By: Sopriala Membere, Columnist, Scholar and Member, CRA Advocacy Network
It was on Wednesday, August 26th, 2026, before a delegation of political support groups who had travelled from Northern Nigeria to pledge their loyalty, that former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, now the presidential standard-bearer of the African Democratic Congress, uttered a sentence that may yet prove to be one of the most consequential policy declarations of the 2027 election cycle.
Among his commitments was a pledge to develop the country’s other existing southern ports, and in elaborating on how long this had preoccupied him, he recalled travelling to Europe during an earlier campaign to discuss with shippers and ship-development companies how those ports might be built up to create, as he put it, “balance as far as importation is concerned” between the south-south and south-east and the rest of the country.
It is worth pausing to consider what was happening in that room. A northern politician, standing before a largely northern audience in the federal capital, was not promising roads or boreholes or the usual transactional favours that define Nigerian electoral patronage directed at the north. He was talking about Calabar, about Uyo, about Port Harcourt, about Onne ports that have languished in the shadows of Lagos for so long that an entire generation of Nigerian traders has grown up believing that importation is synonymous with Apapa and Tin Can Island. He was talking about maritime equity, about the radical proposition that a federation should not have one throat through which all its commerce must pass. And he was doing so not as a rhetorical flourish but as a man who had already done the homework, who had sat across tables in European shipping offices and argued the case for Nigeria’s forgotten harbours.
The immediate context was personal and visceral. Atiku spoke of his own factory in Adamawa, of the absurdity of watching containers sit in a congested Lagos port traffic for up to two months before reaching Yola, of young entrepreneurs driven into bankruptcy not by market forces but by the structural insanity of a port system that treats the rest of the country as a hinterland of Lagos.
“How can there be security?” he asked, and the question hung in the air with the weight of someone who understands that economic desperation is the mother of insecurity.
But to read Atiku’s August 26th declaration merely as a campaign promise is to miss its deeper resonance. It belongs to a longer conversation about what Nigeria has done to itself through decades of infrastructural monoculture, about how a nation with 853 kilometres of Atlantic coastline and natural harbours that once served as the gateways of West African trade came to depend on a single overburdened port artery in Lagos, while the Eastern Ports—Calabar, Port Harcourt, Onne, Warri- decayed in various stages of elegant neglect. The Nigerian Ports Authority has lately been scrambling to reverse this, securing a $1.1 billion rehabilitation facility and overseeing a $2.9 billion expansion at Onne.
Yet these are bureaucratic interventions, palliatives administered by an agency that knows the patient is haemorrhaging but lacks the political authority to perform the needed surgery that addresses the root cause of the hemorrhage. What the Eastern Ports require is not incremental rehabilitation but a presidential-level commitment backed by a vice president who understands, from lived administrative experience, precisely how the arteries of Nigerian maritime commerce function.
This is where the ADC’s selection of Rotimi Amaechi as Atiku’s running mate transforms the August 26 pledge from aspiration into an executable policy.
Nigerian political culture has grown accustomed to treating the vice presidency as a decorative office, a geographical placeholder whose occupant is expected to be seen at funerals and commissioning ceremonies but rarely heard on policy. The Atiku-Amaechi pairing proposes something radically different: a ticket in which the vice president brings not merely the votes and resources of the South but the bureaucratic memory of having run Nigeria’s transportation and maritime architecture for nearly 8 years.
Amaechi was not a passenger in the Ministry of Transportation; he was, by any objective reckoning, the most consequential minister to hold that portfolio since the return to democratic rule in 1999.
Amaechi understood that ports do not function in isolation; they are nodes in an intermodal network. He linked the Lagos ports to the standard gauge rail, introduced the E-Call Up system that temporarily ended the Apapa gridlock, and launched the Deep Blue Project that reduced piracy in Nigerian waters by85% within five months of deployment, according to the International Maritime Bureau. He repossessed the Calabar port harbour village after years of litigation, initiated and got approval for the Warri and Bonny Deep Seaport Projects, and crucially for the argument at hand, granted incentives on harbour dues for vessels using the Eastern Ports.
