The Value-Chain Imperative: Making CEPA Work for Nigerian Manufacturing
In January, in Abu Dhabi, Nigeria was handed something increasingly rare in international trade: a door opened wider than the one it opened in return.
Under the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) signed on the sidelines of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, the United Arab Emirates committed to eliminating tariffs on 7,315 Nigerian products. Nigeria committed to eliminating tariffs on 6,243 Emirati ones.
That asymmetry runs in Nigeria’s favor, though the UAE applies a flat five percent to most imports, so the lines it opened were never high walls. The value here is in the timetable attached to them. The question is what Nigeria chooses to carry through it.
Consider what the country currently sells. In 2025, non-oil exports reached a record 6.1 billion dollars, an 11.5 percent rise, across 281 products shipped to 120 countries. That is real progress. But look at what leads the list: cocoa beans, urea, cashew nuts, sesame seeds, gold doré.
With few exceptions, these are raw or lightly processed commodities, the first link in value chains whose profitable ends are captured somewhere else. Nigerian cocoa becomes Swiss chocolate.
Nigerian cotton becomes apparel carrying another country’s label. Each transaction is a sale; too few buy Nigeria a share of the business that follows.
CEPA changes what is possible, and the detail that matters most is the sequencing. The Nigerian goods granted immediate duty-free entry are largely primary: fish and seafood, oilseeds, cereals, cotton, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. The goods whose tariffs fall over three to five years are of a different kind: machinery, vehicles, electrical equipment, apparel and furniture. None of those phased categories appears anywhere near the top of Nigeria’s current export list.
The phasing looks like a limitation, but it works better as a runway. Before the end of this decade, Nigerian manufactured goods will enter one of the world’s most dynamic trading hubs at zero tariff. The only question is whether Nigeria will have the goods to send.
The agreement is engineered to reward precisely that shift. CEPAs of this type include rules of origin that require substantial domestic value addition. India’s agreement with the UAE set that threshold at 40 percent. Nigeria’s own thresholds will decide which exporters qualify, and any manufacturer planning for 2030 should already know what they are. You cannot buy a product elsewhere, route it through, and claim the benefit.
India shows what that is worth. Since signing its own CEPA with the UAE in 2022, Indian merchandise exports to the Emirates have grown from roughly 28 billion dollars to 36.6 billion, a gain of more than 30 percent in three years. The composition matters more than the total.
Textile and apparel exports rose 25 to 30 percent in qualifying categories. Engineering goods grew 10 to 15 percent. Electrical machinery and heavy capital equipment nearly doubled. India did not simply sell more. It sold better.
Nigeria has spent decades describing diversification as an aspiration. CEPA converts it into a schedule. The three-to-five-year transition is not a waiting period but a build period, and it has already begun. Every month spent treating this agreement as a market-access announcement rather than an industrial deadline is a month of runway spent.
The remaining work is domestic and specific. Nigeria needs export clusters producing at consistent scale, because Gulf retail and industrial buyers contract on reliability before price. It needs certification and standards regimes that let a Nigerian processor meet Emirati requirements without a six-month detour. It needs lower logistics costs, which makes the National Single Window launched in March a more consequential reform than its profile suggests. And it needs financing structured for mid-sized manufacturers, not only for flagship infrastructure.
None of this is speculative. Processing cocoa instead of shipping beans, cashew kernels rather than raw nuts, sesame pressed and bottled here, generic pharmaceuticals where Nigerian capacity and Gulf demand both exist. What is missing is scale, certification and working capital.
Nigeria’s Trade Minister, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole, has been explicit that the next phase must prioritize value-added products, processed agricultural goods, and manufactured exports. The strategy is correctly identified. What has changed is that the deadline is no longer self-imposed.
The schedule, however, is indifferent. Those tariff lines will open on their fixed date, whether or not Nigerian factories are ready to use them, and an unused runway is simply a runway that runs out. Whether they are ready is, at last, entirely a Nigerian decision.
Oti Egwu is a Strategic Communications and Public Affairs Advisor, specializing in Africa-Gulf relations
