Noble Drilling (Nigeria) Ltd. v. Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency & Anor. [2026]

Introduction

Is an offshore drilling rig a ship? And can the Federal High Court, a court with jurisdiction across the entire country, ever be "out of jurisdiction" simply because its process was served in a different city from where it was issued? This appeal answered both questions, and along the way overturned a precedent the Supreme Court itself had been applying for over a decade. The Court unanimously allowed the appeal and dismissed the cross-appeal.

Facts of the Case

Noble Drilling sued NIMASA and the Minister of Transport at the Federal High Court, Lagos, by originating summons, seeking a declaration that its offshore drilling rigs were not "vessels" under the Coastal and Inland Shipping (Cabotage) Act, 2003, that its operations did not amount to "coastal trade" or "cabotage," and that the Minister had acted beyond his powers in classifying the rigs as subject to cabotage waiver fees. It also sought an injunction restraining the respondents from interfering with its operations on that basis.

The originating summons was served on the Minister in Abuja without first obtaining the court's leave and without the endorsement section 97 of the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act requires for service outside a court's territorial reach. The respondents entered a conditional appearance, objected to the suit's competence, and — once that objection failed — filed a defence along with a counter-claim.

The trial court found entirely in Noble Drilling's favour, granting every relief sought and dismissing the counter-claim. NIMASA and the Minister appealed to the Court of Appeal, raising for the first time the question of whether service on the Minister in Abuja was valid. Relying on the Supreme Court's own earlier decision in Owners of MV Arabella v. Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation, the Court of Appeal agreed that service was defective, held the trial court lacked jurisdiction on that basis alone, and set aside the entire judgment — without ever reaching the substantive questions about drilling rigs and cabotage, or the respondents' counter-claim.

Noble Drilling appealed to the Supreme Court. NIMASA and the Minister, unhappy that their counter-claim and remaining arguments had never actually been decided, cross-appealed.

Appellant's Case at the Supreme Court

Noble Drilling's counsel argued that the Court of Appeal had misapplied MV Arabella, and went further, inviting the Supreme Court to overrule that decision outright — pointing to the Court's own precedent in Bucknor-Maclean v. Inlaks Ltd., where a seven-man panel departed from earlier decisions that had "ossified into error," and arguing that the same course was needed here to restore coherence between the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act, the Federal High Court Act, and how proceedings before the Federal High Court are actually meant to work.

Respondents' Case at the Supreme Court

Counsel for NIMASA and the Minister maintained that the Court of Appeal was right to follow MV Arabella, arguing the facts were materially identical — an originating process issued in one city, served on a party in another, without leave. They argued the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act applies to the Federal High Court regardless of its nationwide jurisdiction, that "out of jurisdiction" for service purposes means outside the state where the court sits rather than outside Nigeria, and that departing from MV Arabella would fail the strict test the Supreme Court applies before overruling itself. On the substance, they argued the drilling rigs did qualify as vessels subject to cabotage regulation, and that the trial court had erred by upholding the Minister's Guidelines generally while rejecting their specific application to Noble Drilling's rigs.

Resolution of the Questions for Determination

On whether the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act governs service by the Federal High Court, the Court read section 19(1) of that Act closely and found it defines "court," for the relevant purposes, as the High Court of a State and the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory — with the Federal High Court conspicuously absent, despite having existed well before that definition was codified. The Court treated that gap as telling rather than incidental: when a lawmaker specifically names some courts and simply doesn't mention another that was clearly already around, the more sensible reading is that the exclusion was intended, not forgotten. Reading this alongside the Federal High Court Act, which vests that court with jurisdiction across the entire country, the Court held that the inter-state service regime built for state-bound courts was never meant to apply to a court that isn't bound by state lines in the first place.

On what "out of jurisdiction" actually means for the Federal High Court, the Court pointed to its own Civil Procedure Rules, made under proper statutory authority, which define the phrase to mean outside Nigeria entirely — not outside whichever city the process happened to issue from. Since the Federal High Court's judicial divisions are administrative conveniences rather than jurisdictional boundaries, treating service in Abuja of a suit filed in Lagos as somehow "out of jurisdiction" would produce a genuinely odd result: a court with authority over the entire country being treated as if it had stepped outside its own reach, while still operating comfortably inside its own national borders.

