Unlocking the transportation and tourism potentials of Nigeria’s rivers

Nigeria needs to make more use of its rivers for transport in other to cut the huge cost of transport to the people.

Currently, except in very rare cases, the rivers are mainly used for small-time fishing and minor rural retail transportation. But what of making the inland waterways and their shores safe so that people can travel from one end of the country to another just to view the different ecological zones in their spendor?

Why is river tourism almost non-existent in a country of hundreds of millions? This is a country with a river as famous as the Niger, as well as numerous other interesting waterways.

The rivers need to be properly dredged, so that badges and boats can become a viable option alongside trucks for carrying goods across the country. This will reduce the pressure on the highways. It would massively reduce transportation costs and the frequent accidents on the over-pressured highways.

Opening up Nigeria’s rivers to mass transportation would create lots of new businesses and jobs in a country where 80 million youth are reportedly unemployed.

For instance, imagine lots of river-front hotels and resorts along the shoreline. Imaging cruise ships cruising from state to state, offering tourists the ability to view, stop by and shop in multiple locations along the route.

Imagine lots of Nigerians in the diaspora coming to cool off in boat cruises during the December festive period. Imagine an enterprising ship owner offering a seven-course meal on a boat that shows it’s occupants picturesque scenes along the shoreline, starting from one destination and ending in another.

Ofcourse all these would need adequate security to be sustainable. And any potential overflow of floodwaters from the Lagdo Dam would need to be effectively prevented. These should not be too much of a challenge for the authorities.

We ask the Nigerian authorities to urgently take steps to unlock the currently under-exploited potentials of Nigeria’s rivers.

They should study successful river tourism initiatives like the Yangtze (China); and the Mekong (China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with the view to seriously replicating it in Nigeria. Who knows, with time, the tourist route could expand to include all the countries that host the Rivers Niger and Benue.

If Malaysia could come to Nigeria , study it’s palm oil industry in the 1960s, and since then, make billions of dollars from that, what stops Nigeria from doing same in this vein?