Bayelsa at 30: The Gas, Water and Wealth That Must Stay Home

As Bayelsa State marked 30 years of existence on 1 October, Michael Kabi argues that Nigeria’s oil cradle must build its next generation on gas, an oil and gas industry it owns, and on the water that is its permanent capital

Bayelsa State is 30 this week. On 1 October 1996, a decree of General Sani Abacha carved it out of the old Rivers State. The new state inherited a capital with scarcely a road and eight local governments reachable mostly by boat.

It also inherited one legacy no decree could alter: the swamp at Oloibiri where, 40 years earlier, Shell-BP struck Nigeria’s first commercial oil. The anniversary deserves its regattas and its thanksgiving. It also demands a hard look back, and a strategy

A State Won, Not Given

History comes first, because Bayelsa was never a gift. Before the Willink Commission of 1958, the Ijaw and other delta minorities pleaded against permanent submersion in a federation of three large regions.

Willink declined to create new states. It offered instead a “special area” and, in 1961, a Niger Delta Development Board, the first of many federal consolations that promised more than they delivered.

The line runs from Nembe’s 1895 assault on the Royal Niger Company depot at Akassa, through Isaac Adaka Boro’s 12-day republic in 1966, to Rivers State in 1967 and, at last, Bayelsa. Each episode posed the question Nigerian federalism has never settled: who should benefit from the wealth beneath the creeks?

The Kaiama Declaration of December 1998 showed that statehood had not closed that question. It had only given it an address.

Cash-Rich, Capability-Poor

Bayelsa’s story is best read in the official numbers. In the 2018/19 Nigeria Living Standards Survey, 22.6 per cent of Bayelsans fell below the monetary poverty line, far under the national 40.1 per cent.

Yet the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found 88.5 per cent of Bayelsans deprived across health, education, living standards and work. That is the second-highest rate in the federation, and among children the figure is above 95 per cent. Money circulates, but improvement in livelihood outcomes does not arrive.

The 2026 budget of about N1.016 trillion draws roughly 83 per cent of its revenue from federation sources. Internally generated revenue is under nine per cent. In plain terms, Bayelsa’s fiscal fortunes are set by the price of Brent crude, not in Yenagoa.

None of this is an indictment of any single administration. Thirty years have at the very least, built some real things: five universities where there were none, an airport, a specialist medical university and, only this year, roads to Oporoma and Ekeremor and a 60-megawatt gas-fired power plant at Elebele. The state’s Oil and Environmental Commission, set up in 2019, was a rare act of moral leadership by a sub-national government.

But these are outputs. The outcomes households feel have barely moved.

An Unhedged Position

The global picture will make the next 30 years harder than the last. The International Energy Agency’s central outlook sees world oil demand levelling off around 2030, though other scenarios have it rising for longer. For a producing state, that uncertainty is itself the risk.

The international majors have already sold their onshore assets: Eni’s Agip to Oando in 2024, Shell’s SPDC to the Renaissance consortium in 2025. What remains of their interest in Nigeria is offshore, in deep water. In August, President Bola Tinubu signed the Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects Incentives Order, which the government hopes will unlock up to $50 billion of investment, starting with Shell’s Bonga South West. The order expects qualifying projects to do as much of their engineering, fabrication and marine logistics in Nigeria as is commercially sensible. The question for Bayelsa is whether any of that work will be done from its soil.

Meanwhile, Bayelsa is among the most climate-exposed places in Africa. Official counts put the number of people affected by the 2022 floods as high as 1.5 million.

A state that budgets on oil alone is running an unhedged position. The windfall from petrol subsidy removal and exchange-rate unification could be the hedge, but only if it is converted into lasting assets rather than consumed.

That conversion is an institutional task. West Africa offers a partial template. Ghana’s Petroleum Revenue Management Act of 2011 split oil receipts, by law, between the budget, a stabilisation fund and a heritage fund. Bayelsa need not copy it, but it should adopt the principle of rules that outlive governors. It must also compete with Rivers, Delta and Akwa Ibom for investment on the quality of its rules, its power supply and its people, not on the size of its allocation.

Seven Things to Build

Look at a map of Bayelsa and a plan almost suggests itself. Brass sits on the Atlantic in the east, at the end of the Nembe–Brass road. Agge sits on the coast in the west, at the end of the road through Sagbama and Ekeremor. Between them, on Wilberforce Island, is an airport with one of the longest runways in the country. Gas lies underneath all of it. I would build on those facts in seven ways.

First, gas as the master enabler. Nigeria holds about 215 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, yet it flared some nine billion cubic metres in 2025, the seventh-largest volume in the world. Much of that burns over Bayelsa’s creeks. The Electricity Act 2023 allows states to regulate their own power markets, and Elebele should become the seed of a metered, commercially run Bayelsa electricity market, fed by captured flare gas and growing to several hundred megawatts within a decade. Nothing else on this list works without power.

Second, gas-based industry at Brass and Agge. Brass Island was declared an oil and gas free zone, the Brass Oil and Gas City, in 2015. Its anchor project, a methanol plant designed to turn out 10,000 tonnes a day, signed its gas supply agreement in October 2024 but is still working towards financial close. Brass LNG, incorporated in 2003, never reached a final investment decision at all. Bayelsa has learnt the hard way that a mega-project announced is not a mega-project built.

