Fejiro Oliver
What did the divorce from ECOWAS cost Nigerian exporters on the three Sahel corridors? For one full year, every public discussion of the trade fallout quoted figures from before the split. Naijaonpoint has now computed the first full-year, before-and-after account from the National Bureau of Statistics’ Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics reports for the first, second, third and fourth quarters of 2025. The numbers answer the question, and the answer is not the one the obituaries predicted.
Nigeria’s exports to Niger Republic climbed from ₦82.38 billion in the 2024 full year to ₦131.77 billion in the 2025 full year, a rise of 59.9 percent. Exports to Burkina Faso rose from ₦18.20 billion in 2024 to ₦58.97 billion in 2025, more than tripling, up 224.1 percent. Only Mali followed the expected script: exports there fell from ₦15.42 billion in 2024 to ₦8.05 billion in 2025, a drop of 47.8 percent. All three countries formally left ECOWAS on January 29, 2025, when the year-long notice they gave in January 2024 took effect.
The Niger corridor did not even blink. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the last quarter before the exit, Nigeria exported ₦25.91 billion worth of goods to Niger. In the first quarter of 2025, after the exit, the figure was ₦25.20 billion, barely changed. It then rose to ₦26.19 billion in the second quarter of 2025, jumped to ₦40.85 billion in the third quarter of 2025 and closed at ₦39.52 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Electricity carried the corridor: in the third quarter of 2025 alone, electrical energy sold to Niger was worth ₦28.70 billion, seven of every ten naira of that quarter’s exports. Cement did its part too. In the first quarter of 2025, cement clinkers shipped to Niger were worth ₦1.35 billion, and tobacco and coal moved through the same land borders alongside it. [NEEDS DOC: NCS/NEPC export manifests for the Jibiya (Katsina) and Illela (Sokoto) corridors confirming 2025 volumes and the full commodity mix]
The Burkina Faso corridor is where the numbers turn strange. Nigeria exported ₦5.85 billion worth of goods to Burkina Faso in the fourth quarter of 2024. In 2025 the quarterly figures were ₦6.68 billion, ₦12.90 billion, ₦22.53 billion and ₦16.86 billion. But the tripling is almost entirely a tobacco story. In the third quarter of 2025, cigarettes shipped to Burkina Faso were worth ₦20.66 billion, more than nine of every ten naira of that quarter’s exports. In the fourth quarter of 2025, cigarettes accounted for ₦13.51 billion of the ₦16.86 billion total, four of every five naira. Whatever else the Sahel divorce changed on that corridor, it did not interrupt the cigarette trade.
Mali is the corridor that paid the price. Nigeria’s exports to Mali were ₦801.28 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. In 2025 they were ₦212.78 million in the first quarter, ₦1.67 billion in the second, ₦4.83 billion in the third and ₦1.34 billion in the fourth. The first quarter of 2025 was the weakest quarter of the year for the Mali corridor, and the full year ended 47.8 percent below the 2024 figure.
The three juntas did not leave trade policy untouched. On March 28, 2025, the Alliance of Sahel States began collecting its 0.5 percent Confederal Levy, the PC-AES, on the customs value of goods imported from ECOWAS member states, under a document signed by Mali’s General Assimi Goita. The levy breaks the promise of duty-free trade the three countries enjoyed under the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme, and it landed inside the transitional period ECOWAS itself declared after the exit, when the then ECOWAS Commission president Omar Touray invoked Article 91 of the revised ECOWAS Treaty at the bloc’s 66th ordinary summit. Humanitarian aid is exempt from the levy, oil imports from non-member countries are not subject to it, and national customs authorities are required to transfer the collected funds to the AES within 15 days of each month’s end. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso nevertheless admit the 0.5 percent is a mirror of the ECOWAS community levy they paid for decades, and Mali’s economy minister Alousseni Sanou said in 2025 it would not burden consumers because it was merely a transfer. [NEEDS DOC: Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso customs circulars or enforcement directives on Nigerian-origin goods and on collection of the 0.5 percent levy]
On the ground, the trade moved anyway. The Jibiya and Illela border posts in Katsina and Sokoto states remain the main land gates into Niger Republic, and 2026 reporting from the corridors tells of traders absorbing rising transport costs and delays at informal checkpoints, with some cargoes slipping into unrecorded channels. Nigeria ships between 50,000 and 75,000 tons of maize to Niger every year, by one 2026 account, accounting for the bulk of Niger’s dry grain imports, though no NBS 2025 value was published for maize on any of the three corridors. [NEEDS DOC: 2025 commodity-line values for petroleum gas and maize shipped to Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali] By contrast, petroleum gas, which the Observatory of Economic Complexity put at $44.6 million of Nigeria’s exports to Niger in 2023, does not appear in the NBS 2025 top-product tables for any of the three destinations.
The irony is plain. In January 2026, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council reported that Nigeria’s non-oil exports to the ECOWAS region fell 4.6 percent in 2025 to $272 million because of the withdrawal of the three countries. The NBS country tables tell a different story at corridor level: the two corridors nearest Nigeria’s northern border grew by ₦90.16 billion combined in 2025, while only the farthest one, Mali, shrank by ₦7.38 billion. The sanctions-era border closure of 2023 had already taught northern traders to route around Abuja’s politics, and the 2025 numbers suggest they learned the lesson well. The cost of the AES split was not paid in Niamey or Ouagadougou. It was paid in Bamako.
Source: …Secretsreporters