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Nigeria Maritime media celebrates Adeniyi over his transformational leadership as Customs boss

Funso OLOJO
In an unprecedented show of solidarity and unanimity in the acknowledgement of his sterling performance as the Comptroller-General of Customs, the maritime media practitioners have conferred an award of ‘Iconic Maritime Personality of the year 2024’ on Adewale Adeniyi.
The award, which is to be officially presented to the CGG on January 16th,2025  at the Apapa Port Customs Command Auditorium, Lagos is a testament to the transformational leadership of Adeniyi which the media practitioners agreed has revolutionized the Nigeria Customs Service.
The unprecedented recognition of the performance of Adeniyi was  a unanimous decision by all maritime journalists covering the maritime beat in Nigeria  which cut across print, electronic and online media, led by the different beat associations.
These include the Maritime Reporters Association of Nigeria (MARAN), League of Maritime Editors (LOME), Association of Maritime Journalists of Nigeria (AMJON), Maritime Journalists Association of Nigeria (MAJAN), Shipping Correspondents Association of Nigeria (SCAN), Online Maritime Media Association of Nigeria (OMMAN) and Congress of Maritime Media Practitioners  (CONMMEP).
They believe that CG Adeniyi has posted impressive  performance since his assumption of office as the Customs CGC.
According to a nomination letter sent to the CGC by the Secretary, Award Planning Committee, Mr Innocent Orok, “there is no gainsaying you have redeemed and repositioned the Service in all areas. These include revenue collection, anti-smuggling activities, trade facilitation, national security, staff welfare, inter-agency collaboration, infrastructural upgrading, Information and Communication Technology, and Corporate Social Responsibility, among others.
“It is also incontestable that your record-breaking performance has attracted national and international laurels to you, the Service, and Nigeria as a whole. Unarguably, it is partly for these reasons that the Leadership Newspaper Group recently honoured you with the award of the Public Service Personality of the Year.
“We, the maritime journalists, comprising both print, electronic and online media covering the beat, are happy to be part of this history-making with you as partners in progress.
“In appreciation of your superlative performance and, by extension, your unrelenting support to the media, especially the maritime media, we nominate you as the ICONIC MARITIME PERSONALITY OF THE YEAR.”
On his part, the Chairman of Award Planning Committee, Dele Aderibegbe, explained that “the award is coming at no better time than during the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is looking for focused and dedicated leaders to take the Nigerian economy out of the woods.
According to him, “this honour is very symbolic. First, this is the first time in the maritime sub-sector that all the journalists covering the beat will come together to honour a deserving performer per excellence, who has made the Customs and Nigeria proud by his purposeful, professional and patriotic leadership.
“Secondly, the Nigeria Customs Service under Adewale Adeniyi has been reconnected to international frontiers and leading in revenue collection, anti-smuggling activities, trade facilitation, ICT, modernisation, and inter-agency collaboration, among others.
“This honour by maritime journalists is also to set an agenda for other agencies of government and their appointees that the ever vibrant and dogged maritime media are watching them.
“We are inviting special guests, especially other agencies’ heads and maritime stakeholders to come and witness this great event, which is first of its kind in the Nigerian maritime industry.”
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Analyses

The trillion naira vault: Building political-proof ports for Nigeria

The Monday Discourse with Ibrahim Nasiru focuses on the strategy to lock away the NPA’s port modernisation funds from the groping hands of the politicians in other to avert the calamity which befell the infamous Cabotage Vessels Financing Fund (CVFF)
Following up on the intense national discussion regarding the NPA’s ₦1.489 trillion revenue target, here is a preview of my analysis on how we can structurally lock this massive wealth away from bureaucratic hands.
We cannot allow the historic failure of the Cabotage Vessels Financing Fund (CVFF) to paralyze our economic imagination.
The solution to Port decay isn’t to stop collecting funds, but to change who holds the keys to the vault.
From deploying bankruptcy-remote SPVs to issuing local currency infrastructure bonds backed by pension funds, this piece outlines the exact financial engineering needed to modernize Apapa and Tin Can Island.
Watch out for the full analysis tomorrow.
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Analyses

