Nigeria is a minefield of paradoxes. It is a country of promise that sits in the pits of the misery index. It is drenched in sunshine, yet the books written about it – Stephen Ellis’s This Present Darkness among them – dwell on the absence of light. No paradox challenges the imagination quite like that of the people who live in what one chronicler called a swamp full of dollars, yet endure life without electric light.
Meanwhile, the gas flares of the oil industry around them burn so brightly they are visible from space, and the operators of those flares live in enclaves where the power supply never fails.
The numbers make the paradox brutal. Bayelsa, the state where Nigerian oil was first struck at Oloibiri, recorded a multidimensional poverty rate of 89% in the 2022 National Bureau of Statistics survey – the second worst in the entire federation, against a national average of 63%.
Across the wider region, the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta estimates that the national grid has never reached some 12 million residents of coastal communities. The people of the Niger Delta are potentially rich but are extremely poor.
Ken Saro-Wiwa saw the heart of this irony three decades ago. Under a proper system, he told an interviewer in 1993, Nigerians would discover there was “not so much oil money around anyway”. It was hearsay then; it is close to commonplace now, 30 years after his execution and a year after the state that hanged him finally pardoned him and named him a national hero.
The real wealth of the Delta was never only beneath the swamp. It is the swamp itself, the coast and the sea beyond it.
Governors of the swamp states – Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Edo and Delta, known as the BRACED states – sought to steward change when they asked me to lead a group of private-sector champions, academics and policymakers from the six states to produce a development roadmap for the region. The result was a summit at Tinapa in Calabar in 2009.
Natural provisions
The summit group provided strategic planning away from oil. It recommended a BRACED Commission to coordinate the economic growth strategies of the six states, built on the competitive advantage of ocean-facing cities: the blue economy, aquatic agriculture value chains, tourism and marine-based, cabotage-supported aggregation of manufactured goods from value chains derived from factor endowments across borders on the West African coastline.
Such aggregation would open access to global markets in competitive volumes. There is also the opportunity of servicing Gulf of Guinea shipping lanes in addition to production along the hydrocarbons value chain.
But politics got in the way of execution – just as politics once made Nigeria abandon the natural ports of the Niger Delta in favour of Lagos. The city grew on the back of port activity supporting the oil industry, overtaking Ibadan in the 1980s as the largest city in West Africa. The lesson cuts both ways: ports build cities, and the Delta’s natural entrepôts, like Forçados, are still waiting.
What the Delta suffers is not mysterious; it is the textbook resource curse. Oil rents make a country’s other tradable sectors uncompetitive, expose the treasury to violent price swings and, because governments living on rents need not tax their citizens, corrode the accountability that taxation forces.
As Paul Collier put it in The Bottom Billion: “The heart of the resource curse is that resource rents make democracy malfunction.” Oil money flowed through Abuja and the state capitals; fishing, farming and the ports withered.
The BRACED roadmap was, in essence, an attempt to engineer an exit from this trap – which is precisely why politics smothered it. The rents have their defenders.
Self-entrapment
Collier’s later research pointed to the way out. In 2017, I invited him to Lagos to lecture on the competitive edge of ocean-facing cities. The then governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, was so taken by the ideas that he invited Collier back as keynote speaker at the celebration of 50 years of Lagos State.
The real wealth of the Delta was never only beneath the swamp. It is the swamp itself, the coast and the sea beyond it.
If the idea could captivate the governor of the state that benefitted most from the Delta’s marginalisation, it can surely mobilise the Delta itself.
There is an apparent tension in proposing gas-fired power as a route beyond oil. It dissolves on inspection, because the gas in question is already being produced – and wasted.
According to the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, Nigeria flared 323 billion standard cubic feet of gas in 2025, worth roughly $1.1bn, with the potential to have generated some 32,300 gigawatt-hours of electricity in a region where millions have never seen a grid connection. The World Bank’s data shows Nigeria cut flaring by 42% between 2012 and 2022 before the practice surged back; thus, the problem is reversible.
Blue economy
Geopolitics has only sharpened the case. Major disruptions – from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to the Covid supply-chain crisis and the global drive to de-risk from China – have deepened the strategic value of a region that can generate captive, off-grid power from its gas to overcome the chief infrastructure handicap of producing in Nigeria.
Captive power for manufacturing clusters does not deepen oil dependence; it monetises a waste stream to finance the blue economy that will outlast it. The fuel for the Delta’s factories is, quite literally, burning in the sky above them. Consider what the sea is already paying others.
Vietnam – a country whose coastline is comparable to Nigeria’s, whose flagship export fish (pangasius) is a delta catfish – earned a record $11.3bn from seafood exports in 2025, led by shrimp at $4.6bn. Vietnam is the world’s third-largest seafood exporter, behind only China and Norway.
Nothing in that achievement was geological luck. It was value chains, processing, traceability and market access – all of it replicable in the creeks and estuaries of the Delta, with Europe and North America closer to Forçados than they are to the Mekong.
Seaweed slamdunk
Seaweed tells a similar story at an earlier stage. The global seaweed market, valued at roughly $9bn in 2024, is projected to double within a decade, with Asia-Pacific holding more than 60% and Africa’s share negligible. Vietnam, again, has set a national target of 500,000 tonnes a year by 2030, with some varieties already earning farmers over $8,000 per hectare. For the Delta, seaweed is a fourfold opportunity: food and feed, biofertiliser for soil regeneration, and the higher rungs of nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals.
The third pillar is marine systems and services. An estimated 90% of the international trade of West and Central Africa’s coastal states passes through the Gulf of Guinea. For years, insecurity priced the region out of its own waters; that is changing.
Piracy incidents have fallen from 115 in 2020 to around 20 a year, and early 2026 recorded the lowest levels since 1991. The servicing of shipping lanes, seafaring and crewing, fisheries governance and marine spatial planning are now bankable propositions in a way they were not when the BRACED report was drafted.
The caveat proves the point: illegal fishing is estimated to strip the wider region of some $2.3bn a year – a loss that only functioning fisheries governance, of the kind the roadmap proposed, can recover.
Growth gateway
With intentional improvement in the ease of doing business, captive power aimed at manufacturing clusters and the activation of natural entrepôts like Forçados, the Niger Delta can quickly become the gateway to sustainable growth in Nigeria and to a drastic reduction of poverty among its people.
The summit at Tinapa showed that the will exists; the data presented here shows the markets exist, and the falling piracy numbers show that even the obstacles are yielding. The dollars to be made were never only in the swamp. They are in the sea around it – and they are waiting.
