant to reserve the bulk of the trade for Nigerians.
Into that gap, the “Alarm Blow” trade has stepped in, unlicensed and unprotected, but far more responsive than the formal sector it has effectively displaced at the water’s edge. Where a licensed chandler is slowed by paperwork, berth charges and terminal bureaucracy, a dinghy trader simply goes to the ship, at whatever hour, with whatever the crew needs.
THE HIDDEN LEDGER: PMS, AGO AND DOLLARS
The most consequential part of this trade is what it is paid in. When cash is scarce mid-voyage, PMS and AGO change hands between vessel and dinghy alongside dollar payments that never touch a Nigerian bank.
That is where informal offshore hawking edges into a far larger and more damaging economy: illegal bunkering and product diversion, which has cost Nigeria billions in lost petroleum revenue over the years. A single “Alarm Blow” trader moves a small volume. But the pattern, unmetered fuel leaving vessels informally, dollar transactions with no audit trail, sits on the same continuum as the crude and product theft crises that have plagued the Niger Delta and the wider Gulf of Guinea.
WHAT COORDINATION COULD UNLOCK
Regulators have historically treated this trade as a security problem to be chased away. Left there, Nigeria loses twice: the economic value already circulating offshore is never captured, and the product-diversion loophole the current chaos enables never closes.
A coordinated model, bringing Alarmblow operators under a recognized cooperative or district structure, along the lines of how NIWA and the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) already organized commercial boat operators in Lagos, could change that calculus:
Licensing at scale, extending ship-chandling recognition down to small-scale offshore traders instead of reserving it for large firms, clawing back value currently lost to unregulated and often foreign-dominated supply chains.
Traceable transactions, replacing informal PMS/AGO/dollar barter with regulated payment and product-handling protocols, closing off one of the quieter channels through which petroleum products leak from the formal economy.
Safety and welfare protection for dinghy operators who currently work with no life jackets, no vessel certification, and no recourse when accidents happen far from shore — a natural extension of the labour-welfare mandate MWUN already carries for other categories of coastal and inland boat workers.
Foreign exchange formalisation, channelling dollar payments currently occurring invisibly offshore into Nigeria’s formal forex system.
Data and taxation, giving NIMASA, the NPA and state revenue authorities visibility into a trade that today contributes nothing to official statistics despite its scale and staying power.
NIGERIA WATCH
The Alarmblow trade is best read as the ground-level twin of a fight Waterways News has tracked for months: the slow collapse of Nigeria’s licensed ship-chandling sector under foreign dominance and regulatory neglect. If the industry’s own figures are close to right, the country is losing double digits in billions of dollars a year at the formal end of that trade alone — money that a modernised, well-financed chandling sector, properly protected under the Local Content Act, should be capturing instead of ceding to foreign firms.
The dinghy trade is what fills the space that failure leaves behind. It is also a reminder of a theme this desk keeps returning to: Nigeria’s informal waterway economy — the wooden-boat operators, the cooperative associations like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON, the traders who meet a maritime need nobody licensed is meeting — persists not out of defiance but because the formal system has not shown up.
NIWA’s ongoing efforts to formalize and safety-certify small-scale waterway operators, and MWUN’s long-standing welfare mandate for boat workers, both point toward the kind of structure that could absorb the Alarmblow trade rather than merely criminalize it.
The harder question is whether NIMASA, the NPA and the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy see this as worth the effort. A trade this size, moving in fuel and dollars outside every official ledger, is not a footnote to the bunkering and product-diversion crisis the Gulf of Guinea has wrestled with for years, it is one of its smaller, more visible entry points.
Waterways News will continue tracking how, or whether, policymakers move to bring it into the light.
MOWCA Tasks Nigeria, Regional Partners on Niger Delta Blue Economy Investment
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
The Maritime Organisation of West and Central Africa (MOWCA) has renewed calls for expanded investment in the Niger Delta’s maritime assets, urging stronger public-private partnerships to unlock the region’s blue economy potential beyond oil and gas.
