JUST as I was preparing to write this column, news filtered in that President Bola Tinubu has assented to the Nigerian Ports Economic Regulatory Agency (NPERA) Bill, 2026, paving the way for the establishment of a dedicated economic regulator for Nigeria’s port sector. The news was sourced from a post on the Facebook page of Dr. Pius Akutah, Executive Secretary/CEO of the Nigerian Shippers Council. The enabling law for this new agency was titled Nigerian Port Economic Regulatory Agency Act, 2026. Meanwhile, in 2014, the Federal Government had designated the Nigerian Shippers’ Council as interim economic regulator of the ports pending enactment of a substantive law.
Already, the Federal Goverment of Nigeria has become a burgeoning leviathan with a staggering 1,316 ministries, departments, and agencies, or MDAS. What is more worrisome is that in 2012, the same FG had just 571 MDAs, a figure considered unwieldy, and prompted the Jonathan administration to commission a panel headed by a former head of the federal civil service, Steve Oronsaye to come up with ways and means of bringing down the number. The commission later became known as the Oronsaye panel, and its findings, on which the Federal Government had issued white papers on, two times, is now know as the Oronsaye Report.
