Editorial
Omi-Eko’s Missing Partner: Why Lagos Must Put the Boat Workers’ Union at the Heart of Its Ferry Revolution
Omi-Eko’s Missing Partner: Why Lagos Must Put the Boat Workers’ Union at the Heart of Its Ferry Revolution
MWUN’s Lagos Commercial Private Boat District has been calling for the same reforms Omi-Eko promises — it’s time Lagos State listened
By Oghenewoke Onoriode | Waterways News Correspondent, Lagos
Lagos was built on water. Long before the expressways and the gridlock that define daily life in Africa’s most populous city, its people moved by boat. Canoes carried commerce. Lagoons linked communities. The water was the highway. Now, with roads choked beyond capacity and millions of commuters losing hours daily to traffic, Lagos is attempting to return to that founding logic — through the most ambitious inland waterways investment ever conceived on the African continent.
The vehicle for that return is the Omi-Eko Project, and its scale is extraordinary.
Backed by the French Development Agency (AFD) with a €130 million loan, the European Investment Bank (EIB) with €170 million, and the European Union with a €60 million grant, the project will introduce 15 structured ferry routes spanning 140 kilometres, connect 25 upgraded ferry terminals, and deploy 75 state-of-the-art electric ferries capable of carrying hundreds of passengers each.
But the architects of this project must confront one critical reality plainly: the waterways workforce they seek to transform already has a union — and that union must become a central partner in delivering the Omi-Eko vision, not an afterthought in its rollout.
The Union That Has Always Been There
The Lagos Commercial Private Boat District of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) is the organised representative voice of commercial boat operators on Lagos waterways. The MWUN, Nigeria’s apex trade union in the maritime sector and an affiliate of the Nigeria Labour Congress, represents sailors, dockworkers, and workers across related trades nationwide.
This is not an informal grouping of pier workers. It is a structured, constitutionally recognised labour body with elected leadership and a documented history of engaging government agencies and regulators. Notably, the MWUN has signed Memoranda of Understanding with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), deploying its vessels and personnel for the distribution of sensitive electoral materials across Nigeria’s riverine states — a measure of the institutional credibility and operational trust it has earned at national level.
The question, therefore, is not whether the union exists. It does. The question is whether Lagos State is prepared to sit across the table from it as a genuine partner in one of the most consequential urban transport transformations on the continent.
What the Union Has Been Saying for Years
Long before the Omi-Eko Project was conceived, MWUN through the Lagos Commercial Private Boat District was already raising the very issues the project claims to address. The District formally identified its members’ core operational challenges as: the absence of a safe working environment; submerged wreckages obstructing waterways; poor navigational buoy lighting for night voyages; harassment of operators by security agents; the lack of boat fuel refilling stations along Lagos waterways; inadequate training and retraining opportunities; and the inability of operators to access modern vessels.
Read that list carefully. Every item on it is something the Omi-Eko Project, in one form or another, proposes to fix — cleaner terminals, modern electric ferries, structured routes, safety infrastructure, and a formalised operating environment. The union was not waiting to be told what the problems were. It was waiting to be taken seriously when it named them.
The MWUN has consistently called on government to empower relevant agencies with the legal tools to regulate private boat operators and streamline their operations. That language aligns directly with what Omi-Eko aspires to achieve. The union is not resistant to modernisation. It has been demanding it.
Why the Union Is the Key to Formalisation
Lagos State has argued that water transport formalisation requires cooperative structures among operators. That is a reasonable administrative preference — but it overlooks the fact that the Maritime Workers Union, through the Lagos Commercial Private Boat District already offers something more robust than a cooperative: full trade union representation under Nigeria’s Labour Act, complete with grievance mechanisms, collective bargaining frameworks, and worker protections that cooperatives alone cannot provide.
The current MWUN President General, Comrade Francis Bunu, has raised concerns about unseaworthy vessels on Nigeria’s inland waterways and called for stricter regulatory oversight across the maritime industry. That is precisely the kind of institutional voice that should be at the governance table when LASWA, the Ministry of Transportation, and Omi-Eko project developers are designing the new ferry system’s operational framework. A union leadership that itself calls for safety standards and vessel regulation is a natural ally — not an obstacle.
