President Bola Tinubu has approved a one-year extension of Nigeria’s ban on the export of raw shea nuts, stretching the prohibition from February 26, 2026, to February 25, 2027.
The announcement was made on Wednesday through a statement signed by Bayo Onanuga, the President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, who said the extension reflects the administration’s commitment to industrial development and the broader objectives of its Renewed Hope Agenda.
The decision builds on a six-month ban that Tinubu had previously imposed to stimulate domestic processing and shield Nigeria’s shea industry from the structural disadvantage of exporting unprocessed raw material at far lower prices than what refined products command in international markets. With that initial ban now lapsed, the government has chosen not only to renew the restriction but to reinforce it with a tighter institutional and regulatory framework.
Under the new directives, Tinubu authorised the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment and the Presidential Food Security Coordination Unit to jointly coordinate a unified, evidence-based national framework designed to align industrialisation, trade, and investment priorities across the entire shea value chain. The President also approved the adoption of an export framework developed by the Nigerian Commodity Exchange and directed the outright withdrawal of all waivers previously granted for the direct export of raw shea nuts. Any surplus raw shea nuts, going forward, must be exported strictly through the NCX framework and only in line with approved guidelines.
Tinubu additionally instructed the Federal Ministry of Finance to open a dedicated Nigerian Export and Supervision Scheme Support Window to enable the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment pilot a Livelihood Finance Mechanism targeted at strengthening production and processing capacity at the community level.
The economic logic underpinning the ban is well established. Shea nuts are harvested from shea trees that grow predominantly across Nigeria’s Savanna belt, a stretch spanning states such as Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, Jigawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Plateau, Nasarawa, Benue, and Taraba, among others. The trees, known scientifically as Vitellaria paradoxa, are not cultivated in the conventional sense but grow wild and are tended by rural communities, with women playing a central role in harvesting and processing. Nigeria is widely regarded as one of the world’s largest producers of shea, alongside Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. According to available industry data, Nigeria alone accounts for a substantial share of global shea nut supply, with production estimates historically ranging between 300,000 and 400,000 metric tonnes annually, though figures vary across sources.
The commercial disparity that makes the export ban a matter of serious economic policy is stark. Processed shea butter commands between ten and twenty times the price of raw shea nuts in international markets. Shea butter is a prized ingredient across multiple global industries, including cosmetics and personal care, where it is valued for its moisturising properties; pharmaceuticals, where it features in topical formulations; and the food industry, particularly in confectionery manufacturing as a cocoa butter substitute in markets where it has received regulatory approval. Major global corporations in the beauty and food sectors source shea butter from West Africa, making the region’s shea industry deeply integrated into billion-dollar international supply chains. Yet for decades, Nigeria’s participation in this value chain has been largely limited to the lowest and least profitable rung: raw nut export.
This pattern is not unique to shea. Nigeria’s broader agricultural export history has long been characterised by the shipment of primary commodities at low prices while the value-added stages of processing, refining, and branding happen elsewhere, predominantly in Europe and North America. Cocoa, sesame, ginger, cashew, and groundnuts have all followed similar trajectories, with Nigeria generating far less revenue from these commodities than its production volumes ought to warrant. The shea export ban, in this context, is part of a broader structural argument the Tinubu administration has been making since taking office in May 2023: that Nigeria must arrest the haemorrhage of value through raw commodity exports and redirect economic activity toward manufacturing and processing on home soil.
The Nigerian Commodity Exchange, through whose framework the export of any surplus raw shea nuts must now be channelled, was restructured in recent years to serve as a more functional platform for agricultural commodities trading. Its involvement in the shea framework is intended to bring transparency, traceability, and pricing discipline to a market that has historically operated with considerable informality at the producer and aggregator levels.
The Livelihood Finance Mechanism approved through the NESS Support Window addresses a tension that has accompanied the ban since its introduction. Critics of the initial restriction, including shea traders and some commodity industry observers, raised concerns that an abrupt ban without corresponding support for local processors would hurt rural livelihoods rather than improve them, since processing infrastructure in many shea-producing areas remains limited and undercapitalised. By directing finance toward strengthening production and processing capacity, the government appears to be acknowledging that the policy’s long-term success depends on simultaneous investment in the supply-side conditions that make domestic value addition viable.
The Federal Government reiterated its commitment to policies that promote inclusive growth, local manufacturing, and Nigeria’s competitiveness in global agricultural value chains, according to the statement released by Onanuga.
Whether the extended ban will succeed where past agricultural value-addition policies have struggled depends significantly on how effectively the ministries involved can coordinate enforcement, channel financing to processors in time, and create the market conditions that make Nigerian-processed shea butter competitive both domestically and on the world market. Nigeria has a long institutional history of announcing ambitious agricultural transformation programmes that falter at implementation. The shea ban, with its more concrete regulatory teeth, including the withdrawal of waivers and the mandatory NCX export channel, represents a more structured attempt to convert policy intention into measurable economic outcome.
For the millions of women and rural communities across the Savanna belt whose livelihoods are bound up in shea production, the measure carries both promise and risk. Its promise lies in higher incomes from processed products. Its risk lies in the gap between policy announcement and the actual availability of processing infrastructure, working capital, and market access needed to deliver on that promise within the one-year window the government has set for itself.
