President Tinubu, Terminate the Dodgy £746 Million Ports Deal, Now

By Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili
One hundred and fifty-two days after President Bola Tinubu signed a £746 million ports financing deal with the United Kingdom at Windsor Castle, neither government has disclosed the terms of the agreement.
I initially held back from commenting, prioritising Nigeria’s spiralling insecurity. But the persistent silence surrounding this deal and the pattern of opaque governance it reflects make further waiting irresponsible.
Nigeria’s public debt has exploded from ₦87 trillion in May 2023 to over ₦152 trillion today. Debt service now gulps more than 60 percent of government revenues, leaving crumbs for health, education, and the security Nigerians are dying for lack of.
The administration’s annual borrowing rate has soared to nearly ₦50 trillion, that is, ten times that of its predecessors, fuelled by a $21.45 billion external borrowing plan approved without a single substantive public hearing by the complicit, supine and captive @nassnigeria.
Against this backdrop, the Tinubu government added a £746 million ports deal whose terms remain hidden. This is not a grant, nor aid. It is a sovereign debt obligation. It is a commercial loan arranged by Citibank London, guaranteed by UK Export Finance, and structured to benefit British exporters.
At least £236 million is contractually reserved for British suppliers. British Steel alone secured a £70 million contract it described as one of the largest in its history. Nigeria borrowed the money so that British companies will harvest the contracts, and Nigerians will repay the debt. Yet neither interest rates nor repayment timelines have been officially published.
Civil society organisations, including SEREC, BudgIT and opposition parties, have demanded disclosure. None has received a substantive response. The loan agreement remains unpublished by the Ministry of Finance, NPA, UKEF, or any other official body.
Three failures make this silence unacceptable.
First, currency risk: a sterling loan benchmarked to a floating dollar rate, repayable in a Naira that has lost over 70 percent of its value since 2023, with no disclosed hedging framework.
Second, procurement failure, which is most vexing for me as one who led the public procurement reforms of this country: credible reporting identifies ITB Nigeria, a company owned by Gilbert Chagoury, who is publicly identified as a bosom friend of President Tinubu, as the primary contractor without the due process of competitive tender, without publicly available evidence of the involvement of the Bureau for Public Procurement, and without any published evaluation criteria.
Third, policy failure: the government ignored the proven alternative of private capital. The Lekki Deep Sea Port was built for $1.5 billion under a private BOT concession with zero sovereign debt and now handles 1.2 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs). In simple language, the Lekki Port, for which Nigeria did not take on any loans, attracted private financing and is today successfully handling 1.2 million single 20-foot shipping containers annually.
No analysis whatsoever has been offered by the Tinubu administration to justify why, then, Apapa and Tin Can, two of West Africa’s most commercially productive ports, could not follow the same model of private capital. These two ports do not need sovereign debt to be rehabilitated. What they need is a governance framework that attracts private capital on Nigeria’s terms.
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