Nigerian cement shipping crisis

~25 years before lecture, 200 ships sat full of cement outside Lagos, unloaded for so long that humidity set the concrete in the holds — converted the cargo into junk and consumed a significant fraction of world shipping capacity. Used as the punctuation example for "cement is heavy, transportation cost dominates."

We can ship concrete around the world. Nigeria one time, in their corrupt government of 25 years ago — which is different than the corrupt government of today — they had a guy who ordered 200 shiploads of cement. He was going to rebuild Nigeria with all this oil money, before he got deposed. At one time about 20 or 25 years ago there were 200 ships sitting in the Nigerian harbor full of cement waiting to unload, because they had a strike at the loading docks, or they ordered all this stuff and never figured out how to unload it. I don't know what all the problems were. The ships were sitting there waiting to unload, and in the meantime all the humidity was causing the concrete to set up. All these ships became junk. This was a major crisis in the shipping industry 25 years ago, because a lot of the world's shipping capacity was tied up outside Lagos.