Comrade Bunu has further stated that improving worker welfare, ensuring direct union-management engagement, and guaranteeing compensation for accident victims are central priorities of his administration. These are the social protections that any responsible infrastructure project must embed from the outset.
A Complex Regulatory Landscape — and Why Labour Unity Matters
The Omi-Eko Project does not operate in a simple regulatory environment. In January 2024, the Supreme Court resolved a long-running jurisdictional dispute between the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) and the Lagos State Waterways Authority (LASWA), holding that the NIWA Act, as federal legislation, prevails over the Lagos State Waterways Authority Law of 2008 and that applying both simultaneously constitutes multiple levies on operators.
This ruling has significant consequences for Omi-Eko. It means the project’s operational and regulatory framework must be carefully built at the intersection of federal and state authority — precisely the kind of complex environment where an organised, legally recognised labour body becomes indispensable. The Lagos Commercial Private Boat District, operating under MWUN’s national umbrella, is uniquely positioned to navigate both federal and state dimensions on behalf of workers.
Without the union’s active participation, workers risk being caught in the crossfire of jurisdictional ambiguity — their livelihoods subject to regulatory shifts that are neither fully coordinated nor fully protective.
What a Genuine Partnership Must Look Like
Engaging the Maritime Workers Union is not a gesture of goodwill. It is a structural necessity. A credible partnership must include:
A formal governance seat. The union must be represented in Omi-Eko’s oversight committees as a voting stakeholder — not a passive observer. LASWA, the Ministry of Transportation, and the European partners who have committed over €400 million must insist on this.
A jointly negotiated transition framework: The shift from informal wooden boats to electric ferries will displace existing operators unless there is a planned, negotiated pathway. The union is the correct body to co-design redeployment plans, redundancy terms where unavoidable, and retraining curricula for members.
Skills development and certification routed through the union: The Omi-Eko technology transfer component should channel certification and training through the District structure — ensuring that qualifications reach frontline workers, not just regulatory agencies.
Binding wage and safety standards in concession agreements: When private operators are awarded concessions on Omi-Eko routes, those agreements must include enforceable wage floors and occupational health and safety standards. The MWUN has demonstrated it can hold employers accountable. It should be empowered to do so in the new system.
A formal end to operator harassment: The District has formally documented security agent harassment of commercial boat operators as a longstanding operational burden. As Omi-Eko terminals open and routes formalise, LASWA must issue clear, enforceable directives protecting unionised operators from extortion and arbitrary interference.
The Lesson From the Road
When BRT buses arrived in Lagos, the transition was turbulent. Danfo operators resisted, motor park unions clashed with the new order, and routes were disrupted. The accommodation that eventually emerged came not from ignoring labour, but from engaging it — imperfectly and belatedly, but eventually.
The waterways are different. They are unforgiving in ways roads are not. A workforce that is resentful, bypassed, or economically threatened is a safety risk on a lagoon in a way it simply is not on a bus route. The Maritime Workers Union understands this. It has long argued that improving safety on the waterways requires empowering workers and streamlining operations — not displacing the people who have kept Lagos moving by water for generations.
Conclusion: The Union Is Omi-Eko’s Best Asset
The ferries will come. The terminals will rise. The routes will open. But the true measure of the Omi-Eko Project’s success will not be found in the solar panels on electric hulls or the architectural elegance of new jetties. It will be found in whether the boat operator from Badore, the engine room hand at Ijora, the loading attendant at Kirikiri — men and women who have kept Lagos moving by water for generations — find a dignified, secure, and fairly remunerated place in the new system.
The LCPBD of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria is not a problem to be managed. It is the institutional answer to Lagos State’s own stated goal of formalising waterway transportation. The union has the membership, the mandate, and the structural legitimacy to be Omi-Eko’s most important labour partner.
Lagos State must now act on that reality. The union is already there. The project is here. It is time for them to meet — formally, seriously, and on equal terms.
Nigeria Watch
The Omi-Eko Project represents a defining inflection point not just for Lagos, but for Nigeria’s broader Blue Economy aspirations. With over €400 million in European financing committed and Africa’s largest inland waterways investment now in motion, the stakes extend well beyond one city’s commuter problem.
