MARITIME TRADE & SHIPPING
Oyetola Seals Badagry Deep-Seaport MoU with APM Terminals in Copenhagen, Eyes Apapa, Onne Concession Extensions
Oyetola Seals Badagry Deep-Seaport MoU with APM Terminals in Copenhagen, Eyes Apapa, Onne Concession Extensions
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
APM Terminals has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop the long-proposed Badagry Deep-Seaport, as Nigeria’s Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr Adegboyega Oyetola, led a Federal Government delegation to Denmark to deepen maritime cooperation and court fresh investment into the country’s port infrastructure.
The MoU was signed in Copenhagen on Monday, September 7, 2026, committing both sides to exclusive negotiations toward developing the greenfield project. It was signed by A.P. Moller–Maersk Group Chief Executive Officer Vincent Clerc on behalf of APM Terminals, and by Didi Ndiomu, Managing Director of Badagry Port Development Limited and of Quinn McGrath Marine and Environmental Services Limited.
A.P. Moller–Maersk Group Chief Executive Officer Vincent Clerc (l), and by Didi Ndiomu, Managing Director of Badagry Port Development Limited (r) as they sign the MoU on Monday
If it goes ahead, Badagry Deep-Seaport would add fresh deepwater capacity able to take larger container vessels and open new transshipment business for Nigeria and the wider West African market, while also easing congestion pressure on the existing Lagos city ports.
The signing formed part of a broader Danish engagement in which Oyetola’s delegation met senior Danish government and maritime-industry figures. “Our engagement in Denmark underscores the Federal Government’s commitment to modernizing Nigeria’s maritime infrastructure and unlocking the full potential of our blue economy,” Oyetola said, describing the Badagry talks as central to President Bola Tinubu’s ambition to make Nigeria “West Africa’s premier trade and logistics hub.”
Beyond Badagry, the Nigerian side and APM Terminals also discussed extending the company’s existing port concessions at Lagos Port Complex, Apapa, and at the West Africa Container Terminal (WACT) in Onne.
Igor van den Essen, APM Terminals’ Managing Director for Africa & Europe, said the company saw value in both tracks, deepening its Apapa and Onne concessions and building Badagry from scratch. “Developing Badagry as a greenfield project will further ease congestions in city ports and further open new opportunities,” he said, adding that APM Terminals views public-private partnerships as the route to “long-term investment, a better business environment and, thereby, competitiveness in a rapidly developing market.”
Ndiomu called the agreement the start of a new phase for Nigerian maritime infrastructure, saying it was “in full alignment with the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s ambitious maritime growth strategy.”
The Badagry project would also position Nigeria to handle more transshipment cargo bound for other West and Central African markets through a strategically located deepwater facility.
Nigeria Watch
An MoU is a starting gun, not a finish line and Badagry’s is a race Nigeria has watched restart before. The project has cycled through federal approvals and investor interest for years without breaking ground, most recently surfacing in the run of new deep seaport approvals (alongside Olokola, Ibom, Bakassi and Bonny) that Waterways News tracked earlier this year. What separates Monday’s Copenhagen signing from that pattern is the counterparty: Maersk’s terminal arm is not a paper investor, and its willingness to pursue “exclusive negotiations” signals it sees a bankable case. Whether that translates into diggers on the ground in Badagry, or into another MoU that quietly expires, will depend on land acquisition, environmental clearances and as with every big-ticket Nigerian port promise, the federal government’s follow-through once the cameras from Denmark have gone home.
The concession-extension conversation folded into the same trip deserves at least as much attention from operators as the Badagry headline. Apapa and Onne are live, revenue-generating gateways handling cargo today; any move to extend APM Terminals’ hold on them has immediate implications for shippers, freight forwarders and the smaller operators who move cargo in and out of those terminals, the constituency Waterways News covers most closely. Coming as it does amid ongoing anxiety across the sector about how Nigeria structures and renews its major port concessions, this is a thread we will be pushing NIMASA, NPA and the Ministry to clarify: what terms are on the table, and what safeguards exist for local operators and dockworkers if Apapa and Onne pass into longer-term foreign control.