On MV Arabella itself, the Court didn't shy away from correcting its own prior reasoning: that earlier decision, in holding that sections 97 and 98 of the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act govern Federal High Court service within Nigeria, was an interpretive misstep. The originating summons here required neither prior leave nor the section 97 endorsement, and the Court of Appeal's reliance on the older decision was accordingly an error.

On whether drilling rigs count as "vessels" under the Cabotage Act, the Court treated the statutory language as clear and cumulative — not a checklist where meeting one item suffices, but a set of conditions that must all coexist: the structure must, in substance, be a vessel; it must be designed for or genuinely capable of marine navigation; and it must actually be used to carry persons or property. A drilling rig fixed to the seabed or deployed as a stationary offshore platform doesn't meet that description — it isn't built or used for marine navigation, and it isn't carrying anyone or anything across Nigerian waters. The Court also rejected the argument that classification under a different statute (the Admiralty Jurisdiction Act) could settle the question here, since statutory definitions belong to the scheme that created them and don't transplant automatically from one Act to another.

On the Minister's Guidelines classifying rigs as vessels subject to waiver fees, the Court held that subsidiary legislation only carries the force of law to the extent it stays within what the parent statute actually authorises. A Minister's general power to make implementing regulations doesn't include the power to redefine, by administrative fiat, a term the statute itself has already defined more narrowly. Since the rigs fell outside the statutory definition of "vessel" to begin with, no regulation could reclassify them into that category — subsidiary legislation can flesh out what a statute leaves general, but it cannot rewrite the statute's own terms.

On the 2% cabotage surcharge NIMASA sought to impose, the Court found both statutory conditions for the surcharge — a qualifying vessel, engaged in coastal trade — unmet, since the rigs were neither. With the underlying premise of the counter-claim gone, the counter-claim itself collapsed, and the trial court was right to dismiss it.

On the injunction the trial court granted, the Court held this simply followed from what had already been declared: once a court has settled that a public authority acted beyond its statutory powers, an injunction restraining continuation of that unlawful conduct isn't an intrusion into executive territory — it's exactly the mechanism by which courts hold public authorities to the limits of the law they operate under.

On the remaining issues raised in the cross-appeal, the Court found them academic once the central questions were resolved. Courts don't issue opinions on questions that no longer affect the parties' actual rights, and once the service issue and the vessel classification issue were settled, nothing further turned on the separation-of-powers arguments NIMASA had raised.

Final Verdict

The Supreme Court allowed the appeal, held that the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act does not govern service of Federal High Court process within Nigeria, overruled its own earlier decision in MV Arabella v. NAIC to the extent it held otherwise, restored the trial court's judgment that drilling rigs are not "vessels" under the Cabotage Act, and dismissed the cross-appeal.

Key Takeaways

The Federal High Court's nationwide jurisdiction means service anywhere within Nigeria is service within jurisdiction — there is no inter-state leave requirement modelled on state-bound courts.
The Supreme Court can and does correct its own precedent where an earlier decision is shown to rest on a genuine interpretive error — stare decisis protects legal stability, not permanent error.
A statutory definition built on cumulative conditions requires all of them to be satisfied together; meeting some of the criteria isn't enough where the statute lists them conjunctively.
Ministerial guidelines and regulations can only implement a statute, never expand or override its actual defined terms — an agency cannot regulate something into existence that the enabling Act excludes.
Once a central issue is resolved in a way that removes the practical stakes from a remaining argument, courts will decline to rule on it as academic, regardless of how thoroughly it was argued.

In Practice

Any practitioner litigating before the Federal High Court on a multi-state matter should treat this decision as the current, controlling word on service — MV Arabella is no longer good law on this point, and objections built on it (or defences relying on it) need to be revisited immediately. More broadly, this case is a useful reminder for anyone advising a client operating under a regulatory regime with defined statutory terms: a regulator's guidelines or classification decisions are only as strong as their grounding in the enabling statute's actual language, and a well-argued challenge to an ultra vires classification can succeed even against a regulator with broad-sounding administrative powers.

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