What Lagos gets right — or wrong — on labour integration will set a template replicated across other Nigerian waterway cities: Port Harcourt, Warri, Calabar, Onitsha. If the MWUN’s Lagos District is sidelined in Omi-Eko’s design, the resulting friction — strikes, route disruptions, operator resistance — could erode investor confidence in waterways infrastructure nationally, at precisely the moment Nigeria needs that confidence most.
The Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy and NIWA should be watching this closely. Their own inland waterways mandate, and the federal regulatory architecture upheld by the 2024 Supreme Court ruling, gives them both the authority and the obligation to ensure that organised maritime labour is embedded — not excluded — from the infrastructure reforms now unfolding in Lagos. The Omi-Eko Project is too important to get this wrong.
Editorial Analysis | Waterways News | waterwaysnews.ng
Seafarers’ Day 2026: Carrying World’s Cargo at Enormous Personal Cost
As the global maritime community marks the 2026 Day of the Seafarer, Waterways News examines the deepening welfare crisis confronting the 1.9 million workers who keep world trade afloat — and what Nigeria must urgently do to protect its own.
Raymond Gold O | Waterways News Editorial Desk
The world paused on June 25 to observe the annual Day of the Seafarer, but for the men and women at the helm of the global supply chain, there was little reason to celebrate. This year’s theme — Carrying the World’s Trade, Carrying the Risks — captured with uncomfortable precision the reality confronting maritime workers across the globe: they move over 80 per cent of world trade by volume, yet they remain among the most exposed, underprotected and under-resourced workers in any industry.
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, acknowledged as much in his tribute to seafarers worldwide, affirming that those working at sea are the force sustaining international trade and remain central to the global economy, ensuring the unbroken flow of food, fuel, medicines and everyday commodities across global supply chains. The tribute, however, rings hollow against the backdrop of mounting evidence that the international maritime community has, across multiple fronts, failed the very workers it purports to celebrate.
Conflict Zones, Stranded Crews
The escalating Middle East crisis involving Iran, the United States and Israel has emerged as one of the most acute flashpoints for seafarer welfare this year. More than 20,000 seafarers aboard cargo vessels have been left stranded in deteriorating security conditions across volatile corridors including the Red Sea, the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, with some reportedly killed or wounded in missile strikes on vessels, their plight largely invisible to global media coverage fixated on the geopolitics of the conflict.
The IMO, the World Shipping Council, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the Joint Negotiating Group have all called on the international community to ensure seafarers are protected. Yet shipowners and flag states have, in too many documented cases, failed to mount effective rescue or evacuation responses. Crews have been left without adequate food, water, communications or medical supplies — forgotten in the calculus of great power tensions.
“Whether in the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz or other challenging regions, we must remember that every ship carries more than cargo. It carries people. Seafarers should never become unintended victims of wider geopolitical conflict,” Secretary-General Dominguez has warned. The warning is apt; its implementation, so far, inadequate.
MLC at 20: A Convention in Crisis
This year also marks two decades since the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) was adopted on February 23, 2006 — a milestone that should have been an occasion for measured celebration. Instead, industry observers have used the anniversary to take stock of a convention that, despite amendments covering abandonment, violence, harassment, piracy victim protections and the 2025 designation of seafarers as key workers, has struggled to achieve enforcement on the ground.
Twenty years on, seafarers continue to face unpaid wages, abandonment, unlawful detention, excessive fatigue and the routine denial of shore leave. The ITF’s 2025 survey documented 6,223 seafarers abandoned across 410 vessels, with shipping companies owing an estimated $25.8 million in unpaid wages. The Seafarers Happiness Index 2025 report reinforced a picture of growing pressures: intense operational demands, geopolitical fear, reduced shore leave, mounting workloads and a regulatory environment that often adds complexity without delivering protection.
The criminalisation of seafarers — a long-standing concern — remains particularly egregious. In June 2025, the ILO and IMO’s Tripartite Working Group released guidelines on the fair treatment of seafarers detained in connection with alleged crimes. Most countries have not meaningfully implemented those guidelines, as a court ruling right here in Lagos demonstrated this month.
