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By Steve Agbota
A report by the Sea Empowerment and Research Centre (SEREC) has revealed that Nigeria is losing about $10 billion annually to maritime exploitation, entrenched cartels, systematic inefficiencies and extraction of national wealth through poorly governed export systems and leakages.
SEREC said that other factors contributed to the loss are weak industrial linkages, trade distortions, policy inconsistencies, resources exploitation by external opportunism and internal complicity.
The newly released report titled: “Port of Plenty, Pipelines of Loss: A National Reawakening Call on Maritime-Enabled Resource Leakages,” and signed by the Head of Research, SEREC, Dr Eugene Nweke, said that Nigeria’s maritime sector designed as the engine room of trade and economic expansion, has increasingly become a critical channel for value erosion, while the ports have evolved into pipelines of economic loss.
However, the report, presented a critique of how the country’s maritime sector have evolved from engines of growth into conduits for untracked resource extraction and capital flight.
According to SEREC, despite Nigeria’s yearly cargo throughput exceeding 1.5 billion metric tonnes, including crude oil exports, non-oil exports still account for less than 10 per cent of total export earnings.
Central to the report is the issue of trade misinvoicing and under-valuation, with Nigeria estimated to be losing between $5 billion and $8 billion revenue yearly due to under-declaration, misclassification and poor documentation of exports, particularly in the solid minerals.
“Despite abundant deposits of iron ore, gypsum, other solid minerals and crude oil reserves, the country continues to import refined petroleum products and finished goods at high cost, while the steel industry struggles,” the report highlighted.
According to the report’s maritime perspective, this has created a cycle in which raw materials are exported at low value, while finished goods are imported at high cost, leading to an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion yearly opportunity losses due to lack of value addition.
SEREC said these practices also results in weaken foreign exchange inflows, distort national trade data and deprive government of critical revenue.
The report noted that the situation is exacerbated by weak institutional oversight in Nigeria’s engagements with foreign partners and extractive vulnerabilities, including industrial economies such as China.
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SEREC pointed to opaque resource-backed financing structures, weak monitoring of export volumes and valuation, domestic institutional fragility and limited enforcement of global best practices as critical vulnerabilities.
The report describes Nigeria’s ports as exit corridors for raw resource extraction and entry gateways for refined imports, a dual role that reinforces trade imbalances, industrial stagnation and rising cost of living.
“Frequent policy shifts and overlapping regulatory mandates have created systemic loopholes, encouraged rent-seeking behaviour and enabled insider exploitation. This environment of uncertainty has evolved into a tool for exploitation rather than governance,” the report stated.
SEREC further identified multiple institutional and structural failures, including fragmented digital systems across port, customs and shipping operations, absence of real-time cargo visibility and persistent reliance on manual processes.
The report also flagged weak indigenous maritime capacity, limited national shipping fleet, underdeveloped shipbuilding infrastructure, low retention of maritime economic value as well as regulatory weakness and capture, including selective enforcement, institutional vulnerabilities to vested interests and weak accountability frameworks.
The research centre underscored the overwhelming dependence on foreign shipping interests, which handle over 90 per cent of Nigeria’s seaborne cargo, resulting in yearly freight payments of between $7 billion and $9 billion, which are largely repatriated abroad.
The report highlighted the cumulative impact on the nation, which manifested in lost employment opportunities across industries, persistent infrastructure deficits and widening poverty and inequality.
To reverse the trend, SEREC called on the federal ministries, maritime regulatory agencies, port authorities and industry stakeholders to urgently initiate coordinated reforms that will restore transparency, accountability and value retention within Nigeria’s maritime domain.
The research centre warned that Nigeria’s ports will remain pipelines of national loss rather than platforms for national prosperity, calling for strategic alignment, institutional discipline and policy coherence to transform the maritime sector into a driver of industrialisation, employment generator and a pillar of economic sovereignty.
SEREC also recommended strategic reform, including the implementation of end-to-end traceability in integrated cargo tracking systems, enforcement of real-time export valuation and full digitisation and centralisation of trade documentation.
Other recommendations include integrating the maritime system by harmonising all port and trade-related digital platforms, establishing unified national maritime data architecture and eliminating duplication and opacity.
The research group also called for indigenous shipping development through cargo support framework enforcement, access to maritime financing expansion and strengthening national fleet capacity.
SEREC further proposed the restriction of unprocessed strategic minerals export, promotion of domestic value addition, aligning maritime policy with industrial development goals, enhancing regulatory independence, enforcing sanctions against economic sabotage and eliminating discretionary loopholes.
