Some ideas arrive by way of a report, a policy document or a conference presentation. The more unsettling ones come from looking again at something that has always been there.
One such idea came to me recently in Akwa Ibom, where I had travelled with the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association’s Section on Business Law for a roundtable on unlocking investment in Nigeria’s tourism and hospitality industry.
Kemi Afesojaiye and her team convened a discussion of unusual quality. I owe a further debt to the “11pm crew”, led by the learned silk Chief Emeka Ozoani and by Chineye Oragwu, who proved on the Friday night that the hospitality we had spent the day analysing is something Nigerians already practise rather well. I also came away with a new friend, Yomi, whose company I suspect I shall enjoy, though that is a digression this column cannot afford.
The room brought together people who understood the economics of tourism, the demands of hospitality and, above all, the difficulty of converting Nigeria’s considerable potential into propositions an investor can actually finance. Somewhere between the conversations about hotels, destinations, infrastructure and investment, I found myself returning to a question that has troubled me for some time:
Why have we been so slow to see tourism as a maritime opportunity?
Nigeria is a coastal country. It has a coastline of about 853 kilometres and, behind it, an extensive network of rivers, lagoons, creeks and wetlands. Its commercial capital takes its very name from the Portuguese word for lakes. The federal government has increasingly recognised marine tourism as part of the country’s blue-economy opportunity: the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has described marine tourism as a potentially significant contributor to economic development, and the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy has expressly identified tourism as one of the sectors within the national blue-economy agenda. For all this maritime vocabulary, Nigeria has no maritime tourism economy to speak of.
We are a maritime nation in the language of trade and a landlocked one in the imagination of leisure.
We have treated the water as a corridor, not a destination
For decades, the Nigerian maritime conversation has been dominated by cargo, ports, shipping, oil and gas, offshore operations, fisheries, security and logistics. These industries remain indispensable to the Nigerian economy. They also share an assumption: that the value of water lies in what moves across it or comes out of it. That assumption captures only part of what an ocean economy can be.
The global figures show just how narrow such a conception is. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that international trade in ocean-related goods and services reached approximately $2.5 trillion in 2025, with services accounting for the larger share. Marine and coastal tourism alone generated approximately $725 billion in international services trade, making it the largest ocean-related service export.
The OECD similarly identifies marine and coastal tourism as the largest source of employment within the ocean economy, accounting on average for around 60 percent of ocean-economy full-time-equivalent jobs between 1995 and 2020. These numbers ought to rearrange Nigeria’s priorities. An ocean economy has three sources of value: what can be extracted from the water, what can be transported across it, and what people will pay to experience because of it. Nigeria has built institutions around the first two and left the third, the largest employer of the three, almost entirely to chance.
The cities that understand the value of water
Consider some of the world’s most recognisable destinations. London has built an entire urban experience around the Thames, a river that was for much of its history a working port and an open sewer. The Bosphorus remains one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and is, at the same time, central to Istanbul’s identity and tourism proposition. Singapore has turned its relationship with the sea, waterfront and maritime infrastructure into an element of the city’s commercial and leisure identity. The Maldives has converted its marine geography into a globally recognised tourism product, and Bali has done something similar with its coastline, culture and marine environment.
None of these places offers Nigeria a template to copy. What they offer is proof that the same body of water can be infrastructure, transport, landscape, culture and tourism simultaneously, and that the working harbour and the pleasure boat are complements rather than rivals. Nigeria has tended to see only the first two.
Picture Lagos on those terms. A visitor arrives to find a connected public and commercial ecosystem where today there is a scatter of jetties, drainage channels, industrial facilities and private developments. Carefully designed waterfront districts are linked by safe passenger ferries. Along them sit restaurants and floating cafés, small performance venues, maritime museums and galleries, waterfront markets and children’s educational marine parks. There are sunset and night-time cruises, fishing and culinary excursions, kayaking in controlled waters, marine festivals, floating venues for conferences and weddings and, where environmentally and technically appropriate, boutique accommodation and carefully regulated floating commercial structures.
None of these ideas is exotic. The extraordinary thing is how ordinary they have become elsewhere. Nigerians plainly have an appetite for leisure, so demand is hardly the constraint. The puzzle lies on the supply side: why does so much of Nigerian leisure infrastructure remain overwhelmingly land-based when some of our most valuable natural assets are aquatic?
What if the Third Mainland Bridge became part of a waterfront economy?