Lagos Court, 11 Indian Sailors and a Hard Question
On June 11, 2026, a Federal High Court in Lagos convicted 11 Indian sailors arrested in January following the discovery of 31.5 kilogrammes of cocaine aboard their vessel at the Apapa seaport. The crew had spent six months in detention before sentencing. Three principal officers were ordered to pay restitution of $100,000 each to the Federal Government; the remaining crew members were directed to pay $50,000 each.
The Secretary-General of the Merchant Seafarers Association of Nigeria and the USA, Prof. Alfred Oniye, has been among the most vocal critics of such prosecutions, noting that seafarers are routinely detained when narcotics are found on commercial vessels — often without credible evidence linking them personally to the contraband. Organised criminal networks, he argues, use sophisticated concealment methods to smuggle drugs aboard vessels without the crew’s knowledge, yet it is the crew who bear criminal liability. The consequences — months or years in foreign detention, separation from family, loss of livelihood and lasting professional stigma — are devastating and, in many cases, unjust.
This conviction, occurring in Nigeria’s own courts, is a test of the country’s commitment to the principles it endorses internationally. Nigeria cannot campaign at the IMO for fair treatment of seafarers and simultaneously maintain a domestic legal and prosecutorial framework that imposes collective punishment on crews for crimes they did not commit.
Nigeria’s Seafarers: Trained, Certified, Left Behind
The structural dimensions of Nigeria’s seafarer crisis are perhaps the most troubling of all. Despite controlling over 70 per cent of Africa-bound trade, possessing one of the continent’s most strategically positioned coastlines, and maintaining approximately 30 NIMASA-approved Maritime Education and Training (MET) institutions operating under STCW standards, Nigeria has failed to translate its maritime training infrastructure into meaningful seafarer employment.
Industry figures put the number of trained, certified Nigerian seafarers unable to secure sea-time or trade placement at over 4,000 — a stark contrast with the Philippines, which repatriates approximately $6.14 billion annually in seafarer remittances, and India, which earns around $2 billion. Nigeria’s contribution to these figures remains negligible.
Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Dr Adegboyega Oyetola has cited the Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) as evidence of government commitment, disclosing that 2,459 cadets have been sponsored for training in institutions across the United Kingdom, Egypt, the Philippines, India and Romania, with 1,088 obtaining their Certificates of Competency. Yet anecdotal evidence — and considerable industry frustration — suggests a significant number of NSDP beneficiaries remain unemployed, some reportedly engaged in informal trading or POS operations entirely outside the maritime sector.
The failure has multiple authors. The Director at Tantita Security Services, Enisuoh Warredi, has identified two systemic bottlenecks: insufficient flag-state vessels creating a domestic employment vacuum, and the limited global acceptability of Nigeria’s Certificate of Competency, which sees Nigerian cadets rejected by many foreign vessel operators.
Board Member of the Alumni of Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron (AMANO), Jonathan Peter, has added further layers: bureaucratic delays in certification, institutional politicisation, restricted fleet capacity, prohibitive interest rates and regulatory bottlenecks that combine to suppress investment in indigenous shipping.
The International Chamber of Shipping estimates the global seafarer workforce at approximately 1.89 million, with the Philippines, Russia, Indonesia, China and India as the dominant supplier nations. Nigeria, with all its maritime potential, does not feature meaningfully in that pecking order. That must change.
NIGERIA WATCH
Editorial Commentary | Waterways News
On This Seafarers’ Day, Nigeria Must Do More Than Honour — It Must Act
Every June 25, Nigeria’s maritime institutions issue statements honouring seafarers. NIMASA releases figures. The Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy issues tributes. Industry associations hold events. And then June 26 arrives, and the same 4,000-plus certified Nigerian seafarers who could not find sea berths yesterday wake up to the same reality.
This is the gap that defines Nigeria’s relationship with its maritime workforce: the distance between rhetoric and remedy.
The Day of the Seafarer is not merely a PR occasion. It is a moment of accountability — for flag states, for employers, for regulators and for governments. On each of those counts, Nigeria has outstanding obligations it has not yet discharged.