Under his watch as Transportation Minister, the largest container vessel ever to berth at a Nigerian port arrived at Onne port in Rivers State.
These were not accidental achievements; they reflected a minister who understood that a nation’s maritime policy is inseparable from its ports; that a port policy is what informs the seriousness of a nation’s trade policy; that trade policy is, in the end, an industrial policy; and that industrial policy is the architecture of national survival.
The critics will point to the failures: the non-disbursement of the Cabotage Vessels Financing Fund, the absence of a National Single Window, Nigeria’s repeated failure to secure a seat on the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Category C Council. These are legitimate marks against his tenure, but they are also instructive. They reveal not incompetence but the structural constraints of serving as a minister in a government where cross-ministerial coordination is often hostage to bureaucratic silos and political interference. The CVFF required the concurrence of the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank; the Single Window demanded harmonisation across customs, immigration, port health, and multiple security agencies.
Amaechi as vice president and head of the national economic council, operating within an Atiku administration that has made economic revival and port development a central pillar of its agenda, would not face the same institutional loneliness. He would be positioned to do what he could not do as a minister: orchestrate the whole-of-government response that port revival demands.
And what exactly does revival entail? It is not enough to dredge channels and install fenders, necessary as these are. The Eastern Ports require rail connectivity to the industrial clusters of Aba, Nnewi, and Onitsha in the South-East, and to the agricultural and mineral belts of the North-Central and North-East. They require the completion of the East-West Road, which has become a metaphor for governmental paralysis. They require the completion of the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri rail line, which has been stalled since Amaechi left office as Minister of Transportation. They require the sustaining of the security architecture set up by Amaechi that makes the Gulf of Guinea safe for commercial shipping without militarising the Niger Delta. They require a customs regime that does not treat cargo destined for Onne or Calabar as an afterthought to be delayed and surcharged.
They require, in short, a vice president who can walk into a Federal Executive Council meeting and speak with the authority of someone who has already built a seaport from start to finish and stared down maritime security challenges, with an almost total elimination.
Amaechi is that rare politician who combines executive experience as a two-term governor of one of Nigeria’s most complex states with the bureaucratic and technical depth in the very sector that the Eastern Ports revival depends upon.
The political geography of the 2027 election makes this combination even more consequential. The South-South and South-East have, in different ways, experienced the bruising alienation of being treated as resource colonies rather than as zones of productive enterprise.
The South-East, in particular, has been locked in a paralysing conversation about political marginalisation that often obscures the more immediate economic marginalisation: the fact that its manufacturers must route their imports through Lagos, incurring haulage costs that erode competitiveness, while their exports struggle to find efficient outbound corridors.
The South-South, for all its oil wealth, has watched its port cities atrophy as employment and investment gravitated toward Lagos. Atiku’s pledge on that August afternoon, backed by Amaechi’s proven capacity to deliver maritime infrastructure and reforms, offers these geopolitical zones something more valuable than ethnic representation: it offers them functional integration into the national economy on terms that respect their geography.
There is, moreover, a continental dimension that the ADC ticket is uniquely positioned to exploit. The African Continental Free Trade Area is not a theoretical construct; it is a freight reality that will favour nations with efficient, multi-nodal port systems. Nigeria cannot compete for West African transshipment traffic with a single overburdened gateway in Lagos. The Eastern Ports, properly developed, could become the maritime hinge between the AfCFTA’s western and central African corridors.
Onne, with its deep-water potential and oil and gas logistics ecosystem, could evolve into a regional hub. Calabar, with its proximity to Cameroon and the Central African Republic, could reclaim its historical role as a gateway to the interior. But this requires more than NPA rehabilitation projects; it requires a presidency that sees port policy as foreign policy, and a vice presidency that can translate vision into concrete reality.
The ADC’s national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, captured something essential when he described the Atiku-Amaechi ticket as one that “bridges regions, generations, and political traditions,” arguing that their combined experience offers Nigerians “a credible and compelling alternative capable of restoring confidence in government and accelerating national development.”
