An Oblong Media Global Intelligence Observation
You cannot give what you do not have. That is a first principle of life, leadership and enterprise.
And perhaps this is where we need to have a much more uncomfortable conversation about the enormous maritime and industrial potential sitting largely underdeveloped across Nigeria’s South South and the wider Eastern economic corridor.
This is not about insulting the people of the South South. It is about asking why a region endowed with oil, gas, navigable waterways, ports, coastline and strategic access to the Atlantic has not translated those advantages into anything approaching its potential as a major African maritime and industrial hub.
Having worked around the oil and gas industry, one thing that continually struck me was the relatively limited indigenous participation in the commanding heights of the petroleum value chain.
The Niger Delta produced the resource, but ownership of much of the technology, capital, shipping, engineering, drilling, fabrication and high value services historically remained elsewhere.
That is the contradiction.
Producing oil is not the same thing as owning the oil economy.
Hosting a port is not the same thing as building a maritime economy.
And collecting rents from economic activity is certainly not the same thing as creating that activity.
LOOK AT ROTTERDAM
Rotterdam remains Europe’s largest seaport. In 2025 it handled 428.4 million tonnes of cargo and 14.2 million TEU of containers.
And Rotterdam presents an important lesson for Nigeria.
It is fundamentally a river delta port system connected to the North Sea through waterways whose navigable depths must be continuously managed.
But the Dutch do not sit around complaining about siltation.
They manage it.
They survey.
They dredge.
They deepen channels.
They invest.
They regard maintaining navigable depth as part of the permanent cost of possessing a world class port.
The Port of Rotterdam says sections are hydrographically surveyed on average every six weeks, with frequency adjusted according to siltation, while dredging is undertaken as required to maintain designated depths.
The larger point nevertheless survives intact:
Siltation is an engineering problem, not a death sentence for a port.
That lesson matters enormously to Nigeria.
SO WHY HAVE WE ACCEPTED THE DECLINE OF THE EASTERN PORT CORRIDOR?
Look at the geography:
Port Harcourt.
Onne.
Calabar.
Warri.
Koko.
Sapele.
Then look beyond the ports themselves to the enormous commercial hinterland stretching through Aba, Owerri, Nnewi, Onitsha, Enugu and ultimately into the North Central and North East.
There is an economic corridor sitting there waiting to be deliberately engineered.
The Federal Government’s own port
The structure is more interesting.
The Nigerian Ports Authority lists different operators across the Federal Lighter Terminal and Federal Ocean Terminal, including Brawal, Intels and WACT. The Bureau of Public Enterprises confirms that Onne FOT Terminal A was concessioned to Intels Nigeria Limited in 2006 for 25 years.
Meanwhile, the West Africa Container Terminal (WACT) at Onne is 100% owned by APM Terminals, part of the A.P. Moller-Maersk group. WACT says it has already undergone an investment programme exceeding $100 million and operates vessels of up to 4,500 TEU.
The NPA records berths at the Federal Ocean Terminal with draughts reaching 12 metres.
Onne is already demonstrating that a serious eastern maritime gateway can work.
In fact, APM Terminals explicitly markets WACT as a gateway serving East, North East and Central Nigeria.
That should immediately raise a bigger question.
WHERE IS THE INTEGRATED TRANSPORT PLAN?
Where is the deliberate rail and road strategy connecting Onne efficiently to Aba and the wider Eastern commercial belt?
Why shouldn’t Rivers State, neighbouring states, private investors, NPA, NRC and the Federal Government be sitting around the same table designing an Onne–Aba–Owerri–Onitsha logistics corridor?
Imagine Onne connected efficiently by rail to Aba.
Imagine that network extending into the South-East industrial belt.
Imagine dry ports and logistics parks strategically positioned along that corridor.
Imagine Calabar properly dredged and commercially repositioned.
Imagine Warri and Koko integrated into Delta’s industrial economy.
Imagine Port Harcourt once again functioning as a major commercial maritime gateway rather than merely trading on the reputation of what it once represented.
Those are not fantasies.
They are infrastructure decisions.
THE REAL FAILURE IS ENTREPRENEURIAL
And this is where our South South brothers and their political leadership need to have an uncomfortable conversation with themselves.
The region cannot forever wait for Abuja.
Neither should it wait for Igbo capital from Aba, Onitsha, Nnewi and elsewhere to arrive before recognising the commercial value sitting on its coastline.
The governments of Rivers, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Edo and Delta should be competing aggressively to attract shipping lines, logistics companies, manufacturers, petrochemical industries, ship repair facilities, export processing zones and industrial parks.
They should be assembling consortiums.
They should be travelling to Rotterdam, Antwerp-Bruges, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai looking for technical and investment partners.
They should be creating bankable PPP structures.
They should be asking:
What does it take to move another 500,000 containers through our region?
What infrastructure does a shipping line require before choosing Calabar, Onne or Warri?
What industries can we cluster around these ports?
How do we connect them by rail to the enormous South East manufacturing and trading economy?
That is how serious governments think.
MOVE FROM RENT SEEKING TO ASSET CREATION
The larger disease Nigeria must confront is political arbitrage.
Too much wealth is generated from proximity to government rather than the creation of productive assets.
Pipeline surveillance contracts illustrate the broader debate. Tantita Security Services and other private firms currently participate in NNPC’s pipeline surveillance arrangements; the contracts have even generated litigation over their renewal.
Whatever one’s view of the security justification for those contracts, guarding pipelines cannot become our definition of indigenous participation in the petroleum economy.
Where are the indigenous offshore engineering giants?
Where are the Niger Delta owned drilling companies?
Where are the regional shipping lines?
Where are the shipyards?
Where are the petrochemical conglomerates?
Where are the fabrication yards competing internationally?
Where are the marine engineering companies?
Where are the dredging giants?
Where are the logistics multinationals born in Port Harcourt, Warri or Calabar?
That is the conversation we should be having.
The South South should not merely be the geography from which petroleum is extracted.
It should be one of Africa’s great energy, maritime, petrochemical and logistics centres.
And the South East should not simply complain that its traders are forced to import through Lagos.
Its enormous entrepreneurial capital should be looking southward towards partnerships capable of transforming Onne, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Warri and the wider Eastern maritime corridor.
The interests of both regions intersect.
South South possesses much of the coastline, ports, hydrocarbons and waterways.
The South East possesses one of the country’s largest concentrations of indigenous trading, manufacturing and distribution capital.
Connect those two economic systems properly and something potentially transformative emerges.
BUILD THE EASTERN ECONOMIC CORRIDOR
This is bigger than ethnicity.
It is economics.
The future should be an integrated South East/South South maritime industrial corridor in which ports, railways, highways, industrial parks, oil and gas infrastructure, manufacturing centres and inland logistics hubs reinforce one another.
Rotterdam teaches us something extremely simple:
Geography gives you an opportunity.
Human beings build the port.
Leadership builds the infrastructure.
Capital builds the industries.
Entrepreneurs create the businesses.
And policy connects everything together.
The resources are already there.
The coastline is already there.
The ports are already there.
The population is already there.
The entrepreneurial market is already there.
What has been missing is the determination to connect all these assets into one coherent economic machine.
Stop waiting for Abuja.
Build consortiums. Mobilise capital. Demand enabling infrastructure. Bring in world class technical partners. Connect the ports to the industrial hinterland.
Because ultimately, development is not something that happens to a people.
It is something a people deliberately build.
By Duruebube Chimazuru “Oblong” Nnadi-Oforgu
For
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
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