Chinese Traders Aren’t the Real Problem in Nigeria. The Import Model Is

FTZ News: After traders protested at the Lagos International Trade Fair Complex on Sept. 15, a local research centre told the government to stop treating the episode as a spat over shop space.

Independent Newspaper Nigeria reported the argument on Wednesday, citing SEREC Policy Bulletin No. 45/2026, published Sept. 22 and signed by the centre’s head of research, Dr. Eugene Nweke.


Traders at the complex said Chinese businesses were selling and distributing inside Nigeria, not only shipping goods to Nigerian importers. Nweke said that complaint should be read as a warning about how commerce is organized.


“The objective should not be to close Nigeria to the world,” he wrote, “but should be to make Nigeria productive enough to compete with the world.”


He described the arrangement that used to pay a lot of people here: a factory abroad, a Nigerian importer, the port and customs desk, a wholesaler, a retailer. Manufacturers and trading houses, he wrote, can now finance a shipment, move it, store it and sell it without that string of local middlemen. He did not pin the change on China alone. Online retail and tighter logistics, he said, did the same work.


Nweke asked why foreign firms keep coming. Then he asked why Nigerian firms still sit at the trading end when the country has a large market, materials and access to the rest of Africa under AfCFTA.


SEREC’s answer is production and brands, not a closed border. Free-trade zones and the continental pact are supposed to be the machinery. Shoppers, the paper says, will keep choosing price and convenience. Asking them to pay more because a product is local is not a policy that lasts. Foreign firms still have to follow immigration, tax, customs and standards law. A shield without factories behind it will not hold.


The centre does not write off importers and brokers. Nweke said they already know demand and pricing. He wants that knowledge used to start putting goods together here, then making them, then selling a Nigerian name into other African markets. Finished consumer goods would be a smaller share of what comes over the quay. Machines and parts Nigeria cannot yet make would still arrive.


On the zones themselves, SEREC said warehouses and transshipment are a weak test. Nweke wants officials to look at factory output, local content, jobs and training, whether small Nigerian suppliers get work, and whether the zones earn foreign exchange by selling outside the country.


The paper points to industrial and commercial activity in places including Aba, Nnewi, Onitsha, Lagos and Kano, as well as manufacturing activity across Ogun, Kaduna, Rivers, Enugu, Anambra, Abia and Delta states. Freight forwarders, it says, will stay tied to imported finished goods unless they start working for those factories.


Nweke is working from published reports of the protest. The bulletin does not offer its own crowd count from the Trade Fair Complex./.


photo by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters