Economy

Top Facts about Nigeria’s $1.5bn Lekki Deep Sea Port in Lagos

Published

1 year ago

2023/01/24

On the 23rd of January 2023, President Muhammadu Buhari presided over the historic opening of the Lekki Deep Sea Port at Itoke Village, Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, while the CMA CGM Mozart was being unloaded at the quay.

The project is an investment of over $1.5 billion and a Joint Venture between the Federal Government of Nigeria through the Nigerian Ports Authority, the Lagos State Government, the Tolarams Group (the owner of the Lagos Free Zone), and China Harbour Engineering Company.

Here are some major facts about the Lekki Port

1. The Lekki Deep Sea Port is a multi-purpose deep sea port in the Lagos Free Zone.

2. The port will create 169,972 jobs.

3. The port has ships that can carry more than 14,500 cargo.

4. The seaport sits on a landmass of about 90 hectares.

5. It is one of the biggest seaports in West Africa and the biggest in Nigeria. Around 6 million TEUs of containers plus a sizable amount of liquid and dry bulk uncontainerized goods will be handled by the Lekki port.

6. The container terminal, the liquid terminal, and the dry bulk terminal are the three terminals at the port.

7. The port is sponsored by private investors and a group of banks that contributed $1.5 billion to the project.

8. The automated port system will enable container identification and clearance from the office, requiring little to no interaction with people during actual operations.

9. Initial dredging might raise the draft of the port’s container terminal to 16.5 meters from the current 14 meters. The terminal has a yearly capacity of 2.5 million twenty-foot standard containers.

10. The first port in Nigeria to have ship-to-shore cranes is the deep-water port of Lekki. It contains three “Super-post-Panamax” container gantry cranes, which can access and unload the last row of containers even if the container ship is wider than the Panama Canal (49 m or 160 ft maximum boat beam).

11. Estimates place the additional state revenue for Nigeria at $201 billion through taxes, levies, and royalties.

12. The deep-sea port will be connected to the Nigerian rail network.