By By Matthew Alugbin
What happened at the Lagos International Trade Fair Complex on Monday, September 14, 2026, deserves a critical assessment. Local traders, primarily within the Auto Spare Parts and Machinery Dealers Association, held a protest at the complex over concerns regarding Chinese merchants expanding directly into small-scale retail trade. The events point to one of the issues in the political economy of postcolonial Africa.
The Nigerian traders have suddenly discovered what Karl Marx tried to explain in Capital and elsewhere: that capitalism reduces all human connections to instrumental, market-based transactions. Under this system, relationships are contingent on economic benefit rather than loyalty or shared values. A “friend” is only a friend as long as they serve the drive for profit. The reality is that capital has no permanent friend. The wholesaler of yesterday is the retailer of today.
Some traders were not comfortable that Chinese merchants are now into the retail business. They went ahead to protest this perceived invasion. The story is simple. The Chinese merchant was invited, or invited himself, into Nigeria as the one who brings the goods in bulk. The Nigerian trader is the middleman. The entire architecture of Alaba, Ladipo, Trade Fair, Computer Village, is built on that middleman logic. The middleman in Lagos gives a list to a Chinese supplier. Chinese supplier ships. The middleman clears and distributes to smaller Ogas. Smaller Ogas sell to you and me at three times the price and blame the dollar.
That model has worked for many years. It made many millionaires. Now the Chinese supplier has decided that the middleman is a needless expense. Why should I sell to the Nigerian middleman so that he can add his margin and resell to downlines, when I can rent my own shop at Trade Fair, bring my workers from China, and sell directly to the same downlines at a price the Nigerian middleman cannot match? Note that the Chinese have access to credit at about 3 or 4 percent in China. Meanwhile, the Nigerian middleman borrows at between 19 and 26 percent from a bank that will ask him to bring his great-grandfather’s death certificate as collateral.
Economists may call this vertical integration. Nigerian middlemen see it as, “they are taking our shops.” The moment the wholesaler decides to become the retailer, the retailer is finished. The moment a producer devises means to reach the end users, the middleman becomes irrelevant. This is how capitalist economies work, and it is where sympathy for the Trade Fair protesters becomes complicated.
Sadly, we have a country that has a less effective industrial policy. We have a country whose idea of economic planning is to ban rice importation today and “unban” it tomorrow. We have turned importation itself into an industry. We have decided not to manufacture, yet we are shocked that the man who manufactures has decided to come and sell the products himself. The Chinese are not doing anything illegal in the moral sense of illegality. They are doing what capital does. It is the logic of data capitalism.
The problem is not the Chinese. The problem is the Nigerian state, which has abdicated its responsibility to regulate retail. The sad reality is that there is no legal protection for vulnerable retailers. In Nigeria, what we have is a Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission Act that is so vague it could mean anything. It gives open market access without protection for indigenous retailers. This is not so in Ghana and some African countries. Meanwhile, try to engage the Nigerian consumer who will go to the Trade Fair because the Chinese shop sells the same generator for N20,000 less. That consumer does not care about your economic nationalism. That consumer is trying to survive Tinubu’s economy. They will buy from whoever is cheapest.
We also need to look at ourselves. For years, Nigerian traders have been importers, not producers. We import everything, down to a toothpick. We celebrated Alaba as an enterprise when Alaba is mostly importation of what someone else produced. Now someone else has come to import it more efficiently than us. Why are we surprised? We must ask ourselves honest questions. What have we done with years of dominance in that Trade Fair Complex? Did we build factories? Did we turn those warehouses into plants that produce what we sell? No! We only built bigger warehouses to import more products.
So when we claim that they are trying to take our business, the question is to ask: which business? The business of importing? That business was never ours in the first place. It was always borrowed. We borrowed someone else’s productivity and added margin. Now someone more productive has come to collect his margin back. Nigerian trading capital is spectacularly unproductive. It does not innovate, nor does it manufacture. It merely circulates the same Chinese fan, the same Chinese tile, the same Chinese wire, for twenty years, and calls that enterprise. After dominating imports, we must learn to become a producer. Otherwise, we will forever be protesting against the next foreigner who will trade better than us.