For the informal and cooperative waterway sector such as WABOTAN, ATBOWATON and their members, a deep water port at Badagry is, for now, a distant prospect rather than an immediate concern. But greenfield development of this scale historically brings dredging, land-use changes and new traffic patterns to the creeks and waterways around it. Waterways News will be watching for whether local waterway communities and small-craft operators are consulted as the Badagry negotiations progress, or whether, as with past infrastructure pushes, they find out about changes to their waterways only after contracts are signed.
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.
NPCC: FG’s £746m Apapa, Tin-Can Port Overhaul to Deliver Green, Smart Terminals
The Federal Government’s £746 million facility for the rehabilitation of the Apapa and Tin-Can Island ports is designed to convert both facilities into green and smart ports, with automation and digital systems central to the modernisation drive, the Nigerian Ports Consultative Council (NPCC) has said.
Chairman of the council’s Ports Operations and Security Committee, Capt. Iheanacho Ebubeogu, disclosed this while reviewing port operations and security for the second quarter of 2026, in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Sunday.
Ebubeogu said the programme would deliver upgraded cargo-handling equipment, cut vessel turnaround and cargo dwell times, and improve environmental sustainability, while also boosting revenue generated from port operations.
He said the rehabilitation extends beyond Lagos, with contracts already awarded for the Escravos breakwaters and Terminals A and C, and the Federal Executive Council approving a channel management consortium to maintain and deepen channels serving the Delta ports.
At Rivers Port, Terminal 1 — operated by PTOL — is undergoing upgrades to berths one to three to improve safety and operational efficiency, Ebubeogu said, while Calabar Port would benefit from increased maintenance dredging. Rehabilitation work at the McKaiva and Malero jetties would also support trade along the eastern corridor.
Inland Dry Ports and Regulatory Reform
Ebubeogu said the administration of inland dry ports had been redesigned, with the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) now overseeing them as landlord in line with its statutory mandate.
He added that the Nigerian Shippers’ Council had formally transitioned into the Nigerian Port Economy Regulatory Agency (NPERA), which will regulate the tariffs, charges and rates imposed by shipping lines and terminal operators.
On expansion, Ebubeogu said site clearing had begun at the Snake Island concession area, part of efforts to grow port capacity, attract investment and strengthen the competitiveness of Nigeria’s maritime sector.
Nigeria Watch
The £746 million figure Ebubeogu cites has been public since March, when the UK and Nigeria signed the UK Export Finance-backed facility during President Tinubu’s Downing Street meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer — a deal structured through Citibank and carrying a UK-content requirement (steel supply from British Steel, and roughly 20 percent of project components sourced from UK firms). What Ebubeogu’s Q2 review adds is confirmation that the long-delayed financing has finally cleared its bureaucratic bottlenecks and construction is understood to be starting, after similar timelines slipped in 2024 and earlier in 2026.
For Waterways News readers tracking the gap between announcement and delivery, three things are worth watching. First, the NPERA transition Ebubeogu references is not a minor administrative footnote — it is the operational birth of the tariff regulator created under the NPERA Act, and how it exercises its new powers over shipping lines and terminal operators will matter more to importers and freight forwarders than the port-modernisation headlines.
Second, the shift of inland dry ports to NPA landlord administration touches directly on jurisdictional questions this desk has followed closely amid the NIWA-LASWA disputes — a redesign of who administers dry ports is a governance story in its own right, not just an infrastructure update.
Third, Snake Island site clearing is an early-stage signal only; NPCC and NPA statements on new capacity have a long history of preceding, sometimes by years, any visible construction.
None of the eastern-corridor commitments — Calabar dredging, McKaiva and Malero jetty rehabilitation — come with disclosed timelines or budgets in this briefing, a pattern familiar to operators along the Delta and eastern waterways who have waited through successive administrations for the Escravos breakwater reconstruction alone.
