Download Towards Indigenous Participation in the Nigerian Maritime Sector

Towards Indigenous Participation in the Nigerian Maritime Sector: An Assessment
Of The Cbaotage Act
Nigeria is endowed with about 8,600 kilometers of inland water ways, while its coastline
along the Gulf of Guinea is measured at about 853 kilometers. The country has six major
seaports comprising of the Apapa port, the Tincan Island port, the Calabar port, the Warri
port, the Onne port and the Port Harcourt seaport as well as several inland ports such as
the Onitsha port on the river Niger. In terms of trade, Nigeria currently accounts for over
68% of the volume of cargo and vessel traffic in the entire West African sub-region with
96% of her import cargos being transported through maritime channels. This clearly
underscores the strategic importance of the maritime sector to the Nigerian economy.
Accordingly, Nigeria has always aspired to be the shipping hub for the West African subregion. Experts and industry actors have projected that the maritime sector has the
potential of annually injecting over N7 Trillion per annum into the Nigerian economy
while also creating over 15,000,000 million jobs.
In 2003, the Federal Government enacted the Costal and Inland Shipping (Cabotage) Act
to enhance indigenous participation in commercial activities in Nigeria’s costal and
inland waters.
However, despite the existence of the Act and other Government
initiatives to promote indigenous commercial participation and manpower development
in the sector, the desired objectives of indigenizing the sector, facilitating the
diversification of the Nigerian economy and increasing the sector’s contribution to the
national GDP are still far from being achieved. For example, the recently rebased GDP
statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics indicates that the entire maritime sector
contributes about 0.01% to the Nigerian economy. This figure represents an unfortunate
state of affairs for a littoral state with a large youthful population like Nigeria.
This thesis seeks examine the development of legal and policy regimes to promote local
content or indigenous participation in Nigerian maritime industry as well as the factors
that were responsible for their failure. Particularly, the thesis will employ legal analysis
and comparative studies as the research methodology to critically analyze the provisions
of the Nigerian Cabotage Act. The analysis will be aimed at highlighting several
challenges that have hindered the achievement of the Act’s objectives in the Nigerian
maritime sector. While the comparative aspect of the research will study the development
of Cabotage regimes in other jurisdictions such as the United States and the United
Kingdom with a view to finding examples that can be borrowed from such jurisdictions
to address the situation in Nigeria. Accordingly, the thesis will propose some responses
that are imperative to ensure a successful and sustained achievement of the objectives of
the Act. It is hoped that the thesis will provide an original contribution to the existing
body of research on maritime law in Nigeria