Port and Maritime security

Maritime trade began to develop in Nigeria after the inglorious slave trade era. By the 1830s, when the second wave of European explorers poured into the West African hinterland to verify the flow of the Niger and to make geographical surveys, the essential ramparts of maritime trade such as wharves, ports and jetties were unformed. Steamers had to be loaded and unloaded at surf ports by the famous Kroomen, who used boats to lighten the laden ships. However, the onset of liner services to West Africa by Elder Dempster and Woerman Linie in the 1850s resulted in the gradual development of skeletal port and lighterage facilities. The need by colonial authorities for passenger shipping services for expatriate colonial workers and the carriage of mails and administrative materials further intensified the speed of development of ports and jetties across West Africa. From 1913, the colonial administrators embarked on basic port infrastructural facilities and railways deemed essential for the crucial transport of agricultural produce and raw materials to the metropolis. By the end of colonial rule in 1960, Nigeria's major ports were located in Lagos and Port Harcourt with minor wharves at Sapele, Calabar and Warri. This paper surveys the developmental strides of the newly independent country both to increase the stock of port facilities and to diversify their effective capacity to cope with the enlarged maritime trade of Africa's largest economy, which net worth rose astronomically with the discovery of crude oil in commercial quantities in 1959. The paper finds that in addition to the shipping needs of the population, critical political and economic factors such as the Civil War of 1966–1970 and the notorious " Cement Armada " crisis of the early 1970s both shaped the direction of maritime trade development and instigated coups d'état and bloodletting in 1975 and 1976. In conclusion, the nation's maritime trade hotspots had to be developed with an eye to compete with other regional centers such as Abidjan and Cotonou for the hub-port status which would determine both national revenue profile and the ultimate attraction of foreign direct investment in the global shipping sub sector.

Theocracy, an anti-Bush diatribe against the role of fundamentalist Christians as a strong constituency of the Republican Party, and by the way paid some homage to the spurt of works at the time sharing the common opinion that "…, at the very least, world oil supplies will be tightening in the 2010s and 2020s even as commercial demand mushrooms." But Phillips and those whom he cited couldn't have been more wrong.