The Anchor of Dependency: Rethinking Nigeria’s Port Financing Strategy

Monday Discourse with Ibrahim Nasiru
The recent Port Management Association of West and Central Africa (PMAWCA) conference in Lagos concluded with a dizzying array of multi-billion-dollar infrastructure promises.
 Amidst the boardroom handshakes and official communiques, a familiar theme emerged: West Africa requires tens of billions of dollars to build the “Ports of the Future.”
For Nigeria, a nation grappling with aging brownfield infrastructure and the pressure to fully optimize its deep seaports, the question of infrastructure is no longer about what to build, but how to pay for it.
 For decades, Nigeria’s approach to Port development has been tethered to a traditional anchor of dependency, an over-reliance on foreign loans, lopsided concession frameworks, and external development contracts.
If the nation is to truly unlock the economic sovereignty promised by the Blue Economy, it must critically re-evaluate its Port financing strategy, shifting away from debt-heavy models toward aggressive domestic capital mobilization and genuine structural reforms that address how we handle our internal maritime revenues.
Historically, major Port expansions in Sub-Saharan Africa have followed a predictable financial script.
A sovereign state secures a massive bilateral loan, frequently from foreign development banks, backed by state guarantees or the projected revenues of the Port asset itself.
 On the surface, this model delivers immediate gratification: shiny new gantry cranes, dredged channels, and modern breakwaters.
Below the surface, however, this architecture creates a cycle of financial vulnerability.
When Port assets are financed through rigid, foreign-denominated debt, the pressure to service that debt often overrides the Port’s primary economic mandate, which is to lower the cost of doing business.
High debt-servicing costs force Port authorities to maintain punitive tariff structures, expensive regulatory charges, and inflated berthing fees.
 Consequently, while the infrastructure appears world-class, the Port becomes economically uncompetitive, driving shipping lines to cheaper regional alternatives and defeating the purpose of the initial investment.
To break this loop, Nigeria must confront a glaring fiscal paradox sitting right inside its balance sheet: the architecture of the Nigerian Ports Authority’s (NPA) internal revenue framework.
 As revealed in recent National Assembly budget defenses under Managing Director Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho, the NPA is projecting a staggering ₦1.489 trillion in internally generated revenue (IGR) for the 2026 fiscal year, hot on the heels of generating nearly ₦2 trillion in 2025.
The agency is a financial powerhouse, generating enormous wealth from ship dues, cargo fees, and concession tariffs.
 Yet, because of rigid fiscal remittance laws, a massive chunk of this liquidity is swallowed directly by the federation’s Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) and swept straight into the Treasury Single Account (TSA).
The NPA is effectively treated as a cash cow to finance federal budget deficits rather than being allowed to legally retain and reinvest its own earnings back into the infrastructure that generates them.
Forcing an agency to remit massive sums to the federal treasury while simultaneously asking it to borrow foreign capital or beg for funding via the Central Bank just to dredge a channel or rebuild a collapsing berth is an unsustainable contradiction.
 True financial independence requires a sweeping legislative rethink of the Fiscal Responsibility Act to allow the NPA to establish a dedicated, ring-fenced infrastructure retention fund.
If the agency could legally retain just 20 to 30 percent more of its trillions in actual collections specifically for a Port Modernization Sinking Fund, it could fully self-finance the urgently needed overhauls of the 100-year-old Apapa Port and the decaying infrastructure at Tin Can Island without adding a single dollar of foreign debt to Nigeria’s sovereign balance sheet.
Furthermore, this internal liquidity could be used as equity to issue local currency maritime infrastructure bonds on the domestic capital market, allowing Nigerian pension funds to invest in an asset class that generates predictable, long-term, inflation-hedged cash flows.
Ultimately, breaking the anchor of dependency requires moving past the illusion that a nation must always look outward or borrow its way to maritime dominance.
True Port efficiency cannot coexist with a system that starves its primary trade gateway of operational liquidity in the name of national revenue extraction.
As Nigeria positions itself to capture the trade volumes of a developing continent, its leadership must realize that financial engineering is just as critical as civil engineering.
We must design financing models that allow the maritime sector to feed itself first before feeding the national treasury.
Until we cut the chains of debt-heavy external financing and reform our internal revenue retention laws, our Ports will not function as engines of economic liberation, but rather as highly sophisticated toll gates filtering both national wealth and foreign debt back to external creditors.
Chief Ibrahim Nasiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
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Analyses

Beyond The Lagos Communique: Can West Africa’s $27 Billion Port Rhetoric Outrun Gridlock?

Ibrahim Nasiru
The Monday Discourse with NASIRU focuses on the take away from the just concluded PMAWCA board meeting in Lagos.
Last week, maritime leaders gathered in Lagos for the PMAWCA conference, celebrating a staggering $27 billion infrastructure boom and drawing up plans to replicate the seamless digital models of Rotterdam and Singapore.
But for the average importer, agent, or truck driver trapped in the chaos of Apapa or Tin Can, the disconnect is jarring.
West African Ports are masterful at planning, but historically abysmal at executing.
A multi-billion-dollar Deep Sea Port is just an expensive parking lot for containers if the surrounding rail and road infrastructure remains broken.
True competitiveness will not be won by the nation that signs the largest contract; it will be won by the nation that actually clears a container without corruption, extortion, or manual delays.
It is time to move past courtroom style policy curation and deploy an execution squad.
Read full details tomorrow on why West Africa’s maritime sector needs dockyard discipline over boardroom eloquence.
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