Editor's Choice
NIWA Raises Alarm Over Leaking Boats
NIWA Raises Alarm Over Leaking Boats
Authority intensifies passenger safety sensitisation in Cross River, as riverine communities remain exposed to avoidable tragedies
By Idongesit Akaniyene | Waterways News Calabar
The National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) has issued a direct public safety advisory, urging Nigerians who travel by water to refuse to board any vessel from which crew members are continuously bailing out water — warning that such a condition is an unmistakable sign of structural compromise and imminent danger.
The advisory was delivered by Mr Stanley Onuoha, NIWA’s Area Manager for Cross River and Ebonyi, during an interview in Calabar on Thursday.
Bailing Water Is a Red Flag, Not Routine
Onuoha told correspondents that many waterway passengers unknowingly board vessels that are actively taking on water, either out of urgency, ignorance, or misplaced trust in boat operators. He said this practice has contributed to preventable fatalities on Nigeria’s inland waterways.
“If you are entering a boat and see people using a bailer to remove water, that is the first signal that the boat is leaking,” the NIWA official stated, urging passengers to treat such a sight as sufficient grounds to disembark immediately and seek alternative transport.
He called on passengers to conduct basic visual inspections of vessels before boarding, including checking for structural damage, adequate seating, and the general condition of the boat’s hull and fittings.
Life Jackets: Size and Condition Both Matter
The NIWA area manager also addressed the persistent problem of defective and ill-fitting life jackets on inland waterway vessels — an issue that has repeatedly featured in post-incident investigations following boat accidents in Nigeria.
Onuoha stressed that damaged life jackets offer no reliable buoyancy in an emergency, and cautioned passengers to verify not only that a jacket is present, but that it is in serviceable condition and appropriately sized for the wearer. An oversized or degraded jacket, he noted, can fail at the critical moment it is needed most.
Manifests, Weather Windows, and Daylight Travel
Beyond vessel condition, Onuoha reiterated a cluster of safety protocols that NIWA continues to promote across riverine communities. He urged passengers to insist on filling passenger manifests before departure — a requirement that aids search-and-rescue accountability in the event of an accident.
On weather, the NIWA official warned that travellers must monitor conditions carefully before embarking. He noted that deteriorating weather generates strong tidal surges capable of overwhelming small wooden boats commonly deployed on Nigeria’s inland routes.
He also recommended that all waterway journeys be conducted within the window of 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., emphasising that adequate natural light is essential for navigation safety on rivers and creeks where channel markers and emergency infrastructure remain sparse.
Onuoha stated that NIWA has continued to deploy awareness campaigns in riverine communities across Cross River State, and that sustained enforcement and sensitisation efforts have yielded measurable improvements in safety compliance on waterways within its jurisdiction.
Nigeria Watch
NIWA’s advisory from Calabar lands against a backdrop of chronic structural deficiencies in Nigeria’s inland waterways transport sector that no amount of public messaging alone can fully resolve.
The warning about leaking boats is not new — it echoes similar advisories issued after successive waterway tragedies across the Niger Delta, Cross River, Anambra, and Kebbi corridors over the past decade. What remains stubbornly unchanged is the underlying supply-side reality: a large proportion of the wooden boats plying Nigeria’s inland routes are ageing, poorly maintained, and operating without valid certificates of seaworthiness. NIWA and its state-level counterparts lack the enforcement density to inspect every jetty, every departure point, and every makeshift landing across thousands of kilometres of navigable waterways.
Passenger-side sensitisation is necessary but insufficient. The NIWA official’s advice essentially asks ordinary travellers — many of whom depend on waterways as their only viable transport option — to make safety judgements that should already have been made upstream by regulatory inspection and operator licensing. Where no alternative vessel exists, a passenger’s knowledge that a boat is leaking does not automatically translate into the freedom to walk away.
The deeper reform agenda must continue to centre on: enforcing vessel certification standards with meaningful sanctions for non-compliant operators; accelerating the rollout of proper jetty infrastructure with waiting areas that reduce boarding pressure; fast-tracking the resuscitation of the Inland Waterways Safety Levy framework; and expanding the operational reach of NIWA’s marine safety officers beyond state capitals.
The rainy season is now in full swing. Currents are swelling, tides are unpredictable, and the risk profile on Nigeria’s inland routes rises sharply between June and October. NIWA’s advisory is timely. The institutional response to the conditions behind it must be equally urgent.
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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