Port Harcourt
Built in 1912 to export coal, pivoted to oil after the 1956 Oloibiri discovery—now the operational centre of Africa's largest petroleum producer. The Niger Delta's ecological devastation and militant insurgency are the cost of that extraction logic.
Port Harcourt was built to export coal and ended up exporting oil—a bait-and-switch that defined Nigeria's twentieth century. In 1909, geologist Albert Kitson discovered coal in Enugu, 240 kilometres inland. Governor Frederick Lugard needed a port, and in 1912 he founded one on the Bonny River in the Niger Delta, naming it after Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt. The railway to Enugu opened in 1916. The Diobu people, who had occupied the site, were compelled to cede their land. Port Harcourt was a colonial extraction point from its first day.
The pivot came in 1956, when crude oil was discovered at Oloibiri, 90 kilometres west. Nigeria's first oil shipment left Port Harcourt in 1958. The country's first refinery opened at nearby Alesa-Eleme in 1965. Pipelines radiated outward to wellheads across the Niger Delta, and Port Harcourt became the operational headquarters of Shell, Agip, Total, and other international oil companies. The city that was designed for coal became the capital of Africa's largest petroleum producer. Nigeria's oil production—averaging 1.3 million barrels per day—passes through Port Harcourt's pipeline network.
But oil wealth created ecological catastrophe. The Niger Delta, one of the world's largest wetland ecosystems, became one of its most polluted. Decades of spills, gas flaring, and pipeline failures contaminated soil and water across the region. Local communities saw oil revenue flow to Abuja and multinational headquarters while their fishing grounds died. Militant groups—most notably the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)—attacked infrastructure, shut down production, and turned the region into a conflict zone. Port Harcourt's metropolitan area grew to 3.5 million people despite—or because of—these dynamics, as both opportunity-seekers and displaced rural populations converged on the city.
Port Harcourt is attempting diversification: technology hubs, education centres, and Dangote's 650,000 barrel-per-day refinery (opened September 2024) aim to reduce dependence on crude exports. But the fundamental dynamic hasn't changed since 1912: the city extracts resources from its hinterland and ships them elsewhere. The resource shifted from coal to oil. The extraction logic remained.