Take Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge. Nobody sensible would propose turning a major piece of transport infrastructure into a shopping mall or compromising its engineering function. The more interesting question is whether the enormous urban ecosystem around the bridge and Lagos’s waterways could be deliberately planned as a waterfront destination.
Why should a bridge merely move people from one side of the city to another? Why should the areas around major water transport corridors not become gateways into a network of restaurants, event spaces, cafés, cultural attractions, marinas and recreational destinations?
A ferry terminal can be a destination in its own right, as the great railway stations of the nineteenth century became. A jetty can be the front door of a commercial district. A waterfront does not have to mean reclaiming land and constructing another tower; sometimes the most valuable infrastructure is the kind that allows people to experience what already exists.
At this point the blue economy becomes a question of urban planning. The OECD has increasingly emphasised the role of cities and regions in unlocking the blue economy, noting that water-related tourism and passenger transport are among the most prevalent blue-economy activities at the subnational level. For Lagos, a city whose growth has largely turned its back on the lagoon, this should be a serious planning conversation.
Why Nigerians are cautious about the water
The argument has another side, and it cannot be romanticised away. Nigeria has a safety problem on its waterways. The public perception of water transport has been shaped by boat mishaps, overloaded vessels, inadequate safety practices, night operations and, at times, weak enforcement. The federal government established a special committee in 2025 specifically to address recurring boat mishaps, and the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) has acknowledged concerns around unregistered vessels, overloading, night sailing and non-compliance with life-saving requirements.
For tourism, this is decisive. Leisure economies are not built around places people believe to be unsafe. A Nigerian may happily spend an evening at a restaurant overlooking the water and still hesitate when asked to board a boat to reach it. That hesitation is an economic fact with a price attached: it shrinks the market before a single vessel is launched. Trust of this kind cannot be bought with advertising. It has to be designed into the product. Every serious maritime tourism proposition would therefore need to begin with a safety architecture: certified vessels, trained operators, passenger manifests, compulsory life-saving equipment, weather and navigation protocols, emergency response systems, regulated jetties, insurance, visible enforcement and clear standards for commercial and recreational operators.
NIWA’s recent initiatives are instructive. The Authority has expanded water-marshal deployment, introduced safety measures and distributed life jackets, while the Inland Waterways Transportation Regulations provide formal requirements concerning life-saving appliances and the authorisation of public events that may affect safe navigation.
Keeping Nigerians away from the water is no answer to the safety problem. The answer is to make the water demonstrably safe enough that people want to return to it, and to treat safety as part of the tourism product itself, much as airlines sell reliability as well as seats.
The problem investors understand immediately: uncertainty
Capital does not fear regulation. It fears uncertainty, and the distinction is the one the economist Frank Knight drew a century ago between risk, which can be priced, and uncertainty, which cannot. An investor can price a licence, a tax, a concession fee, an environmental requirement or a safety standard. What defeats the spreadsheet is doubt over who has jurisdiction, which agency must approve a project, whether the regulatory position will change halfway through development, or whether a waterfront investment made with one government will survive the next. Nigeria’s waterways already illustrate the difficulty.
The Supreme Court has affirmed the federal government’s exclusive control over activities on the nation’s inland waterways, including licensing and related regulatory functions, while state governments retain important responsibilities in areas such as urban planning, tourism, waterfront development and local infrastructure. See National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) & Ors v. Lagos State Waterways Authority (LASWA) & Ors, SC/CV/17/2018, where the Supreme Court considered the respective constitutional and statutory spheres of authority over Nigeria’s inland waterways.
That legal and institutional structure need not prevent investment, provided the two tiers of government present the investor with a single door. What Nigeria needs is a coherent waterfront investment framework.
An investor contemplating a marina, floating restaurant, waterfront resort, passenger terminal or recreational facility should not have to navigate an institutional maze merely to discover who can grant the relevant approvals. That investor should know at the outset who grants the concession and who collects the fees; who regulates the vessel, the waterfront structure and the passenger operation; who approves the environmental impact, controls navigation and provides security; how long approvals last; and what happens when federal and state interests intersect or the administration changes.
These read like questions of bureaucratic housekeeping. In practice, every one left unanswered is added to the cost of capital.
The real opportunity may be smaller than we think
A further misconception deserves challenge: that maritime tourism means building another massive resort. The blue economy is usually discussed in language that suggests billion-dollar infrastructure: deep-sea ports, offshore energy, shipyards, massive terminals and industrial projects. Tourism works differently. A thousand small businesses can create a more resilient tourism economy than one monumental development, because their risks are spread and their owners are local.