Consider the NSDP. The programme represents genuine government expenditure and genuine aspiration. But investment in training without a corresponding investment in placement and fleet expansion is an incomplete policy at best. The Federal Government has spent public funds producing seafarers who are selling second-hand clothing. That is not a maritime strategy — it is a leakage problem.
NIMASA and the Ministry must urgently develop structured placement partnerships with international shipping companies, leverage bilateral maritime agreements, and accelerate the upgrade of Nigeria’s Certificate of Competency to internationally competitive standards. The Malta ship registry partnership that NIMASA has been exploring must also be interrogated for what practical employment pathways it creates for Nigerian nationals, not merely what flag revenue it generates.
The fleet question is foundational. Nigeria cannot meaningfully employ its own seafarers without ships flying the Nigerian flag. The Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF) has languished in bureaucratic limbo for too long. Its disbursement — long promised, long delayed — must become a political priority, not a perennial headline.
Without vessels, there is no sea-time. Without sea-time, certificates remain academic. Without employment, the entire human capital investment chain collapses.
The Lagos cocaine conviction also demands a policy response, not just prosecutorial discretion. Nigeria should formally adopt and implement the ILO-IMO Tripartite Working Group guidelines on fair treatment of detained seafarers. Port State Control officers, prosecutors and the judiciary need clear procedural frameworks that distinguish between crew complicity and crew victimhood when narcotics are discovered aboard vessels. The criminalisation of innocent mariners is not law enforcement — it is an injustice with a maritime label.
On the broader geopolitical front, Nigeria has obligations to its nationals sailing in conflict zones. Nigerian seafarers trapped aboard vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea or the Black Sea are not merely statistics in an ITF report. They are citizens, and their welfare is a consular responsibility. The Department of Shipping and NIMASA must work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop a rapid welfare response protocol for Nigerian seafarers caught in crisis zones — something that does not currently exist in any operational form.
The 2026 Day of the Seafarer has come and gone. The theme — Carrying the World’s Trade, Carrying the Risks — will be archived, cited in conference papers and forgotten by most. But for Nigeria’s certified seafarers queuing at POS machines because there are no ships to board, the risks are not abstract. They are daily. And they demand a policy response proportionate to the scale of the problem.
Nigeria’s blue economy ambitions will be hollow so long as the human capital at its centre remains undeployed, unprotected and undervalued. The time for tributes has passed. The time for policy is now.
Waterways News | waterwaysnews.ng | Maritime | Ports | Inland Waterways | Blue Economy
Day of the Seafarer 2026: Nigeria’s Maritime Professionals Deserve More Than Ceremonies
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News Editorial Board | Lagos, Monday, June 22, 2026
On Wednesday, June 25, the International Maritime Organization will once again convene the global maritime community to mark the annual Day of the Seafarer. This year’s theme — Carrying Global Trade. Carrying the Risks — is particularly resonant at a time when seafarers navigating the Strait of Hormuz and other conflict-affected waters are daily confronting the human cost of geopolitical brinkmanship. The IMO’s campaign rightly highlights that the men and women who keep world trade moving often do so under conditions of extreme hazard, far removed from the comfort of boardrooms and policy chambers.
Waterways News joins the global maritime community in honouring seafarers for their indispensable service to international commerce. Their sacrifices underpin every cargo movement, every imported good, every barrel of crude that reaches export terminals. Nigeria, as Africa’s largest oil exporter and one of the continent’s busiest maritime economies, owes its seafarers a particular debt of gratitude. But gratitude, unaccompanied by concrete action, is a hollow tribute.
A Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
Each year, the Day of the Seafarer prompts reflection on conditions facing Nigerian maritime professionals. And each year, the picture is the same: a growing population of trained seafarers struggling against unemployment, wage disparity, certification barriers, and a domestic industry that too often reaches for foreign crews before it looks inward.
Unlike their counterparts caught in the crossfire of the Middle East conflict, the primary threat to Nigerian seafarers is not armed aggression. It is systemic marginalisation at home. The problem begins — and largely ends — with a structural mismatch between the supply of trained seafarers and the absorptive capacity of the Nigerian maritime industry.
