Opinion

A historic Niger Delta investment summit holds in Port Harcourt

Published

1 month ago

September 11, 2026

By Ehi Braimah,

When I wrote in April about “Beyond oil: Niger Delta attracts investments for economic growth and development,” the central argument was straightforward: Niger Delta must begin to look beyond crude oil and deliberately position itself as a diversified investment destination.

Also read: Ehi Braimah Set to Shape Rotaract Nigeria’s Branding and Public Image

At the time, the Niger Delta Economic and Investment Summit (NDEIS) was scheduled for May. The summit, with the theme, “Driving investment, innovation, and industrial growth in the Niger Delta,” was subsequently postponed, but the additional preparation time has arguably made the event even more significant.

From September 15 – 17, 2026, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, will host what promises to be a defining conversation about the economic future of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region comprising nine states: Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo, and Rivers.

The venue is the Obi Wali International Conference Centre, an appropriate setting for a summit that seeks to bring together government, business, investors, development institutions, financial institutions, professionals, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders around one overriding objective: transforming the enormous economic potential of the Niger Delta into sustainable investment and jobs.

This is not intended to be another talk shop. The organisers of the summit, the Niger Delta Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Trade, Mines and Agriculture (NDCCITMA), have positioned NDEIS as a structured investment marketplace designed to connect global capital with bankable projects and supportive public policy.

The summit’s stated ambition is substantial: more than 1,000 delegates, over 100 exhibitors, at least 30 bankable projects in the Deal Room and a target of up to $50 billion in investment commitments.

Those are ambitious numbers, but ambition is precisely what a region as strategically important as the Niger Delta requires.

Ambassador Idaere Gogo-Ogan, NDCCITMA chairman and convener of the summit, framed the ambition plainly during a pre-summit media briefing held earlier in March. “The region is ready to deliver 500,000 new jobs, inclusive of investment drive and wealth creation,” he said, describing the summit as a platform to deliberate on “investment mobilisation, enterprise growth, industrial expansion, and regional coordination.”

A gathering of influential Nigerians and global investors

The summit is expected to attract a formidable gathering of political leaders, captains of industry, investors, development partners, regulators, financial institutions, academics, professionals and entrepreneurs.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is expected to declare the summit open, adding a significant federal dimension to an event whose focus is regional economic transformation.

The Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, is expected to serve as Chief Host, while the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) is a key institutional partner.

The participation of the governors of the Niger Delta states is particularly important. The region’s economic future cannot be addressed successfully by any single state acting alone.

The governors therefore have an opportunity to use the summit to demonstrate that the Niger Delta can move from competition among states to strategic economic collaboration.

For investors, the message should be clear: the region is open for business.

The Niger Delta has traditionally been identified overwhelmingly with oil and gas. Yet, its economic possibilities extend much further.

The summit has identified seven strategic sectors: agro-industrial development and food security; blue economy and marine industries; oil, gas and energy transition; manufacturing, industrialisation and special economic zones; tourism, culture and the creative economy; digital economy, innovation and human capital; and access to finance and investment capital.

These sectors represent the bridge between the Niger Delta of yesterday and the Niger Delta of tomorrow.

A keynote speech with a powerful message

One of the major attractions of the summit will be the keynote address by Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, CFR, Chairman of Access Holdings Plc. Mr. Aig-Imoukhuede’s profile is particularly relevant to the investment conversation.

He is an investor, banker and philanthropist whose career has spanned banking, finance, investment, insurance, technology, real estate and energy.

As former Group Managing Director of Access Bank, he played a major role in transforming the institution into one of Nigeria’s leading banks.

His keynote will therefore go beyond rhetoric. The Niger Delta region and other summit participants will be hearing directly from an expert who understands capital, risk, entrepreneurship, corporate governance and the difficult process of turning opportunities into investment propositions.

The central question should be: how does the Niger Delta move from possessing resources to creating investable assets?

That distinction is critical. Investors do not invest merely because a region has resources; they invest where there are bankable projects, credible institutions, predictable policies, infrastructure, security, competent human capital and reasonable prospects of return on investment.

From conference hall to Deal Room

Perhaps the most important feature of NDEIS is its Deal Room. This is where the summit can distinguish itself from conventional conferences with opportunities for access to markets, technology and capital.

A successful summit should not be measured only by the quality of speeches delivered or the number of dignitaries who attend. Its ultimate test should be what happens after the speeches.

Did investors meet project promoters? Were projects subjected to serious investment scrutiny? How were financing conversations initiated? Were memoranda of understanding signed? Did companies commit capital? Did governments provide investment incentives?

The planned Deal Room has witnessed increased interest from participants and investors with over 30 investment-ready projects received to date, and it clearly provides an opportunity to answer those questions. If properly managed, it could become the engine room of the summit.

Exhibitions that tell the Niger Delta story

The exhibition component is equally important. With more than 100 exhibitors expected, the summit provides an opportunity for companies, states, government agencies, SMEs and entrepreneurs to showcase what the Niger Delta can produce.

The exhibition floor in an air-conditioned marquee will tell a compelling story: that beyond crude oil, there are agricultural products, manufacturing enterprises, technology companies, tourism assets, creative industries, maritime businesses, energy opportunities and innovative young entrepreneurs.

This is where the summit’s investment narrative becomes tangible. An investor should be able to walk through the exhibition arena and see opportunities rather than merely hear about them from a podium.

