Inside Nigeria’s Blue Economy Push: How a Renewed Navy-NIMASA Pact Is Changing Maritime Security
By Lod Onyeji ABUJA, NIGERIA — After 17 years, Nigeria’s two most important maritime security institutions have rewritten the rules of their partnership. At Naval Headquarters in Abuja on Tuesday, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, and the Nigerian Navy signed the first formal renewal of their 2007 Memorandum of Understanding. The signatories: NIMASA Director General Dr. Dayo Mobereola and Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral Idi Abbas. On paper, it is an administrative update. In practice, the data suggests it is the institutional backbone behind one of the most dramatic turnarounds in West African maritime security in the last decade. *The Empirical Case: Why the Partnership Worked* The antecedents of the NIMASA-Navy collaboration are measurable, not rhetorical. Since the launch of joint operations under the SPOMO Act in 2019 and the operationalization of the Deep Blue Project in 2021, Nigeria recorded *zero successful piracy attacks on merchant v...
