NPA BOSS: PORT CONCESSION RENEWALS DELAYED FOR THOROUGH REVIEW, NOT NEGLIGENCE

Dantsoho says flawed agreements could create bigger problems; urges ICD operators to adapt to changing market realities

By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News Correspondent, Lagos

The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) has broken its silence on the prolonged delay in renewing seaport concession agreements, attributing the hold-up to an ongoing comprehensive review designed to strengthen contractual frameworks and shore up investor confidence.
Speaking to maritime journalists in Lagos, NPA Managing Director Abubakar Dantsoho said the Federal Government is deliberately prioritising the correction of structural deficiencies in existing agreements before any renewals are approved — a signal that the administration is unwilling to repeat the contractual pitfalls that have dogged Nigeria’s port sector for nearly two decades.

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Background: Contracts Running Out
Nigeria’s seaports were handed over to private terminal operators in 2006 under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, with concession agreements ranging between 10 and 25 years. With many of those contracts now expired or expiring, uncertainty has deepened across the terminal operating community, with concessionaires growing increasingly anxious over the absence of fresh agreements.

“Get It Right” — Dantsoho
Dantsoho acknowledged the frustrations of terminal operators but held firm that quality must take precedence over speed. Both the NPA and concessionaires, he said, have identified unmet obligations on various sides — issues that must be resolved upfront to prevent costly disputes down the line.
“The focus is to get it right. A flawed agreement could create bigger problems later, while a well-structured one will provide long-term stability,” the NPA chief stated.
He also pushed back against the notion that slow processing undermines investor appeal, arguing that serious investors value legal clarity and contractual certainty far more than the pace of execution. A rigorous review, he noted, could even attract fresh investors should any existing operators choose not to renew.

ICD Operators Told to Restrategise
On the question of inland container depots (ICDs) and bonded terminals, Dantsoho issued a pointed advisory: adapt or risk irrelevance. He noted that while such facilities were critical pressure valves during periods of severe port congestion, the progressive easing of gridlock at Nigeria’s major ports has begun to erode the commercial rationale for their current operating models. Operators, he warned, must restrategise to remain competitive in a shifting maritime landscape.

NIGERIA WATCH: What this means for terminal operators, freight forwarders, and port stakeholders
The NPA’s position on concession renewals has far-reaching implications for virtually every layer of Nigeria’s maritime supply chain.
For terminal operators at Apapa, Tin Can Island, and the emerging Lekki Deep Sea Port, the delay introduces commercial uncertainty — investment decisions on equipment, berth upgrades, and staffing are difficult to commit to without clarity on tenure. Some operators are believed to be operating on tacit month-to-month arrangements, a situation that discourages capital expenditure.
For freight forwarders and shippers, stability of terminal operations directly affects cargo handling efficiency, tariff predictability, and turnaround times. Protracted uncertainty at the operator level has a downstream effect on the cost of doing business through Nigerian ports.
The NPA’s hint that new investors could enter if existing concessionaires step aside is significant. It opens the door to fresh capital and potentially more competitive terminal management — but only if the review produces the legally watertight agreements Dantsoho is promising.
On ICDs and bonded terminals, the warning is clear: the congestion-driven business model of the past is fading. As the NPA and the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) continue to push efficiency reforms, facilities that once thrived on cargo diversion and storage overflow must find new value propositions — whether in last-mile logistics, warehousing, or value-added trade facilitation services.
The Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy and NIMASA will also be watching closely, as the outcome of the concession review will set the template for how Nigeria manages its blue economy assets going forward — and whether the country can finally position its ports as competitive gateways in the West African sub-region.

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NSW Opens Apapa Support Centre as Digital Trade Platform Goes Live

By Emetena Ikuku, Waterways News Correspondent

LAGOS — The management of Nigeria’s National Single Window (NSW) has established a dedicated stakeholder support centre at 34 Wharf Road, Apapa, following the go-live of the country’s long-awaited digital trade facilitation platform last Friday.

The NSW platform — a Federal Government initiative to consolidate all port-related documentation and regulatory processes into a single digital environment — launched formally earlier in the week before transitioning to full commercial operations days later, marking a significant shift from pilot-phase testing to live deployment.

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Support Centre Targets Smooth Onboarding
The Apapa facility is designed to assist port operators, freight forwarders, customs agents and other stakeholders encountering difficulties navigating the new system. Its location on Wharf Road, at the heart of Nigeria’s busiest port corridor, is intended to ensure ease of access for users operating within the Apapa axis.
Beyond physical walk-in support, the NSW management has activated a multi-channel helpdesk offering assistance via telephone, WhatsApp and email to address operational issues and resolve platform inquiries.
Management urged stakeholders to utilise the available support services, noting that effective onboarding is central to realising the platform’s full trade facilitation potential.

Platform Aims to Cut Cargo Dwell Time
The NSW is engineered to eliminate manual documentation bottlenecks by integrating all port clearance, regulatory and compliance processes under one digital roof. Authorities say full deployment is expected to reduce the cost of doing business at Nigerian ports and accelerate cargo throughput — objectives that have long ranked among the priorities of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy.