The visible layer is a licensed fleet of small passenger boats, a network of waterfront restaurants and food markets, marine tour and cruise operators, heritage tours, cultural centres, fishing excursions, kayaking, diving, marine photography and floating event spaces. Behind it sits a second layer that is easy to overlook: local boat-building and boat maintenance, marine insurance, navigation technology, safety equipment, training schools and the hospitality trade that gathers around every jetty. Taken together, these businesses are the ecosystem itself, and it would be a mistake to regard any of them as peripheral.
NIMASA has itself argued that marine tourism does not necessarily require enormous capital expenditure and that small and medium-sized enterprises can capture significant employment and economic value within the sector. Here maritime tourism meets the broader philosophy of the blue economy, whose objective is to build an economic ecosystem around the sustainable use of the ocean, a more demanding ambition than simply monetising it.
Akwa Ibom poses the more interesting question
My visit to Akwa Ibom reinforced the point. The conversation there went well beyond tourism as sightseeing, to investment, hospitality, infrastructure, connectivity and the conditions necessary for private capital to participate. That is the correct conversation. Tourism becomes economically meaningful when we stop asking only, “What attractions do we have?” and begin asking, “What investable experiences can we build around what we have?”
Akwa Ibom’s coastal geography, beaches, waterways, hospitality assets and growing connectivity provide precisely the kind of environment in which this question deserves serious attention. The State has itself identified tourism development and private-sector investment as part of its economic strategy, while improved air connectivity supplies another piece of the tourism infrastructure puzzle. The opportunity, however, is a national one. From Lagos to Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and other coastal states, Nigeria possesses a geography that could support multiple forms of maritime tourism. The mistake would be to think of these places merely as locations with beaches. A beach is an asset; a destination is an economic system, and the distance between the two is covered by transport, safety, regulation and finance.
Nigeria needs to learn to sell the experience of the water
A deeper cultural issue lies beneath all this. For much of our modern economic history, the Nigerian relationship with the water has been utilitarian. The water carries cargo, oil, fishermen and commuters. It is dredged, secured and regulated. It is seldom enjoyed.
The rest of the world has discovered that the water can also carry experiences. Tourism is, in the end, the commercialisation of experience, and few experiences are more universal than being beside, on or surrounded by water. The maritime-tourism opportunity therefore extends well beyond beaches and resorts, to the entire interface between people, water, culture, hospitality, transport, food, entertainment, heritage and nature.
For the same reason, environmental protection is one of the economic foundations of maritime tourism, and to treat it as an obstacle is to misread the balance sheet. The attraction disappears if the water becomes polluted, the coastline erodes, mangroves are destroyed or marine biodiversity collapses. Sustainability, in this industry, is asset preservation: the ecosystem is the capital stock, and tourism lives off its yield. UNCTAD’s work on the ocean economy makes precisely this connection: healthy marine ecosystems underpin the long-term value of ocean-based economic activities, including tourism.
The blue economy needs a blue imagination
Nigeria now has a Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy. The language of the blue economy has entered national policy, marine tourism has been expressly recognised as an opportunity, and the institutional conversation has begun. The next step is harder. We need to move from blue-economy rhetoric to blue-economy products.
That means identifying specific waterfront investment zones, creating predictable concession frameworks, resolving regulatory interfaces, developing safety standards, building modern passenger infrastructure, opening selected waterways to properly regulated leisure activities, protecting sensitive ecosystems and giving private investors sufficient tenure and regulatory certainty to commit capital.
Most importantly, it requires the government to think like a destination developer rather than merely a regulator. Tourism is an industry of complements: nobody builds the restaurant until the ferry runs, and nobody runs the ferry until there is somewhere to go. Only the government can break that deadlock, which is why a general invitation to “invest in tourism” achieves so little.
The government should be able to point to a particular stretch of waterfront and say: here is the site, here are the rules and the concession period, here are the environmental framework, the navigation regime and the safety standard, here is the infrastructure and here is the approval process. Now build. That is how investment becomes possible.
The irony is that Nigeria may not need to discover a new natural resource in order to diversify its economy. It already has one, and has simply been looking at it from the wrong direction.
For generations, we have looked at the water and seen a route to somewhere else. Perhaps the next phase of Nigeria’s blue economy should begin when we learn to see the water itself as somewhere worth going.
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