NPA spent 49% of its 2024 budget. Nine months later, it’s touting a “sweeping transformation.” KEHINDE ADEGOKE reports.
INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS
Nine months apart, the Nigerian Ports Authority made two disclosures to different audiences. Read together, they raise a question the agency still hasn’t answered.
In June 2025, NPA Managing Director Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho told the House of Representatives Committee on Ports and Harbours that the authority had spent just N417.86 billion of its N850.92 billion approved 2024 budget — less than half.
Dantsoho attributed the shortfall to a structural bind: a mandatory 50 percent deduction of NPA’s revenue at source by the federal government, combined with delayed remittances and what he called “restrictive procurement thresholds,” which together stall critical infrastructure projects before they can get off the ground.
In March 2026, presenting the NPA’s 2025 Operational Performance Report, Dantsoho described a very different picture: a maritime sector “undergoing a sweeping transformation,” anchored on “comprehensive modernisation of Nigeria’s port infrastructure” — quay wall reconstruction, channel deepening, upgraded cargo-handling equipment and expanded terminal capacity at Apapa, Tin Can Island, Port Harcourt, Warri and Calabar.
Both statements are on the public record, made nine months apart in two separate settings — one before the National Assembly, one at the release of an annual performance report. Read together rather than in isolation, they raise a question worth asking directly.
The question is simple: an agency that could execute only 49 per cent of its approved capital and operational budget in 2024 is, in the same period, describing infrastructure upgrades across five major ports as already underway or delivering results.
Both things can be true — modernisation can be real and partial at once — but without a project-by-project breakdown of where the N417.86 billion actually went, there is currently no public way to verify how much of the “sweeping transformation” language reflects completed work versus budgeted intent.
What NPA has disclosed, and what it hasn’t
NPA’s own account of the constraint is specific: revenue deducted at source, delayed remittances, procurement thresholds that slow project approval. What the agency has not disclosed, in any public filing or statement reviewed for this piece, is which capital line items were funded and which were deferred as a result.
The 2025 Operational Performance Report describes network-wide gains — cargo throughput up 24.8 per cent, container traffic up 25.7 percent, ship calls up nearly 12 per cent — but operational throughput figures measure trade volume moving through existing infrastructure, not the pace or completion of the infrastructure upgrades themselves.
A busier port and a modernised port are not automatically the same claim, and the report as reported does not appear to distinguish between the two.
Dantsoho has separately signalled that the same execution risk carries into the current cycle: more than 70 percent of NPA’s proposed N1.14 trillion 2025 budget — roughly N778.46 billion — was earmarked for capital projects, under the same revenue-deduction structure he says constrained 2024 spending. If the 50-percent-at-source deduction has continued unchanged, there is no public basis yet to assume 2025 execution looked meaningfully different from 2024’s 49 percent.
What would close the gap
A project-by-project capital expenditure breakdown for 2024 — showing what was budgeted, what was actually spent, and what was completed, delayed, or dropped at each of the five ports named in NPA’s own modernisation framing — would resolve this cleanly.
NPA has not published one. This piece is not in a position to assume what that breakdown would show; asserting either that the modernisation claims are hollow or that they are fully justified would go beyond what is currently on the public record in either direction.
NPA has not publicly done a specific breakdown, and no project-by-project figures have been published by the authority to date. Until such a breakdown is made available, the relationship between the 2024 underspend and the modernisation claims made in the 2025 Operational Performance Report remains an open question rather than a settled one.
