Nigeria’s foreign trade policy

From a BusinessDay Nigeria column:

[O]ur trade policy has remained very inconsistent many years after independence. Recent reforms – particularly the NEEDS – have however tried to considerably minimize the unpredictability of the trade policy regime by establishing a schedule to fully adopt the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) common external tariff (CET) by 1 January 2008, and respect obligations under multilateral trading systems. However, according to Afeikhena Jerome in a 2005 paper titled” Institutional Framework and the Process of Trade Policy Making in Africa: The Case of Nigeria”, “trade policy formulation and implementation in Nigeria, even though conditioned by the global context, is dominated by governmental and inter-governmental agencies whose responsibilities overlap and between which coordination is deficient. There is no identifiable source or structure of research and analytical support for trade policy making in Nigeria”.

Reminds me of a meeting I had in 2008 with a high-ranking official at the Nigerian ministry of trade. I asked whether I could get a copy of the country’s trade policy document. He said there was no document like that, and there hadn’t been one in a while.