Ken Ikebunna, a BSc holder in Chemistry, is a Nigerian youth who worked in the oil and gas industry as a wellhead test consultant, and decided to give heed to FG’s massive campaign for young people in the oil region to try the non-oil export business.
Whereas his colleagues who made some money in the oil industry decided to foreign citizenship and japa, the Imo State-born Ikebunna, now married with two kids, bought his way into non-oil export business.
He loaded two 20-tons cargo (sesame seeds) targeted at Dubai but changed his mind for China. Many things went wrong with the shipping line and he lost almost N100m. The company that he said wrongly shipped the goods to Dubai have stopped talking to him. He is now a frustrated exporter, regretting not joining his mates to flee to other lands.
Demand:
“We are asking for compensation for the loss that we have incurred. That’s it. The amount of money that we have spent on this matter got me to a point that I regretted investing that amount of money in Nigeria. I have a lot of friends who bought permanent residency in Canada and they didn’t spend up to N50million to travel to Canada with family.
“Doing this kind of investment in Nigeria and meeting such a loss is not a good one. Nigeria is looking for opportunity to increase non-oil exports, this is not a good example for someone who is just building his business.”
Huge loss:
Ikebunna said he took a loan to finance that transaction. “Currently, that loan is accruing interest on a daily basis because of the penalty on it. So, we want a situation where we will be able to be relieved of our burden. In fact, it also cost us the opportunity of establishing a continuous business transaction with the people who were supposed to buy it from China.”
He said it was a Chinese company that was supposed to buy the sesame seeds from them when their negotiation with the Dubai company wasn’t strong. “We were supposed to collect payment before we shipped. But when they were telling us that their bank was delaying to give us letter of credit (LC), we now said no, that wasn’t our agreement.”
How it began:
The victim told the story in his own way. “My name is Ken Ikebunna. I am the Managing Director of Highflyer.com Nigeria Limited. Our company is an export and trading company. We export agricultural goods and minerals from Nigeria.
What happened:
So, in 2024, we tried to export sesame seeds. The consignment was billed initially to go to Dubai, and we informed the shipping company so. We sent the cargo, two 20-foot containers of sesame seeds. We sent it to Apapa, at Lilypond, at the APM Terminal.
“But while we were still negotiating the payment terms with our buyers, we informed the shipping company, Hapag-Lloyd Shipping Nigeria Limited, that we were no longer shipping it to Dubai, but to China. We have a forwarding agent, so it’s the forwarding agent that communicates with the shipping company. So, we informed the forwarding agent, who informed the shipping company. The shipping company acknowledged that they’ve cancelled the shipment and that the containers had been kept in the port, that it is no longer being shipped. We have documents to these steps.”
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Details:
So, later on, we now found out that they actually shipped it against our instructions.
We now asked them for a way out, if they could bring it back. They said no, that the ship that accompanied it must get to Dubai and then come back to Nigeria.
They even called us from Qatar to ask if they could sell it for us. The conversation did not go well because of terms of sales.
The goods were taken to the port, to Lilypond, October 2nd, 2024. The vessel left Lilypond on November 13, 2024. So you can see, from 2nd October to November 13 when the vessel left, it had already stayed one month. Then it traveled on sea to Dubai and came back to Nigeria on February 2, 2025.
So you can see the number of months in between. So, by the time it came back, we told the shipping line that by now we knew that the goods must have gone bad, and we were rejecting the cargo.
We thus hired a Loss and Claims Consultant, and resolved to reject the cargo outright and pursue the path of filing claims.
The shipping line tried to do this, but instead of calling for settlement, they sent their law firm. The law firm that is in their retainership wrote to us. Their first letter was titled “Without Prejudice.” So we thought that they were coming to make peace, but we didn’t know that they were trying to bamboozle us to agree to anything that the shipping line said.
So, we were going back and forth to agree or not to agree. He now said that the practice is that we should agree to a joint survey; we were to bring a surveyor, the shipping line would also bring a surveyor, both parties would determine the extent of damage on the goods, and then we would now know how much claim we could lay, if we said that the cargo was bad.