Nigeria has no shortage of maritime training institutions. What it has is a serious shortage of vessels. Without a substantial fleet of indigenous commercial shipping tonnage, the maritime sector simply cannot accommodate the volume of graduates produced annually. The few Nigerian shipping companies that do operate frequently prefer to hire foreign seafarers, citing competency and reliability concerns — a preference that reflects, in part, genuine gaps in the training pipeline, and in part, the inertia of established hiring practices that successive administrations have failed to challenge through policy.
The Certificate Trap
The certification crisis is arguably the most damaging structural constraint facing Nigerian seafarers and one that demands urgent regulatory intervention.
The IMO’s STCW Convention sets the international benchmark for seafarer training and certification. Meeting that benchmark requires investment in modern training infrastructure, qualified instructors, functional simulators, and credible quality assurance systems. Nigeria’s maritime academies, including the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) in Oron, Akwa Ibom State — the country’s flagship institution — have long struggled to deliver at that standard. The consequences are direct and severe: certificates issued by Nigerian institutions face recognition challenges in international labour markets, limiting the global employment options available to holders.
Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron
More critically, Nigeria currently issues only Near Coastal Voyage certificates. This is a fundamental ceiling on professional ambition. Without Class 1 and Class 2 certificates of competency, Nigerian seafarers cannot advance to the command-level positions — Chief Engineer, Chief Mate, Captain — that represent the pinnacle of a seafaring career. Those who aspire to these ranks must travel abroad and bear the personal cost of foreign certification programmes. For most, that cost is prohibitive. The effect is a bottleneck that traps capable maritime professionals in the lower tiers of the career ladder, regardless of their experience or aptitude.
NIMASA and the Question of Institutional Priority
Responsibility for maritime labour policy and seafarer development sits squarely with the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency. The agency has not been idle: the National Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) has sent cohorts of young Nigerians to foreign maritime academies for training in nautical science and marine engineering, and NIMASA has invested in maritime departments at several Nigerian universities.
These initiatives are commendable. But they do not address the core problem. Sending Nigerians abroad for training that cannot be delivered at home is a palliative, not a solution. The more urgent priority must be the rehabilitation and re-equipment of MAN Oron to a standard that can support unrestricted certificate issuance — that is, certificates recognised globally, at all officer levels, without the Near Coastal limitation that currently constrains Nigerian seafarers’ international employability. Until that happens, Nigerian maritime training will continue to produce graduates whose qualifications are, for practical purposes, domestically stranded.
The agency must also pursue with greater urgency the structural incentives needed to grow an indigenous fleet. The Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund, now running well over two decades behind on its disbursement mandate, remains the most glaring symbol of institutional failure in this regard. Without ships, there are no berths for Nigerian seafarers — no matter how many academies are built or how many graduates are certified.
Beyond Ceremony
As Nigeria marks the 2026 Day of the Seafarer, it is worth confronting an uncomfortable truth: a generation of the country’s most accomplished seafarers — officers who trained aboard Nigerian National Shipping Line vessels in the era when Nigeria still owned ocean-going tonnage — has aged out of service. That institutional knowledge and sea-time experience has not been fully transmitted to the next generation. Nigeria no longer owns the high-tonnage fleet that once gave those officers purpose and a career path. Reversing that decline is not simply a matter of national pride; it is a commercial and strategic imperative for a country that imports almost everything it consumes and exports almost everything it produces by sea.
What Nigeria’s seafarers need on this Day of the Seafarer is not another roundtable. They need a fully funded and internationally accredited Maritime Academy of Nigeria. They need an accelerated CVFF disbursement framework that places Nigerian-owned vessels on Nigerian waters. They need a NIMASA that uses its regulatory authority to enforce local content obligations on vessel operators, not merely promulgate them. And they need a Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy that treats seafarer workforce development as the economic development issue it fundamentally is.
Celebrating Nigerian seafarers must mean more than commemorative plaques and press statements. It must mean ensuring that the next generation of Nigerian maritime professionals has ships to sail, certificates the world will accept, and careers worthy of the risks they carry.
Waterways News is Nigeria’s specialist publication for the maritime sector, inland waterways, and blue economy.