MOWCA Secretary-General, Dr Paul Adalikwu, made the call while receiving a delegation from the Niger Delta Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Trade, Mines and Agriculture (NDCCITMA) at the organisation’s secretariat in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Adalikwu said that despite the Niger Delta’s global identity as an oil and gas hub, the region holds significant untapped opportunities in maritime transport, fishing, tourism, underwater mining, and other ocean-based economic activities. He described these natural marine resources as a major economic advantage that, with strategic policy direction, effective planning, and sustained investment, could be converted into long-term development gains.
He argued that deeper public-private collaboration could draw foreign direct investment into the region, generate jobs, and speed up economic growth, pointing to the Niger Delta’s waterways, coastal geography, and proximity to the Gulf of Guinea as factors that position it to become a major maritime trade and logistics hub.
The MOWCA scribe added that the organisation remains focused on initiatives that strengthen regional maritime cooperation, advance blue economy development, upgrade infrastructure, promote renewable energy, and support sustainable growth across West and Central Africa.
Speaking for the delegation, NDCCITMA Board Secretary, Dr Solomon Edebiri, said the Niger Delta’s extensive coastlines, waterways, ports, and fishing resources could drive employment, trade, and industrial growth if properly harnessed. He listed additional opportunities in agriculture and agro-processing, compressed natural gas (CNG), logistics, warehousing, packaging, export production, and renewable energy.
Edebiri said the chamber is actively seeking international technical cooperation, investment, and strategic partnerships to help diversify the Niger Delta’s economy away from its heavy reliance on hydrocarbons, with particular attention to fisheries, aquaculture, marine transportation, and coastal infrastructure.
Both parties identified potential collaboration areas spanning blue economy projects, maritime infrastructure, renewable energy, investment mobilisation, Gulf of Guinea regional cooperation, technical capacity building, and maritime trade and logistics, alongside discussions on linking the region with international development partners.
The NDCCITMA delegation also invited MOWCA to the inaugural Niger Delta Economic and Investment Summit and Exhibition (NDEIS), scheduled for September 15–17 in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. Organised in partnership with the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), the three-day summit is expected to serve as a platform for converting the region’s natural resources and economic potential into viable, bankable projects.
Nigeria Watch
For a region whose maritime identity has for decades been defined almost entirely by crude oil terminals, pipeline vandalism, and security patrols, MOWCA’s intervention lands as a useful reminder that the Niger Delta’s blue economy case has been made many times before, with little to show for it at the implementation stage.
The diversification argument Edebiri makes on behalf of NDCCITMA echoes what operators along the creeks and inland waterways of Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States have argued for years: that fisheries, aquaculture, and coastal logistics remain undercapitalised even as federal attention stays fixed on oil revenue and, more recently, on gas monetisation. That gap matters for the small-scale and informal waterway operators this desk tracks closely, the boat owners and cooperative members under bodies like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON, who operate the actual vessels moving people and goods through the very waterways MOWCA and NDCCITMA are now describing as investment-ready.
There is also a coordination question worth watching. Any serious blue economy investment drive in the Niger Delta will eventually run into the jurisdictional turf that NIWA, NPA, and state agencies like LASWA already contest elsewhere in the country, as well as into the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy’s own investment mobilisation plans under Minister Adegboyega Oyetola. Whether MOWCA’s regional framing complements or competes with that domestic architecture is unclear from this meeting alone.
The September NDEIS summit in Port Harcourt will be the first real test of whether this Abidjan conversation converts into anything bankable, or joins the long list of Niger Delta investment pledges that stalled between communiqué and cash, a pattern uncomfortably similar to the CVFF disbursement saga this desk continues to track for indigenous shipowners nationwide. Waterways News will monitor whether MOWCA’s participation at NDEIS produces concrete commitments or another round of stated intentions.
Oil and Gas7 months agoTantita’s Pipeline Deal: $144m Contract, Rising Output, and the Questions that Deserve Answers
- MARITIME TRADE & SHIPPING7 months ago
World’s Largest Container Ship Sets New Maritime Record with 22,233 TEUs on Single Voyage
- Blue Economy7 months ago
Nigeria’s Coast Guard Bill: A Solution in Search of a Problem?
