Something sinister is contributing to the continued wrecking of Nigeria’s economy. And no one, including the government and its functionaries, seems aware of it or thinks it is necessary to do anything about it, even if they are.
The truth struck violently recently when the news report flashed that Chinese manufacturers have now decided to bypass their Igbo middlemen, whom they accuse of selling at exorbitant prices, to retail their manufactures directly to Nigerian consumers.
Those who are old enough will recall that in the days before the Indigenisation Decree, which took them out of the retail end of the Nigerian economy, some Asians lived and operated their retail textiles and other merchandise shops on Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ereko and Balogun streets on Lagos Island.
The Chinese are now replicating the same template, taking advantage of the 1995 repeal of the Indigenisation Decree, which opened up the Nigerian economy to foreign investment, to operate retail outlets for all manner of goods at the International Trade Fair Complex, near Festac Town, Lagos, and in the Kano metropolis in Kano State.
Some Igbo bashers, mostly of other ethnic groups in Nigeria, and some Igbo, who are envious of their kinsmen who seem to be making tonnes of fortune from merchandising Chinese manufactures, were gleeful that fellow Nigerians were going to be losing out in business through the treachery of the Chinese manufacturers.
While it may be true that the Igbo merchandisers of Chinese manufactures may have been doing an overkill by taking excessive sales profits, those bashers of Igbo traders fail to realise that the Chinese just took another dangerous path to undermine the Nigerian economy and compromise its ability to rapidly re-industrialise.
The Chinese manufacturers, who pose as some kind of do-gooder saviours that are doing Nigerian consumers a favour, are actually doing their best (or worst?) to knock the bottom out of Nigeria’s feeble effort to grow an industrial economy.
Those old enough may recall the devastating effect of dumping cheaper, or even donated, parboiled rice by Western metropolitan countries, which made Nigerians reject their own homegrown, but admittedly coarse, rice from the 1960s to the 1970s. This dangerous phenomenon is about to repeat itself with the audacity of the Chinese manufacturers.
It knocked the bottom out of local rice production in Nigeria and turned the wheel around to enable massive importation of rice from anywhere in the world. The consequent demand for foreign exchange over the years to pay for the imports has directly contributed to a portion of the pressure on the naira.
In January 2026, an agribusiness committee of the Federal Government was so concerned that it had to recommend the formal ban on Nigeria’s importation of 2.4 million metric tonnes of rice with a street value that is more than N1tn.
In 1960, the year of Nigeria’s political Independence from Great Britain, Nigerian farmers grew about 99 per cent of the estimated 239,000 metric tonnes of rice that the citizens consumed. The naira value of the imported roughly one per cent rice import was so minimal that there is hardly any record of it preserved anywhere.
Neither the Central Bank of Nigeria, established in 1958, nor the National Bureau of Statistics that was established in 2007, after the merger of the former Federal Office of Statistics, that was established in 1947, and the National Data Bank, have the figures.
NBS says that Nigeria’s overall food and beverages import bill of 2025 was N7.65tn, or 17 per cent of Nigeria’s import bill, and that N1tn, or 13.07 per cent, of that amount was spent on the importation of rice that has practically become Nigeria’s staple food.
As the food armada was buffeting the Nigerian ports and the economy and overwhelming the nation’s foreign exchange market over the years, no minister of Agriculture, Industries, National Planning or Finance, appeared to have noticed the deceleration of rice production in Nigeria.
The only time anyone seemed to have noticed the dearth in the production of rice was in 2022, when Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria corralled “grateful” members of Rice Farmers’ Association of Nigeria to “mount” a rice pyramid in Abuja, in other to show that its much-abused Anchor Borrowers’ Programme was a success.
And, by the same token, no Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment; National Planning; Finance; or Coordinating Minister of the Economy, has found the silver bullet to extricate Nigeria from the deathly embrace of the Chinese, or other foreign, manufacturers and their local collaborators, who seem intent on keeping Nigeria as an import-oriented economy.
Unfortunately, the hollow Nigerian Industrial Policy plan that was launched in 2025, in the absence of the President, does not exactly address the issue of Nigeria’s industrial needs. It reads more like the work of a consultant who wrote from imagination and without data from a realistic field survey.
This careless and half-hearted approach to planning Nigeria’s industrial economy is reminiscent of the tardy effort of the armchair consultants of the World Bank who did not even deign to visit Nigeria, but wrote Nigeria’s First Five-Year Economic Development Plan without live data, from their comfy executive suites on 1818 H Street, NW, near Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C., America’s Federal Capital.
It is time for today’s Federal Government to come up with a bold masterplan, above the scale of the $13 billion Marshall Plan that America used to rebuild Europe’s post-World War II economy, to provide the infrastructure needed to prep Nigeria’s economy ready for re-industrialisation.
The plan should encourage local or foreign investments for local production of strategic consumer goods, like foodstuffs, household products, and automobiles, and to discourage unbridled imports that can squander Nigeria’s foreign reserves.
The government should not just ban importation of foreign goods, but create a superstructure that will encourage investment in manufacturing within Nigeria’s borders. At the moment, it is difficult to run manufacturing businesses profitably in Nigeria. That is what the Chinese manufacturers are preying on.
Take it from someone who ran the policy, management, marketing, purchasing and accounting functions of a medium-sized textile manufacturing factory for 10 years, spanning the years of the Babangida government, those of iron-fisted Abacha, that was followed by pandering Obasanjo government that was trying to find a way out of Nigeria’s economic abyss.
At this stage, one is beginning to think that maybe the Federal Government’s economic management team should look for the last of the Mohicans, those who ran some of the most successful Nigerian businesses from the 1960s into the early years of the 20th century.
The likes of Michael Omolayole, Felix Ohiwerei, Olusegun Osunkeye, and Festus Odimegwu should be consulted to point the searchlight to the road that should be traveled to re-industrialise the Nigerian economy. They would know what else needs to be done.
These gentlemen are no longer in competition with anyone, and it would be to their eternal joy and glory that their opinions and insights were sought in the quest to redirect the industrialisation of the Nigerian economy.
But Nigerians need to know that their economy is being wrecked by a cahoots of clueless government economic policymakers, mercenary foreign exporters, reckless local importers and hedonistic Nigerian consumers of foreign luxuries.
X@lekansote1, lekansote.com