Editorial
AfCFTA: Nigeria’s Ports and Shipping Sector Must Drive Continental Trade — Or Cede the Table
AfCFTA: Nigeria’s Ports and Shipping Sector Must Drive Continental Trade — Or Cede the Table
By Emetena Ikuku | Waterways News
Nigeria’s underwhelming engagement with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is not just a trade policy failure — it is a maritime failure. And until the country fixes the rot at its ports, on its waterways, and in its shipping corridors, no amount of ministerial cheerleading will change that.
The AfCFTA, which brings together 54 of the 55 African Union member states into a single market of 1.3 billion people and a combined GDP of around $3.4 trillion, was designed precisely to reverse Africa’s long-standing failure to trade with itself. Research by the African Development Bank had established that only 16 percent of the continent’s international trade takes place between African nations — a damning indictment that the AfCFTA set out to correct.
Nigeria signed up to the agreement in July 2019 and ratified it in December 2020. Six years on, the country has little to show for it. The numbers tell a brutal story. Of approximately 8,500 Certificates of Origin issued across Africa under the AfCFTA framework — the key instrument that certifies local content in exported goods and qualifies them for preferential tariff access — South Africa alone issued over 4,000, accounting for nearly half the continental total. Egypt, Kenya and Ghana all maintain significantly higher utilisation rates. Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation, sits far behind all of them.
It is the ports and the waterways that hold the answer — and equally, the problem.
For decades, Nigeria’s seaports have been synonymous with gridlock, inefficiency and regulatory bottlenecks. Cargo dwell times remain among the highest on the continent. Lengthy customs procedures, inconsistent border checks, and layered bureaucratic requirements pile cost upon cost, ensuring that Nigerian goods arrive at continental markets already priced out of competitiveness. The AfCFTA’s preferential tariff regime means nothing if the port-to-market journey bleeds exporters dry before they can benefit from it.
Compounding this is the country’s near-total dependence on foreign-owned vessels for cargo movement. Without a functional national carrier or meaningful investment in indigenous shipping capacity, Nigeria cannot build the regional maritime connectivity that sustained intra-African trade demands. Competitors are not standing still — South Africa, Egypt and Kenya have leveraged their maritime infrastructure to position themselves as AfCFTA frontrunners. Nigeria’s weak coastal and inland waterway links continue to inflate logistics costs and undermine the competitiveness of Nigerian manufacturers and exporters.
Roads and rail are in a similar state. Poor transport networks from production hubs to port gates continue to raise the cost of doing business, making it harder for Nigerian goods — particularly from small and medium enterprises — to compete even within a framework designed to give them an advantage.
There is no shortage of institutional structures. A National Action Committee on AfCFTA implementation exists on paper. But the evidence suggests it has been far too ineffective in galvanising Nigeria’s participation. The implementation framework remains hamstrung by bureaucratic inertia, limited automation and weak coordination between the agencies that must work together — NPA, Customs, NIMASA, Standards bodies — if AfCFTA trade is to flow.
It is therefore difficult to reconcile reality with the claims of the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr Jumoke Oduwole, who has described Nigeria as a “pacesetter” in AfCFTA implementation and cited unverified “groundbreaking achievements” from 2025. Such declarations, unsupported by data and contradicted by Nigeria’s Certificate of Origin rankings, are precisely the kind of self-congratulation that deepens the problem by forestalling urgent corrective action.
The waterways community — port operators, terminal concessionaires, freight forwarders, shipping lines, maritime agencies and logistics players — must recognise that AfCFTA is their opportunity as much as it is a challenge. The agreement creates preferential demand for African-origin goods across 54 markets. Nigeria’s manufacturers, farmers and processors can only access that demand if cargo moves efficiently from factory to vessel to destination. That chain passes through Nigeria’s ports. It runs along its inland waterways. It depends on its shipping corridors.
The fixes are known: accelerate port digitalisation and the National Single Window, reduce cargo dwell times, invest in indigenous shipping, rehabilitate inland waterways and eastern ports to ease congestion at Lagos, and build genuine awareness among exporters — particularly SMEs — about how to use AfCFTA trade instruments.
Nigeria cannot afford to keep warming a bench while South Africa, Egypt and Kenya lead the game. The AfCFTA table is set. Nigeria must decide whether to eat — or watch others dine
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