Two things are different now. The Nembe–Brass road, due to finish its first phase around the end of this year, will put Brass within driving distance of the rest of Nigeria for the first time. And the plans for Agge set aside land for gas-based industry alongside the port. The state should work the two zones as one programme: methanol, fertiliser and petrochemicals at Brass; power, fabrication and manufacturing at Agge. In the meantime, smaller plants for compressed natural gas, LPG and gas-fired cold storage can create jobs this decade instead of the next.

Third, keeping the oil and gas business at home. The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board is headquartered in Yenagoa, yet most of the industry’s contracts are still won and spent in Port Harcourt, Lagos and abroad. Bayelsa should take a stake in marginal and divested fields through a professionally run state energy company with private partners. It should build a fabrication, maintenance and decommissioning cluster to serve the new Nigerian operators. And it should insist that host community trusts, funded under the Petroleum Industry Act with three per cent of operating costs, publish their accounts.

The airport belongs in this conversation. Bayelsa International Airport was designed with a 3.7-kilometre runway capable of taking a Boeing 747, and its planners always had oil and gas traffic in mind. Today it handles a few passenger flights to Abuja and Lagos. Deepwater operators need helicopter bases, warehousing, cargo handling and crew-change facilities close to their fields, and they currently fly much of that out of Port Harcourt and Lagos. With the new deep offshore incentives pushing work in-country, Bayelsa should convert the airport into a dedicated aviation logistics hub for offshore operations, offering hangars, bonded warehouses and a helicopter terminal on terms the operators can bank on. Having worked inside the industry, I know that operators move bases for reasons of cost, safety and reliability, not sentiment. The state must win the business on those terms.

Fourth, the blue economy. Oil will run down; the water will not. Bayelsa already has a Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy and an aquaculture village at Yenegwe with a hatchery, 500 grow-out ponds and a feed mill. That is a start. The next step is commercial scale: fish processing and cold chains powered by gas, so that the catch from Brass, Nembe and Oporoma reaches markets in Port Harcourt, Onitsha and Lagos fresh and graded.

Maritime transport needs the same seriousness. The state has bought ferries, water ambulances and cargo barges, but most people still travel in boats that are uninsured and unregulated. Scheduled, licensed and safe water transport would improve more lives, more quickly, than almost any single road. Ship repair is the other gap. Many Nigerian vessel owners still send ships abroad for dry-docking. Dry docks and repair yards at Brass and Agge would keep that money, and those skills, in the delta. Underneath all of it, mangrove restoration, financed through the Commission’s proposed $12 billion clean-up programme and carefully structured blue-carbon finance, would rebuild the nurseries on which the fishery depends.

Fifth, Agge as a port city. The Agge Deep Seaport in Ekeremor has been on the drawing board since 2012. The current design is a $3 billion project on 15,000 hectares, 10,000 of them set aside for a free trade zone and industrial parks, with container, bulk and liquid terminals, tank farms, a fabrication yard, a dry dock and a 500-megawatt power plant. The coast there offers natural deep-draft conditions that few Nigerian sites can match.

Built well, Agge would be more than a port. It would be a free trade and industrial zone that gives the Brass gas, the delta’s fish and the region’s manufacturers a gateway to the Gulf of Guinea. But honesty is needed here too. The state appointed a transaction adviser only this year, and no investor has yet committed serious money. Agge should be pursued through a bankable public-private partnership, with road and power links planned from the outset, and it should be tested on commercial grounds before public money is put at risk.

Sixth, people for an energy-and-water economy. Technical colleges designed with employers should train process operators, welders, divers, seafarers, marine engineers, aquaculturists and aviation technicians. An annual, published learning assessment would let the state manage what it finally measures.

Seventh, a fiscal and institutional framework. That means a legislated Future Generations and Maintenance Fund taking a fixed share of derivation revenue; a public register of state assets; audited accounts published on time; and a statutory 30-year development plan that binds successive administrations. Without it, every project above is hostage to the next election.

Order matters. The power market and the fiscal rule must come first, because everything else depends on reliable electricity and protected capital. The airport conversion can come early, since the runway already exists and the deepwater demand is real. The energy company and the first modular gas plants should follow by 2031. The blue economy will grow as the new roads reach the coast. Brass and Agge should be pursued on commercial terms and never at the expense of the state’s balance sheet.

Each of these needs a dated, public target, from megawatts metered to hectares of mangrove restored to helicopter movements at Yenagoa, so that citizens can judge progress by evidence rather than ribbon-cuttings. Each also deserves fuller treatment than one article allows, and I will return to them one by one in the weeks ahead.

What Stays Home

At Oloibiri, the capped wellhead still stands, and the museum promised for it is still unbuilt. It may be the most honest monument in the state.

The generation that won Bayelsa its statehood achieved a political victory. This generation must win an economic one, so that what flows through Bayelsa, its gas, its oil revenue and its water, finally stays home and builds something lasting.

The first 30 years established a state. The next 30 will decide what it was for.

*Dr. Michael Blessing Kabi is a chartered accountant and former oil industry executive who manages an advisory firm in Lagos. He writes on petroleum sector governance, fiscal and tax reform, ESG and sustainability, and the development of the Niger Delta, where he also leads a non-profit working on climate resilience and the blue economy.