The Chairman of the NPERA Governing Board, His Excellency Ibrahim Shema, and the Director General/CEO of the former Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), Dr. Pius Akutah Ukeyima, MON, have highlighted the monumental economic impact of Nigeria’s newly minted port regulator.
Speaking in Lagos at a high-profile event celebrating the recent presidential assent, Shema declared that the new agency establishes a permanent statutory framework for port economic regulation. This legislative bedrock is specifically engineered to drive transparency, ignite fair competition, maximize operational efficiency, and pull in massive foreign investment.
Under this new mandate, Shema revealed that NPERA will aggressively regulate tariffs and commercial charges, enforce strict licensing and regulatory standards, monitor service quality, referee fair market competition, resolve commercial disputes, streamline trade facilitation, and shield port users from exploitation.
Former Katsina State Governor and current NPERA Governing Board Chairman, Ibrahim Shema, firmly clarified that the newly minted agency was not established to clash with existing maritime institutions, but to guarantee that every entity operates strictly within its designated statutory boundaries.
“This is not about creating competing authorities. It is about establishing a coherent system in which institutions work together, each within its statutory responsibilities, in the broader national interest,” he declared.
He added that NPERA’s operational blueprint will anchor heavily on transparency, fairness, predictability, efficiency, and accountability. The primary target of this regulatory approach is to drastically slash the high cost of doing business across all Nigerian ports.
Furthermore, Shema emphasized that this updated framework will provide rock-solid regulatory certainty for shipping lines, terminal operators, freight forwarders, importers, exporters, and international investors, while simultaneously refining commercial dispute resolution and shielding port users from exploitation.
In his remarks, Akutah hailed the birth of NPERA as a monumental leap forward in positioning Nigeria as a premier global maritime powerhouse and the dominant logistics hub for West and Central Africa.
He noted that the sweeping legislative update will institutionalize strict market fair play and absolute predictability across the maritime landscape, arming global investors with the ironclad confidence needed to commit heavy capital to the industry.
The port chief directly linked this regulatory overhaul to Nigeria’s broader, ambitious target of building a $1 trillion economy by 2030, emphasizing that the maritime sector must be aggressively re-engineered to unlock its full wealth-generating potential.
“This is one of the many factors that are contributing to making Nigeria a maritime nation,” Akutah stated. He pointed out that the pioneering creation of the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy, alongside Nigeria’s triumphant return to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Council, clearly underscores the Federal Government’s unyielding commitment to the sector.
However, he realistically acknowledged that bringing the law to life demands flawless, synchronized coordination among NPERA, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), and other vital regulatory bodies.
Akutah explained that certain legacy functions will seamlessly transfer to appropriate institutions under the new statutory design, requiring all sister agencies to align closely to map out and respect their newly delineated boundaries.
“The real work, the main work, is starting now. It’s not all about the law itself, but it’s about how we navigate the law in terms of our relationship with other critical stakeholders,” he stressed.
He firmly maintained that operational overlaps must never devolve into toxic institutional rivalries, reminding stakeholders that these diverse agencies were built to complement, not clash with, one another in defending Nigeria’s economic sovereignty.
Both leaders concluded with absolute confidence that the newly minted framework will permanently skyrocket port efficiency, pull in foreign direct investment, accelerate seamless trade facilitation, and exponentially increase the maritime sector’s contribution to Nigeria’s national gross domestic product (GDP).
