IN January, in Abu Dhabi, Nigeria was handed something increasingly valuable in international trade: wider access to a major global commercial hub and a timetable against which its industrial ambitions can now be measured.
Under the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, or CEPA, signed on the sidelines of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, the United Arab Emirates agreed to eliminate tariffs on 7,315 Nigerian product lines. Nigeria, in turn, committed to liberalising 6,243 product lines from the UAE.
But the headline numbers require context.
The UAE granted immediate duty-free treatment to 2,805 Nigerian product lines. Another 1,468 will become tariff-free within three years and 3,042 within five years. Nigeria immediately liberalised 3,949 lines, with a further 2,294 to follow within five years.
The real opportunity, therefore, is not simply that Nigeria has secured more tariff lines on paper. It is that the agreement gives Nigerian producers a defined period in which to prepare for deeper access to one of the world’s most commercially connected markets.
The question is what Nigeria chooses to carry through that door.
Commodity exports are not enough
Consider what the country currently sells.
Nigeria’s non-oil exports reached a record $6.1bn in 2025, up 11.5 percent from $5.46bn the previous year. The country exported 281 non-oil products to 120 markets.
That is significant progress.
Yet the biggest individual earners still illustrate Nigeria’s longstanding problem. Cocoa beans generated $1.99bn, followed by urea at $1.29bn, cashew nuts at $456.9m, sesame seeds at $300.3m and gold doré at $228.8m.
There is value in those exports, certainly. But much of Nigeria’s agricultural export base continues to enter global value chains before the most profitable stages of processing, branding, packaging and distribution.
Cocoa beans can become chocolate and confectionery. Raw cashew nuts become packaged consumer products. Sesame can become oil, tahini and other processed foods.
Each additional stage completed in Nigeria means more potential jobs, industrial capability, tax revenue and export value staying at home.
That is where CEPA becomes important.
The tariff timetable is a runway
The Nigerian products receiving immediate UAE duty-free access include fish and seafood, cereals, oilseeds, fruits and nuts, cotton, pharmaceuticals and chemicals.
Other categories — including cocoa preparations, machinery, vehicles, apparel and furniture — are being liberalised over three to five years.
That phasing should not be interpreted merely as a delay.
It is a runway.
By the end of the transition period, Nigerian manufacturers in several sectors will have improved tariff access to a market that also serves as a logistics, re-export and distribution centre connecting the Middle East, Asia and other regions.
The question is whether Nigeria will have enough competitive products ready when those tariff advantages fully arrive.
For decades, diversification has appeared in Nigerian policy documents as an aspiration. CEPA puts dates beside parts of that aspiration.
Every month spent treating the agreement primarily as a diplomatic achievement rather than an industrial deadline is a month of preparation lost.
Rules of origin change the calculation
There is another reason manufacturers need to start preparing now.
Trade preferences are not determined only by where a product is shipped from. CEPA includes rules of origin intended to ensure that preferential treatment benefits goods that genuinely qualify as Nigerian or Emirati products rather than goods simply routed through either country.
For Nigerian manufacturers, that means understanding the applicable origin requirements, documentation and product-specific criteria well before the tariff phase-outs are completed.
The opportunity is not in importing a finished product, changing its packaging and sending it onwards.
It lies in building enough Nigerian production and processing into the product to qualify for the agreement while creating economic value domestically.
That distinction is fundamental.
India offers a useful lesson
India’s experience with its own UAE CEPA demonstrates what can happen when market access is matched by export capacity.
The India-UAE agreement entered into force in May 2022. India’s merchandise exports to the UAE subsequently rose from about $28bn in the 2021–22 financial year to $36.63bn in 2024–25 — an increase of roughly 31 percent.
Nigeria should not assume it can reproduce India’s experience simply by signing a similar agreement. India entered its CEPA with a much deeper manufacturing base, broader industrial supply chains and greater export capacity.
That is precisely the point.
Market access rewards countries that already have something competitive to sell.
Nigeria’s challenge is therefore to use the transition period to build the productive capacity that turns tariff concessions into actual exports.
The work is now domestic
The remaining work is highly practical.
Nigeria needs export-oriented production clusters capable of delivering consistent volumes and quality. Manufacturers need certification systems that enable them to satisfy Emirati standards without long and expensive delays.
Ports, customs processes and logistics must become faster and cheaper.
That makes the first phase of the National Single Window, which went live on March 27, more consequential than its relatively technical profile might suggest. The platform is intended to reduce duplication and allow trade documentation to move through a centralised digital system.
Manufacturers also need working capital and export finance suited to companies attempting to scale beyond the domestic market.
None of these possibilities is abstract.
Nigeria can process more of its cocoa rather than exporting beans. It can export cashew kernels and consumer-ready products rather than predominantly raw nuts. Sesame can be processed, packaged and branded locally. Pharmaceuticals offer another avenue where domestic production capacity and Gulf demand could intersect.
What separates possibility from export revenue is production scale, quality, certification, financing and execution.
Nigeria’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Jumoke Oduwole, has urged Nigerian businesses to identify the opportunities created by the agreement and use the improved market access secured through CEPA.
That message now requires an equally determined industrial response.
Nigeria cannot waste the window
The tariff schedule will not wait for Nigerian factories.
The three- and five-year deadlines will arrive whether manufacturers have expanded capacity or not; whether certification systems have improved or not; whether logistics costs have fallen or not.
An unused trade preference has no economic value.
CEPA therefore gives Nigeria more than access to another market. It gives the country a measurable test of whether decades of rhetoric about industrialisation and export diversification can finally be translated into competitive production.
The runway is open.
Whether Nigeria has enough manufactured goods ready for take-off is now largely a Nigerian decision.
Oti Egwu is a Strategic Communications and Public Affairs Adviser specialising in Africa-Gulf relations.