Nigeria Watch
The go-live of the National Single Window carries direct implications for operators across the Nigerian port ecosystem. At Apapa and Tin Can Island — where manual documentation cycles and fragmented agency interactions have historically inflated cargo dwell times — the platform’s ability to centralise clearance processes could offer meaningful efficiency gains for importers, freight forwarders and terminal operators alike.
For the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), seamless NSW adoption among port users will be a key indicator of whether the digital trade agenda translates into measurable reductions in port congestion and logistics costs. NIMASA, whose regulatory mandate intersects with vessel and cargo documentation, will also have a stake in the platform’s integration architecture.
Freight forwarding associations and licensed customs agents — many of whom remain accustomed to manual and semi-manual clearance pathways — will likely represent the largest onboarding challenge. The placement of the support centre on Wharf Road, rather than at a government ministry or agency complex, signals a deliberate effort to meet practitioners where they operate.
The NSW’s full commercialisation also arrives against the backdrop of broader port reform efforts, including ongoing concession reviews and the Federal Government’s push to position Nigerian ports as competitive West African trade hubs. Whether the platform achieves critical mass adoption in its early weeks will depend heavily on the responsiveness of the helpdesk infrastructure now being put to the test.

Waterways News | Lagos

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Broken Laws, Broken Promises: How Nigeria’s Outdated Legal Framework is Costing the Blue Economy Billions

By Raymond Gold | Co-producer & Research Reporter | Waterways News, Lagos

Nigeria sits on one of Africa’s most formidable maritime endowments — over 853 kilometres of Atlantic coastline, a sprawling network of inland waterways, rich fishery stocks, and offshore energy reserves that remain largely untapped. Yet, decade after decade, the country’s blue economy bleeds potential. The reason, experts and legal analysts increasingly agree, is not simply a lack of vision or investment. It is a failure of law.

The legislative architecture underpinning Nigeria’s maritime and ocean economy is, in many critical areas, dangerously obsolete. Key statutes were written in eras that never anticipated the complexities of modern ocean governance, illegal unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, offshore renewable energy, or the kind of integrated marine spatial planning that now drives blue economy growth across comparable coastal nations.

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Nigeria’s Sea Fisheries Act, for instance, dates back to 1992 and contains no provisions whatsoever for IUU fishing — a practice now widely recognised as one of the gravest threats to sustainable fisheries globally. While other nations have overhauled their fisheries laws repeatedly to address evolving sustainability principles, Nigeria’s statute remains frozen in time, leaving enforcement agencies without the legal tools to act decisively against poachers and illegal trawlers stripping the country’s maritime resources.

The problem, however, goes beyond outdated statutes. Nigeria’s maritime legal landscape is also riddled with agency conflict — competing mandates created, often inadvertently, by overlapping establishment acts. The Nigerian Ports Authority and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency have long operated across marginal jurisdictional fault lines, with inter-agency rivalries generating revenue losses and regulatory paralysis. These conflicts, rooted in the very acts that created these agencies, have led to inter-agency rivalry, loss of national revenue, and a significant drag on maritime sector progress.

Recent court decisions have begun to address some of these conflicts, though they also expose how deeply structural the problem is. In a landmark 2024 ruling, the Supreme Court of Nigeria held that navigable inland waterways fall within the exclusive legislative competence of the Federal Government, affirming the supremacy of the NIWA Act over conflicting state legislation and creating regulatory clarity for investors and operators in Nigeria’s maritime and inland waterways sector. The ruling settled a long-running dispute between the National Inland Waterways Authority and the Lagos State Waterways Authority over who holds regulatory power on federal waterways — a dispute that had created uncertainty for operators and chilled investment.

More recently, in January 2026, the Supreme Court addressed regulatory and statutory interpretation issues involving maritime administration and levies, reinforcing the doctrine that administrative agencies cannot expand their authority through policy or guidelines beyond what their enabling statute allows. The judgment is significant for LNG operators and maritime logistics providers, clarifying that levies lacking clear statutory backing cannot be validly imposed — a ruling that reduces the risk of the multiple, overlapping charges that have long frustrated maritime businesses operating in Nigerian waters.

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At the port operations level, a Federal High Court ruling in May 2025 suspended the collection of a Practitioners Operating Fee imposed on freight forwarders by the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria, holding that the imposition lacked sufficient legal backing — a decision that significantly affects port operations, maritime logistics, and economic activities within Nigeria’s blue economy framework. These court victories are important. But they are reactive, not proactive — firefighting after regulatory overreach has already damaged the operating environment. What Nigeria urgently needs, analysts say, is a comprehensive legislative overhaul that gets ahead of these conflicts rather than waiting for courts to resolve them years after the damage is done.

Dr Emeka Akabogu, a maritime lawyer and policy analyst, has stated that overlapping agency functions and regulatory inconsistencies in the sector continue to hinder investment and operational efficiency. His view is widely shared. The House Committee on Ports and Harbours has confirmed that a Nigerian Port Regulatory Agency Bill is in progress, aimed at streamlining the tangled web of overlapping mandates that currently fragment port governance.

Meanwhile, the human cost of legislative inaction is mounting. NIMASA once projected that Nigeria’s blue economy could generate over $20 billion annually, yet the gap between that potential and actual earnings remains vast. Nigeria continues to lose jobs and revenue to better-organised maritime economies, even as it holds the chair of the World Customs Organization Council — a seat of international maritime prestige that stands in sharp contrast to its domestic governance failures.

Billions in potential maritime earnings remain unrealised, undermining Nigeria’s bid to diversify from oil, with chronic underperformance threatening not only economic diversification but job creation.

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The passage of a National Policy on Marine and Blue Economy was welcomed as a step forward. But policy documents, however well-crafted, cannot substitute for enforceable law. Nigeria’s National Assembly must move — urgently — to repeal obsolete maritime statutes, eliminate duplicative agency mandates, enact a comprehensive fisheries law fit for the 21st century, and establish a coordinated legislative framework that treats the blue economy as the national strategic asset it truly is.

Nigeria’s oceans are not the problem. Nigeria’s laws are.