The Value-Chain Imperative: Making CEPA Work For Nigerian Manufacturing

The UAE has opened its market to 7,315 Nigerian products. The tariffs on manufactured goods come off within five years. The agreement is built to reward countries that add value at home. The work now belongs to Nigeria.

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:…