President Bola Tinubu performed the groundbreaking for the Bakassi Deep Seaport in Cross River State on Friday, represented at the ceremony by Vice-President Kashim Shettima. Tinubu described the project as a fiscal game-changer and said Nigeria could no longer concentrate the bulk of its maritime trade in Lagos. The project was first advanced in 2014, with an environmental and social impact assessment completed in March 2015, and then stalled for a decade on political, administrative, legal and environmental obstacles before Governor Bassey Otu revived it.
The financing structure is the story. The Cross River State government formalised a public-private partnership for the port in February 2025, backed by a $3.5 billion facility from the African Export-Import Bank. That makes Afreximbank, a multilateral trade bank, the anchor financier of a state-sponsored port, rather than the federal government or a global terminal operator. One account of the ceremony reported Governor Otu referring to an initial funding approval of $2.27 billion; the $3.5 billion figure is the project’s stated total value, and the two numbers describe different things, a total cost against a first approved tranche.
The port is designed with a 20 metre draft, deep enough for ultra-large container vessels that currently bypass Nigerian waters, according to Nigerian Ports Authority managing director Abubakar Dantsoho. Dantsoho said the facility is intended to serve as a maritime hub for Nigeria, the Gulf of Guinea and the landlocked Sahel countries. A dedicated superhighway, reported at 260 kilometres by BusinessDay and 275 kilometres in the NPA’s account, is planned as the evacuation corridor linking the port to the north-central and north-eastern regions.
Tinubu put the wider prize at an estimated $44 billion a year if Nigeria captured maritime cargo now diverted to neighbouring countries, a presidential estimate rather than a project forecast. No operational opening date was given at the ceremony. The next tests are construction mobilisation under the PPP and whether the Afreximbank facility disburses on the schedule the state has promised.