Nigeria banks on River Niger to boost commerce and navigation

Plans are to deepen the river channel and stabilise its banks along a stretch of 572 kilometers (376 miles) as to allow passage of large vessels and open up inland ports.

“The goal is to activate the navigational channels of the river which once served as a bubbling colonial trading route,” project supervisor Joshua Arugege told AFP.

But activists are worried about the damage to the ecosystem of the host communities along the stretch where the dredging will take place.

Inaugurating the project in September President Umaru Yar'Adua said that when completed, it would “ensure all-year-round navigability of the River Niger.”

“It will provide an attractive, cheaper and safer means of haulage of goods while engendering linkages and promoting commerce and trading activities between communities and peoples of the eight states adjoining the river,” he said.

Contractors moved in last month and are working round the clock to beat a mid-2010 deadline.

At the Lokoja site in central Nigeria, a dredger is at work busy flushing water from the river to reduce the sea level and allow other equipment to move in.

Houseboats, dredging pipes and barges are just some of the equipment at the site of a mega operation to deepen the river to 2.5 metres, with a bottom width of 60 metres and top width of 100 metres.

Then government will move in to construct seven ports to serve the 152 host communities along the river, from which Nigeria derives its name.

“We need inland ports because the river users will require intermediate stations to load and off-load persons and cargoes,” Captain Dauda Musa, area manager of the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), the government agency overseeing the project, told AFP.

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