HIS EXCELLENCY ASIWAJU BOLA AHMED TINUBU, GCFR
On the Urgent Need to Revive the Eastern Ports and End Structural Economic
Marginalization
By Chief Dr. David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex, MFR’OON
—Ugo’Ena” Nde Abiriba.

Mr. President,
There comes a time in the life of a nation when silence becomes an accomplice to suffering, and truth — even when heavy — must be carried to the center stage. With the steadying respect due to your office, but with the candor demanded by history, I write to you today on a matter that has long choked the economic lungs of the Eastern Region and fueled avoidable agitation: the death of the Eastern seaports.

I speak not from theory, but from lived memory. From the 1970s through the 1990s, I witnessed the Eastern maritime corridor in all its glory — Calabar Port alive with stevedores; Port Harcourt and Onne roaring with cranes; Warri and Sapele bustling like cities built on tide. Commerce flowed like a river obeying its natural course. The East breathed, worked, traded, prospered.

Then, like a cruel eclipse, the ships stopped coming.

One by one, the ports went silent.
Gates locked. Dockyards rusted. Communities dimmed.
And a great region — once vibrant with enterprise — was forced to kneel before an artificial bottleneck: a Lagos-only import architecture that makes no economic, geographic, or moral sense for a nation of nearly 300 million people.

Today, every importer east of the Niger must send their goods through Lagos, then haul them across thousands of kilometers of wounded highways — Ore, Benin, Asaba, Yenagoa, Onitsha, Owerri, Aba, Port Harcourt, Umuahia, Ikot Ekpene, Uyo, Calabar — roads that bear burdens they were never designed to carry. Consumers pay more.
Transporters risk more.
Businesses bleed more.
And the agitation born from perceived structural exclusion grows deeper, year after year.

Mr. President, you are a student of systems. You understand that no economy survives on one artery alone.
A nation that concentrates all maritime activity in a single city is a nation choosing inefficiency over intelligence, hardship over balance, and congestion over creativity.

Reviving the Eastern Ports is not an ethnic request.
It is a national economic imperative.
It is a safety valve for Lagos, a job engine for the South-South and South-East, a cost-reduction mechanism for millions of traders, and a healing balm for a region that has too often felt unheard.

The East does not ask for charity.
It asks for justice, balance, and functionality.

Mr. President, history is offering you a golden pen.
With one stroke — the political will to fully reactivate Calabar, Onne, Port Harcourt, Warri, Koko, and Sapele Ports — you can rewrite decades of imbalance, cool the embers of agitation, and prove that Nigeria belongs equally to all her children.

Let the ships return.
Let the cranes rise again like tired giants waking from sleep.
Let commerce dance once more on our waterfronts.
Let the East feel, not promises, but policy.
And let your administration be remembered as the one that re-opened the gates through which prosperity once flowed.

This is not just economics — it is nationhood.
And the clock is ticking.

With profound respect,

Chief Dr. David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex MFR’OON
–Ugo’Ena” Nde Abiriba.