By
Suleiman U. Yusuf
When the Tinubu administration announced in mid-2024 a 150-day duty-free window for critical food staples such as maize, wheat, and rice, many Nigerians breathed a sigh of relief. The idea was simple and rhetorically powerful: suspend import taxes temporarily, increase supply, and cool soaring food inflation. It sounded like common sense in a time of crisis.
In practice, however, this waiver is not an act of relief. It is a structural shock to Nigeria’s agricultural heartland. It is a policy that rewards politically connected importers such as Abdulsamad Rabiu, Founder and Chairman of BUA Group, at the expense of smallholder farmers. It encourages cycles of dependency and lays a dangerous trap for future food insecurity.
Here is why the waiver is not only failing in its promise but also deepening Nigeria’s economic and social vulnerabilities.
The Waiver’s Promise and Its Reality
The Federal Government claimed the waiver would lower consumer prices by increasing supply. In parallel, it slated the importation of 250,000 metric tonnes of maize and 250,000 metric tonnes of wheat to restock reserves and reduce scarcity. However, the implementation details such as customs rules, eligibility standards, exchange rates, and logistics ensured that most of the gains went to large milling and trading firms, not to everyday citizens.
Even then, reports suggest that consumer relief was shallow. After factoring in freight charges, foreign exchange costs, handling expenses, and administrative delays, the pass-through to ordinary markets was minimal. Business AM and ThisDay have both reported opacity and weak implementation.
Meanwhile, northern maize farmers have watched their harvests fetch ever lower prices at the farm gate as imported grain begins to saturate downstream value chains, particularly in the poultry feed industry. In short, the benefits are concentrated downstream, while the pain is borne upstream in the fields.
Why This Waiver Is Worse Than It Looks
1. It signals to farmers not to plant next season.
Agriculture depends on incentives. When cheap imports flood the market immediately after harvest, farmers internalize a simple truth: my labour and investment are wasted if imports undercut me. That disincentive is far more damaging than any short-term relief could ever be helpful.
2. Gated implementation favours incumbents, not local aggregators.
The waiver scheme rests on restrictive eligibility criteria including years of operation, minimum milling capacity, audited statements, ownership of silos, and formal tax history. These conditions effectively shut out many rural cooperatives and small-scale mills, especially in northern regions that lack capital or auditing capacity. The result is that trade rents accrue to large, often coastal or capital-based corporations.
3. It undermines the middlemen who stabilize markets.
For decades, northern grain traders have played a vital role in stabilizing markets by buying at harvest, storing, and releasing later to moderate prices. With cheap imports flooding their territories, their margins evaporate and they retreat. The storage, aggregation, and price-buffering functions they served collapse, leaving the market more volatile.
4. Fiscal costs and lack of transparency erode public trust.
Estimates indicate that nearly 97 billion naira in customs duties and levies were waived under this scheme. Yet there is no public dashboard, no regular disclosure of beneficiary identities, import volumes by state, landing costs, or retail pass-through rates. The policy therefore looks less like economic relief and more like a rent-seeking bonanza. Opacity undermines credibility.
5. It worsens cross-border leakages and smuggling.
In a weak-currency environment, grains frequently leak to neighbouring countries through informal routes. Legislative moves such as the Senate’s proposed criminalisation of bulk corn exports show that government itself recognises this risk. Yet waivers increase the overall supply of tradable commodities and enlarge the window for arbitrage.
6. It piles onto existing structural deficits.
If Nigeria had strong feeder roads, adequate storage, irrigation networks, rural credit, and extension services, the impact might have been less severe. But in their absence, the waiver magnifies inequality. Those with capital and connections benefit, while small producers lose even more.
7. It deepens insecurity in the North.
Northern Nigeria is already plagued by violence, banditry, and social fragility. When farming becomes unprofitable, more young people are drawn into desperation economies. The collapse of agricultural livelihoods is not just an economic issue. It is a slow-burning fuse under national security.
8. It injects volatility into national food security.
Current projections by the Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that more than 30 million Nigerians will face crisis or worse levels of food insecurity during the 2025 lean season. At such a time, sending the wrong production signals is like removing the ladder while people are still trying to climb out of the pit.
Lessons from History and Comparative Evidence
Nigeria’s experience is not unique. Several studies of trade liberalisation in agriculture, both within Africa and globally, show that removing tariffs without complementary support tends to benefit imports more than domestic producers.
A 2016 study titled The Impact of Trade Liberalisation on Nigeria’s Agricultural Sector found that openness can enhance agricultural performance, but only when accompanied by investment, capital formation, and productivity gains.
Another 2025 study on trade liberalisation’s effect on agricultural output between 1970 and 2020 shows that while openness can help output in the long run, its short-term disruptions are severe and must be managed.
Even regional institutions have warned of the dangers. The African Development Bank has cautioned that Nigeria’s food import policy could destroy the country’s agriculture.
The lesson is clear: trade liberalisation in agriculture is not a silver bullet. It must be calibrated, sequenced, and supported by strong state capacity, infrastructure, and farmer protection.
A Better Path Forward: Reform, Not Reversal
Here is an alternative approach that could deliver both relief and resilience:
1. Adopt seasonal import corridors instead of blanket waivers.
Open import windows when domestic supply is weakest, but close them during harvest. Use Tariff-Rate Quotas to limit volume and protect local acreage.
2. Buy local first for reserves.
Strengthen the Strategic Grain Reserve and NASC through guaranteed minimum pricing at harvest. Such mop-up mechanisms support farm incomes and prevent price crashes.
3. Prioritise input support over import support.
Expand e-voucher programmes for subsidised fertiliser, improved seed, irrigation energy, and extension services so farmers’ costs fall rather than their revenues.
4. Invest in storage, aggregation, and rural roads.
Focus capital expenditure on northern grain belts to make domestic supply competitive in logistics and cost.
5. Build transparency and accountability into relief schemes.
Establish a public, real-time waiver dashboard showing who is importing what, at what cost, and where it is landing. Publish weekly retail-versus-farm-gate price data by State.
6. Tackle border leakages and smuggling through cooperation.
Work with Customs, border communities, and ECOWAS partners to manage cross-border flows. Legalise processed exports, regulate raw exports, and encourage local value addition.
7. Support risk-management and financing tools.
Expand access to index-based insurance, warehouse receipts, and working-capital credit for cooperatives and aggregators.
The Choice Before Nigeria
The Tinubu administration and those that will follow must ask a fundamental question: Are we in the import business or the agriculture revival business?
If Nigeria continues down the path of importing now and reviving later, it will lose the very foundation of its food sovereignty. Every bag of duty-free or subsidised grain we import marginalises the farmer who feeds us.
But if we align incentives, reduce structural costs, and strengthen transparency, we can build a Nigeria where affordable food is produced at home, where farmers reinvest in their land, and where food security is built into policy rather than borrowed from abroad.
Cheap imports may look like relief today, but if they destroy local producers, they plant famine for tomorrow.
Suleiman Usman Yusuf writes from Abuja, and could be reached via suleimanusmanbac@gmail.com
Writes from Nasarawa, Nigeria