Inside Hadiza Bala-Usman’s 15-Point Policy Suggestion for Tariff Regulation, Port Modernisation
‘Nifemi Coker
The Special Adviser on Policy Coordination to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and former Managing Director, Nigerian Ports Authority, Hadiza Bala-Usman, has outline five policy suggestions to regulate port tariff and 10 policy suggestions on modernising Nigeria’s port for global competitiveness.
The stateswoman made the submissions in her keynote address at the 2026 MARAN Annual Maritime Lecture organised by the Maritime Reporters Association of Nigeria (MARAN) which held in Lagos, with the theme “Port Modernisation, Charges and the Competitiveness Question”.
According to her policy suggestion, tariff regulations should rest on five pillars of predictability, transparency, performance, benchmarking and Dialogue.
Predictability implies that businesses should know when, why and how tariffs may change. Periodic reviews based on published principles, she said, are preferable to decades of frozen rates followed by disruptive increases.
Transparency, she says, ensures that the methodology and evidence behind major tariff adjustments should be public and understandable.
Her third submission—performance— implies that high tariffs correspond to measurable service improvements.
“Investment must produce performance and performance must justify cost. You cannot keep paying for services that are not efficient and do not have what it takes to compete within the West African coast,” she said
In her fourth policy suggestion on tariff regulation, she said local tariffs should be benchmarked against existing tariffs in the region.
“Nigeria must compare its tariffs with competing African gateways, which are within the African coast, but the totality of African gateways. Nigeria needs to do that benchmarking.
Also, “Dialogue among government agencies, shipping lines, cargo owners and other stakeholders. We need constructive engagement that protects legitimate interests and improves the totality of our economic governance,” she said.
In the same vein, she stated that the 10 immediate priorities of the federal government for port modernisation include;
- first: to complete the modernization of the ports program and efficiency with transparent timelines and procurement integrity with public milestones for performance and capacity, productivity and reliability.
- Second: tie every major investment to targets for vessel cargo, turnaround time, equipment productivity and total logistics, whereby there is clarity of the value of the investment. There needs to be a direct connectivity between an investment and what it does to improve the operational efficiency in the sector.
- Third: maintain a predictable tariff regime, as I mentioned, based on published methodology that considers inflation, operating and infrastructure costs, international benchmark and trade competitiveness.
- Fourth: accelerate the implementation of the National Single Window and redesign cargo clearance around one digital data trail for the Nigerian agency intervention and risk-based inspection.
- Fifth: integrate the port community system with the wider trade architecture so that actors exchange information before and users do not repeatedly submit the same data.
- Sixth: remove duplicated or obsolete regulatory interventions and assign every necessary intervention to clearly accountable institution. We need to review the duplication where agencies of government are doing similar things and keep asking for the same data and asking for a tariff.
- Seventh: match reference and equipment with stronger rail road, verge and inland connection to ensure there is connectivity with the hinterland.
- Eighth: set transparent and measurable concession obligations for investment, service, equipment availability, productivity and performance, and compare again by regular performance review.
- Ninth: deliberately attract commercially viable regional and transit cargo by developing efficient trade corridor beyond the port and national borders.
- The tenth: publish annual benchmark of cost, speed, reliability, connectivity, standardization and customer experience.
According to her, the discourse is beyond any single authority.
“This debate is larger than any single authority, ministry, terminal operator, customs service or shipping company. It concerns the totality of Nigeria’s economy. Lower logistics cost, strengthening manufacturing and exports, it increases foreign exchange earnings, revenue, investment and employment, and helps Nigeria capture a larger share of African trade, and that is the prize we’re looking to get,” she said.
By engaging these policy suggestions, she explained that Nigerian ports can deliver the lowest practicable total cost of trade with high reliability, transparency and predictability.
“The measure of a modern Nigerian port is what its investment do for Nigeria, how quickly goods move, how competitive our trade business is, how confidently investors commit capital, and how much the country exports and how efficiently Nigerian enterprises compete globally,” she said.
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