This is not mere campaign rhetoric. It is an acknowledgment that Nigerian politics has suffered from a dangerous divorce between political ambition and administrative competence, between the poetry of campaigns and the prose of governance. Atiku brings to the ticket a depth of economic policy thinking honed over three decades of public and private sector leadership, a familiarity with the architecture of federal finance, and a network of relationships across Nigeria’s political economy that remains unmatched by any of his contemporaries.
Amaechi brings the hard-won knowledge of how to move projects from memoranda to commissioning, how to navigate the labyrinth of project financing, and how to stare down the entrenched interests that have historically profited from the dysfunction of Nigerian ports.
The sceptics will ask whether this is not merely another opposition alliance of convenience, given the well-documented friction between the two men after the ADC primaries.
But political maturity is measured precisely by the capacity to subordinate personal grievance to national purpose. Amaechi’s acceptance of the vice-presidential slot, after contesting the primary with evident vigour, signals a recognition that the challenges facing Nigeria in 2027 are too severe for the luxury of personal pique. It also signals, more importantly, that the ADC is assembling a government-in-waiting rather than merely a candidacy for electoral contestation.
In a political culture where running mates are so often chosen for their docility, the selection of a figure as formidable and independently accomplished as Amaechi suggests an Atiku presidency prepared to govern through competence rather than cronyism.
For the South-South, this ticket represents the possibility of redemption. Amaechi is not a stranger to the region’s aspirations; he is a son of the Niger Delta who, as governor, built the infrastructure that transformed Rivers State’s urban landscape and, as minister, laid the rail and maritime foundations that the current Tinubu regime has been more than happy to run propaganda on and inherit without significantly advancing.
For the South-East, the promise of Eastern Ports revival is a practical pathway to reducing the cost of doing business, to reconnecting the very industrious Aligbo manufacturers to global supply chains through proximate and efficient gateways, and to ending the absurdity of Onitsha-bound containers sitting for weeks in Lagos traffic.
There is, of course, the matter of the zoning argument, the persistent claim that the South should be allowed to complete a second term before power returns to the North. It is an argument rooted in a certain logic of fairness, but fairness in politics cannot be reduced to rotational arithmetic when the survival of the republic is at stake. The question before Nigerians in 2027 is not merely who occupies Aso Rock but whether the occupant possesses the capacity to halt the country’s slide into economic desolation and socio-cultural collapse. Atiku’s northern base, which he has correctly identified as the decisive electoral battleground, combined with Amaechi’s southern credibility, creates a demographic coalition that can actually win—and more importantly, a governing partnership that can actually deliver on promises based on antecedence. Zoning, in the end, is a means to an end, not an end in itself; and if the end is a Nigeria where no region is structurally disadvantaged, then a ticket that promises to revive the Eastern Ports is doing more for southern interests than any rigid adherence to rotational formulas ever had, especially one that gave Nigeria the Tinubu–Shettima regime, incompetent and reputationally damaged in equal measure.
As the 2027 election draws closer, Nigerians will be bombarded with promises, each more extravagant than the last. But there is a difference between promises that emerge from focus-group testing and those that emerge from the intersection of personal conviction and proven capacity. Atiku’s pledge on that Wednesday afternoon in Abuja, before men and women who had come to offer their support, was not a poll-driven afterthought; it was consistent with his long-articulated vision of a decentralised, inclusive market-driven Nigerian economy, that cares for vulnerable Nigerians.
Amaechi’s presence on the ticket transforms that vision from aspiration to executable policy.
Together, they offer the South-South and South-East not the politics of grievance but the politics of reconstruction—not ethnic patronage but economic empowerment through infrastructure.
The Eastern Ports have waited too long for a government that sees them not as relics of a colonial contraption but as assets of a future prosperous Nigeria. The waters of Calabar, Onne, Port Harcourt, and Warri have remained unquiet, restless with the memory of what they once were and the promise of what they could become. It is time to let them earn their keep again.
Since Amaechi departed from government, plans for the Bonny, Warri, and Ibom deep seaports have ground to a halt. The Atiku-Amaechi ticket may yet prove to be the catalyst to revive these vital projects, advancing the maritime economy across the South-South and South-East.