Nigeria’s industry, trade and investment sector recorded a mixed performance in 2025, as improved macroeconomic stability helped rebuild investor confidence and support business planning, while deep structural costs and longstanding bottlenecks limited productivity, industrial expansion and the pace of private-led growth.
The year marked a sharp contrast with the volatility of 2024. Greater exchange rate predictability, ease of inflation and calmer financial conditions created a more stable operating environment for businesses and investors, prompting the federal government to push harder on its ambition to reposition the economy for self-reliance, expand non-oil exports and move the country towards its target of building a $1 trillion economy by 2030.
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That goal became a dominant theme shaping policy direction, decision-making and engagement with global partners, serving both as motivation and a measure of the scale of reforms required.
At the centre of policy execution was the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (FMITI), which set out ambitious targets for the year, including attracting $6 billion in foreign direct and portfolio investment, generating $6.5 billion in non-oil exports, increasing trade value by 20 per cent and creating 200,000 export-led jobs.
According to Jumoke Oduwole, minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, the government intensified investment promotion through targeted roadshows and global engagements. She said these efforts unlocked over $50 billion in investment commitments, strengthened investor confidence and helped reposition Nigeria as a credible, forward-looking investment destination in an increasingly competitive global environment.
Several industrial projects took shape during the year, particularly within Special Economic Zones, where new textile parks, automobile assembly plants and food processing hubs emerged.
These facilities were designed to serve the domestic market, conserve foreign exchange, create jobs and support Nigeria’s aspiration to become a manufacturing hub for ECOWAS and the wider African market.
Trade diplomacy also featured prominently, with Nigeria concluding its World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Policy Review and advancing reforms to modernise its trade framework in line with global best practices.
Despite these efforts, data show the entrenched structural weakness of Nigeria’s industrial base. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that by the third quarter of 2025, manufacturing accounted for just 7.62 per cent of real GDP.
Muda Yusuf, chief executive officer of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE), said the manufacturing sector remains fragile, expanding by only 1.25 percent and contributing just 7.62 percent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). He said the weak performance reflected “deep-seated structural constraints, including chronic power deficits, high energy and logistics costs, unfair competition from imports, limited access to finance, and elevated operating expenses.”
Yusuf warned that unless these constraints are decisively addressed, “high power, energy and logistics costs will continue to weigh heavily on real-sector productivity and constrain Nigeria’s industrial growth prospects.”
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He noted, however, that trade and investment benefitted from the relative macroeconomic stability recorded in 2025. According to him, the more predictable environment made planning easier for manufacturers and investors, as exchange rate instability that characterised 2024 largely subsided, with periods of mild appreciation during the year.
This stability, he explained, reduced uncertainty, improved investor confidence and contributed to a deceleration in inflation, supporting consumer purchasing power.
He added that while the anticipated surge in foreign direct investment did not fully materialise, investor perceptions of Nigeria improved over the course of the year, reflecting the time-intensive nature of FDI decisions that require extensive country risk assessments.
Portfolio investment flows, he said, performed relatively better, benefitting from the more stable macroeconomic environment. However, persistent challenges continued to weigh on trade performance, particularly high logistics costs driven by port inefficiencies and insecurity, which disrupted mobility and distribution networks.
Yusuf also pointed to the cost of funds as a key concern for investors. “Despite the deceleration in inflation, we have not seen a significant drop in interest rates. That, again, is something that investors in the trade and investment environments worried about in 2025,” he said.
Looking ahead, he expressed cautious optimism for 2026, projecting that sustained stability could support a moderation in interest rates and a reduction in energy costs, especially if global oil prices remain relatively subdued. “We are hoping that some of these variables will be better if we have a level of stability in 2026,” he said. “We also expect to see some level of reduction in energy costs on the back of the fact that oil prices are not so high and they are not expected to be so high in the coming year… but generally, I think 2025 was a much better year for trade and investment than the previous year. We hope that 2026 will even be a much better year.”
On the trade front, Nigeria deepened international partnerships with the signing of the UK Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership, progress on Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements with the UAE and Japan, the U.S. Commercial Investment Partnership, expanded engagement with Brazil and a formalised Nigeria–Benin Memorandum of Understanding.
African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFT) implementation emerged as one of the year’s most consequential developments, as Nigeria completed its five-year implementation review ahead of peers, secured presidential approval and transmitted its ECOWAS Provisional Tariff Schedule to the AfCFTA Secretariat.
As co-champion for Digital Trade under AfCFTA, Nigeria also pushed reforms to unlock cross-border digital commerce and reduce trade barriers.
Gender inclusion also featured strongly in 2025. The ministry of industry, trade and investment , working with the United Nations Development Programme and Uganda Airlines, launched the Nigeria–East and Southern Africa Air Cargo Corridor under the AfCFTA framework, exporting Made-in-Nigeria goods produced exclusively by women-led businesses with logistics costs discounted by up to 75 per cent.
Nigerian women-led firms also secured $32 million in export opportunities through the SheTrades Nigeria–UK Trade Mission supported by the UK government.
Still, concerns grew within the private sector over the role of the state in commercial activity.
Dele Kelvin Oye, chairman of Alliance for Economic Research and Ethics and president, Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA), cautioned against excessive government involvement.
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“The government has no business doing business. When countries sign MOUs elsewhere, it is the businesses that come to the table. In Nigeria, it is mostly government officials. Many of these commitments are announced, and that is the end,” he said.
Oye argued that decades of state-led ventures, citing Ajaokuta Steel, ALSCON, Nigerian Airways and national refineries, illustrate systemic failure rather than prosperity. “These failures are not isolated incidents. They are the inevitable outcomes of a model where the government oversteps its legitimate role,” he said.
He called for decisive reforms, including halting the creation of new state-owned enterprises, accelerating privatisation, simplifying regulation and prioritising infrastructure investment through public-private partnerships.
According to him, “The choice is between continuing to fund failure through the mechanisms of legalized plunder or facilitating a new era of prosperity driven by private sector innovation and leadership. For the future of Nigeria, the choice should be obvious.”
