ABUJA, Nigeria — President Bola Tinubu has ordered an immediate, temporary six-month suspension of Nigeria’s raw shea nut exports, a move the government says is designed to curb informal trade, feed local processors starved of inputs and capture more value at home.
Vice-President Kashim Shettima conveyed the directive at a multi-stakeholder session at the Presidential Villa, describing it as “not an anti-trade policy but a pro-value addition policy designed to secure raw materials for our processing factories and [to] run them at full capacity, thereby boosting rural income and jobs for our people.”
He added that the shift aims to reposition the country “from an exporter of raw shea nut to a global supplier of refined shea butter, oil and other derivatives.”
The Presidency’s media office had earlier flagged the order, while Shettima presided over what officials called an “implementation meeting” with regulators, industry groups and exporters to agree on enforcement steps.
Officials framed the moratorium as part of a wider industrial policy: Nigeria, they said, produces roughly 350,000 metric tonnes of shea annually and accounts for nearly 40 percent of global supply—yet captures only about 1 percent of a $6.5 billion international market because most exports leave as raw kernels.
The government now targets at least $300 million in annual earnings in the short term, with the potential for a tenfold rise by 2027 as processing expands.
Abubakar Kyari, the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, said local plants operate at about 35–50 percent of their combined 160,000-tonne installed capacity, in part because Nigeria “loses over 90,000 tonnes to informal cross-border trade each year.”
He noted that neighbours such as Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Togo already restrict raw exports to bolster domestic industries, leaving Nigeria “an outlier and a hotspot for opportunistic buying.”
Women are expected to be among the biggest beneficiaries.
More than 90 percent of pickers and many processors in the shea belt are women, Kyari said, arguing that moving up the value chain would support rural incomes and jobs.
“Shea is one of the few commodities where our country holds both a comparative and absolute advantage,” he said.
The State House later underscored that the ban is time-limited and subject to review, part of a package that also seeks new market access, including talks to fast-track entry for Nigerian shea butter and oil into Brazil within three months, according to briefings shared from the Villa.
Nigeria’s press statement did not set out detailed enforcement protocols, but officials said an inter-agency team has been meeting exporters and processors to align on compliance while allowing shipments of processed derivatives—such as butter, olein and stearin—to continue.
The aim, Shettima said, is “industrialisation, rural transformation, gender empowerment and expanding Nigeria’s global trade footprint.”
