Sailing Nigeria – Thoughts from recent journeys

By Tolu Ogunlesi …
I spent the first week of August travelling in the Niger delta, by road from Port Harcourt to Yenagoa to Warri to Benin. Somewhere in Bayelsa, just outside Yenagoa, I crossed the River Nun. I recalled it as the river the poet Gabriel Okara wrote about in one of his best-known poems, The Call of the River Nun, and felt a certain sense of literature-induced wistfulness.
And then two weeks later I was in Yola, in north-eastern Nigeria; the part of Nigeria known to most of the world as the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency. (Yola is the second most important city in that part of Nigeria, after Maiduguri. It is a serene place, surrounded by hills, and bathed by the seemingly placid Benue River).
Seeing the Benue made me curious about the fascinating water-connectedness of Nigeria’s disparate parts. I thought about the parts of the Niger and its tributaries which I had seen in the delta two weeks earlier, and then this Benue that flows into northern Nigeria from Cameroon, and then recalled that the Benue and Niger are linked.
You can therefore sail westward from Yola, to Makurdi, and then to Lokoja, where the Benue unites with the Niger, and the resulting body of water – the Lower Niger – flows southwards past Idah in Kogi State, Agenebode in Edo, Onitsha in Anambra State, and Aboh in Delta State, shortly after which it splits into the Nun and Forcados Rivers. (The Forcados river flows westwards into Delta State, while the Nun flows southwards, into Yenagoa, and from there to Akassa, both in Bayelsa state).

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The problem with trying to sail across Nigeria is that the waterways are typically obstructed by accumulated silt, and therefore need regular dredging to make them accessible. One resident of Lokoja recalls that in the 1960s and 1970s ships and barges regularly sailed from the creeks of the Niger Delta northwards to Lokoja.
Former President Umar Yar’Adua had ambitious plans to dredge the lower Niger, awarding a 35 billion naira contract in 2009. Last year it was reported that the dredging had been completed. And then last month it was reported that the contract for the dredging of the Lower Benue River had been awarded, for 26 billion naira, to be completed by 2017. Fingers crossed. When completed, it should be possible to sail, for fun and for business, from Yola, near the border with Cameroon, all the way to the oil-producing Niger Delta. I can’t wait for the day I’ll be able to make an attempt.

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