Waterways News will continue tracking disbursement and delivery timelines against Ebubeogu’s Q2 claims in subsequent quarterly reviews.
Blue Economy
Apapa’s Export Gambit: APM Terminals Bets on Round-the-Clock Barges, Rail to Break Cargo Logjam
Apapa’s Export Gambit: APM Terminals Bets on Round-the-Clock Barges, Rail to Break Cargo Logjam
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
APM Terminals Apapa says it is moving to unclog one of the most persistent chokepoints in Nigeria’s export trade, unveiling plans to run barge operations at its Finger Jetty around the clock from the fourth quarter of 2026, alongside an ambitious push to shift up to 60 per cent of its export containers onto rail.
The disclosures were made at the third edition of the terminal’s Exporters Forum, themed “Exports – Voice of Customers Forum,” which drew exporters, shipping lines, logistics operators, regulators and academics to Lagos to dissect the bottlenecks still weighing down Nigeria’s export supply chain.
Head of Commercial at APM Terminals Apapa, Kayode Olufemi-Daniel, told the gathering that the terminal was working backward from the pain points exporters actually face, rather than imposing solutions from the top. He described a process of mapping root causes with stakeholders and building a joint action plan to lift export volumes.
At the centre of that plan is the dedicated Finger Jetty, which will begin 24-hour barge operations in the last quarter of the year. The facility will handle both inbound and outbound containers, giving customers round-the-clock capacity to move export cargo in, evacuate imports, and bring in empty containers, a marked departure, Olufemi-Daniel said, from the days when barging competed for space on the terminal’s main quay.
Terminal management framed the expansion as part of a broader campaign to lure exporters back to Apapa and support the Federal Government’s push to diversify the economy away from oil.
Rail is the other pillar of the strategy. Key Client Manager Adesoji Olaniyan said the terminal currently runs evacuation arrangements through two rail locations, each handling roughly three weekly calls, with trains carrying about 60 TEUs apiece. Internal assessments, he said, continue to show rail as the most cost-effective evacuation option available to the terminal, underpinning its 60-per-cent target.
Stakeholders at the forum credited APM Terminals with sustaining an open channel for feedback and progress-tracking. COSCO Shipping Lines Nigeria’s Precious Idika pointed to the terminal’s Team View portal as a genuine simplifier for gating and payment processes, while Lagos Business School’s Prof. Frank Ojadi urged the terminal to replicate the model beyond Lagos, in export-producing hubs such as Kano and Port Harcourt. Representatives of Maersk Line, British American Tobacco Nigeria, PIL Nigeria, Allround Cargo Company and Star Living Nigeria also acknowledged visible operational improvements.
Nigeria Watch
For a sector Waterways News tracks closely — the fortunes of small-scale and cooperative waterway operators who move much of the cargo between Apapa’s berths and the wider Lagos waterway network — APM Terminals’ 24-hour barging expansion is worth watching beyond the headline. A dedicated jetty running around the clock means more berthing windows and, potentially, more work for the barge operators and cooperative associations, including outfits like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON, that service container movement in and out of Apapa. Whether that additional capacity translates into fairer scheduling and payment terms for informal and cooperative operators — as opposed to simply absorbing more volume for the terminal’s own commercial benefit — will be the real test of this initiative’s impact on the ground.
It is also a reminder of the structural imbalance this desk has flagged repeatedly: private terminal operators like APM Terminals can unilaterally expand infrastructure and set the terms of engagement, while NIWA’s regulatory framework for the inland waterway operators who plug into that infrastructure remains comparatively under-resourced. Prof. Ojadi’s call to extend the Apapa model to Kano and Port Harcourt is well made, but Waterways News would add that any replication should come with parallel investment in the waterway-side capacity including vessels, jetties, and safety standards that feeds these terminals, not just the terminal gates themselves.
Nigeria’s non-oil export ambitions cannot rest on rail and barge announcements alone; they depend on the informal operators who still move a large share of that cargo having a stake in how the gains are shared.
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