Now, we went through back and forth, agreeing on getting the cargo survey done or not, from February till April.
The first instance of the cargo survey was done on 10th April, 2025. We hired our own surveyor; they hired their own surveyor.”
According to Ikebunna, so many lapses occurred along the line until it was clear that the shipping company was not ready to do the right thing.
One of the lapses he said was bringing the goods back through the import terminal instead of export. This led to heavy charges, he said, up to N11m. “In fact, at a time, those containers accrued demurrage, because as at August, the shipping line paid about N10.8 million on demurrage for those containers. We paid over N800,000 in demurrage on the same containers, additional to the one that they already paid. So, these expenses are all because of the import terminal that they left it at. But if they had taken it to the export terminal, none of these would have counted.”
He said they agreed to come the next day to complete the assessment but the next day, he said the other party did not show up.
He said he began to seek legal options due to endless frustrations. He said they have their surveyor’s report, which shows that the goods, from the ones they saw from the outside, were already bad. “And in fact, no longer fit for human consumption. The cargo was for human consumption. It cannot survive another round of export. So the only remedy at that moment was to convert it to animal feed and recover some funds from it, but that was not done.”
Value:
He said: “At the time we were selling the goods, the invoice value of the goods was $72,000. Now, as at that time, the Free On Board (FOB) value of the goods as at that time was over $60,000. At that time last year, a ton of sesame seeds was selling locally for N2 million. And we had 38.2 tons. Which brings us N76 million of the local value of the goods, not the transportation or your profit or anything. These prices are still verifiable.
Why Lagos!
On why a Port Harcourt company chose Lagos as the export point, he said: “I bought the goods in Kano, took it to Lagos. Which was closer. It is closer to ship through Lagos from Kano than through Port Harcourt. Port Harcourt is a longer distance. So the transaction was done in Lagos.”
Intervention
“When this matter first arose, before involving lawyers, before hiring a claims consultant, we filed a petition to the Nigerian Shippers Council, letting them know that this is the problem we were facing at this company. We complained that the company was playing us back and forth. We have that letter.
“And the way which the Nigerian Shippers Council handled it didn’t please us. I was thinking that Nigerian Shippers Council in collaboration with Nigerian Export Promotion Council would take the concerns of exporters very seriously. But when this whole thing happened, they didn’t want it to look like they were siding with anybody.”
Evidence of rot:
Ikebunna said: “The goods were in top shape when we were sending them. By the time it was opened for inspection, the container was already in bad shape. There is what they call ‘Kraft paper’ lined on the body of the container to prevent it from collecting moisture from outside the container body.
“The Kraft papers were all damp. There is what they call an oxygen extractor or dry bags. Like if you buy new shoe, those small things that extract moist. There are large portions of it, as big as your palm, that we hung inside each of the containers to remove moisture as the goods are on transit. They overstayed the time they were supposed to and they were fully soaked. We have pictures of it from the report and everything.
“So, once the goods were returned and we opened it by that April 10, 2025, we saw that the goods were already very bad. Because we assume that maybe the ones on the outside that we were seeing are bad, maybe the ones inside may still be good. Maybe whatever climatic condition or whatever is happening in it hasn’t gotten to those ones. Maybe some can be remedied. So we were expecting them to say, “Okay, finish this inspection, let’s know the way forward.”
Advice to young Nigerians:
With this level of frustration and disappointment, what would this young man advise other youths to do or to learn from his story.
“Well, what I will advise any young man who wants to invest in Nigeria is to be able to have patience and resilience. Honestly, if you don’t have patience and resilience, something like this can actually wreck someone’s health. In fact, when this thing just happened, I was almost becoming a mental wreck. It was some people who are much older in shipping business that advised me that I shouldn’t allow this matter to destroy my health. This can create blood pressure illness.
“One of them told me that he made a lot of money when he was young. In fact, he said he started making money from like 32 years. But within that same 30s, he encountered a very big financial loss. He started having BP from his 30s. He has been taking BP medicines from his 30s. He’s almost 60 now. So he’s the one who advised me never to allow this wreck my health. He said one day I would look at this transaction that looks very huge and find it is actually very small, not worth taking away my health.