The intellectual architecture

The quality of the summit will also depend on its panelists, moderators and rapporteurs.

The organisers have assembled speakers from government, business, finance, academia, energy, maritime industries, technology, law, investment promotion and other sectors.

The published speaker list includes senior figures such as NDDC Chairman Chiedu Ebie, NDDC Managing Director/CEO Dr. Samuel Ogbuku, SEC Director-General Emomotimi Agama, and Renaissance Africa Energy Company CEO Tony Attah.

Others include Rivers State Investment Promotion Agency Director-General Chamberlain Peterside, former NDDC Managing Director Timi Alaibe, former University of Port Harcourt Vice Chancellor Professor Joseph Ajienka, Starzs Marine & Engineering Limited Chairman Greg Ogbeifun, and several other experts.

The moderators have an equally important responsibility. A good moderator must move a panel beyond prepared speeches and polite exchanges.

The hard questions must be asked: what exactly are the investment opportunities? Who will finance them? What are the risks? What incentives are available? What reforms are required? How will investors repatriate profits? What happens to host communities? How will environmental sustainability be guaranteed?

The rapporteurs, meanwhile, have the responsibility of capturing the substance of the conversations and translating them into actionable recommendations. That is how a summit becomes a roadmap.

The media must tell the story

A summit of this magnitude also deserves substantial media coverage. The media should not merely report who attended and who spoke; it should tell the larger story of an economically strategic region attempting to redefine itself.

There would be sustained coverage before, during and after the summit across television, radio, newspapers, digital platforms and social media.

Interviews, special reports, investment stories, business features, photographs, short videos, social-media content and post-event analysis are also planned to ensure that the conversation does not disappear when delegates leave Port Harcourt.

Indeed, the summit presents an opportunity to change the narrative about the Niger Delta – from a region predominantly associated with oil, environmental degradation and conflict to a region increasingly associated with enterprise, investment, innovation and economic opportunity. That narrative shift is itself an investment asset.

The importance of end-to-end event management

For a summit of this scale, content and execution matter. A world-class summit requires an end-to-end event management experience: delegate registration and accreditation, protocol, airport arrivals and departures, transportation, accommodation, venue management, stage production, branding, exhibition management, audiovisual production, security, hospitality, media operations, digital engagement, networking, VIP management and post-event reporting.

Every touchpoint is crucial. The experience of a foreign investor arriving at the airport, being received, transported to the hotel, accredited at the venue, guided through the exhibition, introduced to relevant project promoters and followed up after the summit can influence his or her perception of the region.

World-class events are therefore not defined only by beautiful stages and impressive speeches, but also by a seamless execution. Official summit consultants are: Dr. Tony Epelle, CEO of Samuelson Advisory Partners & coordinating consultant; Ono Akpe, CEO of Red Sapphire; Donald Okudu, CEO of Mesh Ads, and Ehi Braimah, CEO of Neo Media & Marketing

A summit that must produce results

The Convener and organisers deserve commendation for placing investment at the centre of the conversation, but expectations must remain high.

The Niger Delta has hosted numerous conferences and stakeholder meetings over the years. What the region needs now is not another declaration of intent – it needs implementation.

NDEIS provides an opportunity to create a pipeline of projects, facilitate investment partnerships, strengthen public-private collaboration and establish measurable commitments.

The summit’s ambition of attracting up to $50 billion in investment commitments is bold.

But the real measure of success will be the quality of investments eventually deployed, the jobs created, businesses established, infrastructure delivered and value retained within the region.

The Niger Delta is too important to Nigeria’s economy to remain defined by its oil wealth alone.

It is home to a large population, an extensive coastline and waterways, vast agricultural possibilities, significant energy resources, a vibrant culture and enormous human capital. The region’s transformation therefore has implications far beyond the nine states.

Dr. Solomon Edebiri, NDCCITMA secretary and local organising committee chairman, says the summit is a “strategic initiative designed to reposition the Niger Delta as a competitive hub for investment, enterprise development, and sustainable industrialisation.” While the world knows the Delta for oil and gas, its real legacy, he argued, rests on a “wealth of diverse and largely untapped opportunities” that the gathering aims to unlock.

As Port Harcourt prepares to welcome delegates, development partners and experts from Nigeria and beyond, the Niger Delta Economic and Investment Summit represents an opportunity to begin a new chapter.

The challenge is to convert conversations into commitments, enhancing access to markets and technology, deployment of capital and achieving productive economic activities.

Also read: Ehi Braimah Set to Shape Rotaract Nigeria’s Branding and Public Image

That is the real meaning of Beyond Oil. And it explains why the Niger Delta Economic and Investment Summit in Port Harcourt could become a historic moment – not simply because of the VIPs who attend, but because of the investment decisions and economic partnerships that emerge from it.

The Niger Delta region is ready to tell a new story.

Related Topics:featured investment NDCCITMA NDEIS Niger Delta Port Harcourt

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Opinion

Tegbe’s 24-Hour Energy Zones and the Shift From Megawatts to Money

Published

2 weeks ago

October 2, 2026

Mariam Balogun

By Sufuyan Ojeifo,

There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

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Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end.

The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability.

A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand.

The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements.

A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change.

If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage.

If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn.

The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market.

But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office.

It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness.

For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out.

But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough.

Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

Also read: Everton Celebrates Nigeria’s 66th Independence With Football Legends

That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.