We Are Already Growing It. We Just Aren’t Getting Paid

The medicinal cannabis market Nigeria cannot afford to ignore

I have never taken drugs. Not once. Not even the ceremonial puff at a university party that everyone seems to have in their origin story. I say this not as a boast — it is simply a fact, and a useful one for what follows. I have no personal stake in this argument. No dog in this fight. No suppressed nostalgia for Amsterdam cafés to colour my judgment.

What I do have is a habit, acquired over decades in finance and public policy, of noticing when a market is growing at double digits and the country I care most about has no coherent plan to participate in it.

The global medicinal cannabis market was valued at approximately $20–25 billion in 2023. It is growing at between 20 and 25 percent annually. By the end of this decade, most projections place it in the $60–90 billion range, depending on regulatory expansion and market definitions. These are not speculative figures from a niche publication — they reflect estimates across major market research firms that serious investors and trade ministries rely upon. The countries that moved early — Canada, Germany, Thailand, Morocco, and a clutch of smaller African nations — are building industries, attracting investment, and booking tax revenue. Even Britain where green houses are needed to cultivate have issued guidelines. Nigeria, which has some of the most favourable growing conditions on earth for the crop in question, has no policy framework for any of this.

That is the puzzle I want to sit with today.

We Are Already in the Business

Nigeria’s comparative advantage in agriculture is frequently invoked and rarely capitalised upon. We have 84 million hectares of arable land, only a fraction under cultivation. We have a climate ranging from the humid tropics of the south to the drier savanna of the north. We have a young, large, and chronically underemployed workforce. And we have a crop that has been growing here, without permission and without policy, for a very long time.

Cannabis sativa is not a foreign introduction to Nigeria’s agricultural landscape. It has been cultivated illegally — primarily in Ondo, Edo, Delta, and parts of the South-South — for decades. The NDLEA’s annual seizure statistics are, in a perverse way, a testament to the scale of production. Nigeria is already growing cannabis. The question is not whether the crop can be produced here — it plainly can. The question is whether the state captures any of the value, or whether that value continues to flow entirely through informal channels that pay no tax, create no regulated employment, and generate no foreign exchange.

Nigeria is already growing cannabis. The question is not whether the crop can be produced here — it plainly can. The question is whether the state captures any of the value, or whether that value flows through channels that pay no tax and generate no foreign exchange.

The Foreign Exchange Case

When I served as Minister of Finance, the conversation I had most often — with investors, and international institutions — was about diversification. How does Nigeria reduce its dependence on oil? How does it earn foreign exchange from sectors not hostage to a commodity price set in Rotterdam? How does it build export industries that create jobs and generate fiscal revenue that compounds over time?

Medicinal cannabis is interesting because it disrupts that calculus in an unusual way. Unlike bulk agricultural commodities, where Nigeria competes against countries with infrastructure and logistics advantages we cannot easily close, pharmaceutical-grade cannabis commands margins that reward quality and compliance over sheer volume. A kilogram of CBD extract is not priced like a kilogram of cocoa. The value addition happens at the processing stage — and processing is something we can, with the right policy, do here.

To understand where cannabis sits relative to markets Nigeria already participates in — or has participated in and lost ground — consider the table below.

Market	Value Today	Projected	CAGR	Nigeria’s Current Position
Medicinal Cannabis ★	~$20–25bn (2024)	~$60–90bn (2030)	~22%	No framework. An existing illegal cultivation base generates no tax, no forex, no formal employment.
Cocoa	~$25bn (2024)	~$38bn (2032)	~5%	4th largest producer globally. Exports raw beans. Captures none of the chocolate margin.
Chocolate	~$131bn (2024)	~$173bn (2030)	~4%	Same bean. Eight times the market value. Nigeria is at the bottom of the chain.
Palm Oil	~$70bn (2024)	~$100bn (2033)	~5%	Once the world’s largest producer. Now a net importer. A cautionary tale about squandered advantage.
Coffee	~$245bn (2024)	~$380bn (2034)	~5%	Negligible producer. Largely absent from a market this size.

Sources: Grand View Research; IMARC Group; Data Bridge Market Research; Precedence Research; Polaris Market Research. Figures are approximate and reflect mid-range estimates across multiple research providers. Projections to 2030–35 reflect consensus CAGR applied to current values.

The table makes a point that I find more useful than any statistic in isolation. Nigeria is already participating in most of these markets. The pattern across every row except cannabis is identical: raw material out, finished value somewhere else. Cocoa grows in Ondo and Ekiti; the chocolate margin ends up in Switzerland. Oil palm is indigenous to West Africa; Indonesia and Malaysia took the industry and built it into a $70 billion market while Nigeria became a net importer of its own native crop.

Medicinal cannabis is the one market in this table where Nigeria could theoretically enter at processing and pharmaceutical level from the start, precisely because no country has yet established an insurmountable lead on the African continent. That window will not stay open indefinitely.

There is also a tax architecture argument that rarely gets made. A licensed medicinal cannabis industry would, if structured correctly, be unusually taxable. The industry has natural chokepoints — seed supply, cultivation licensing, processing, export certification, pharmaceutical approval — at which revenue can be collected cleanly. The regulatory requirements for pharmaceutical products demand documentation. The taxman’s job becomes significantly easier when the industry cannot legally operate without paperwork. Canada’s Cannabis Act generated C$580 million in federal and provincial tax revenue in its first full year of operation. That came from an industry that had previously generated no fiscal revenue at all.

The Countries That Moved While We Watched

I want to name the African comparators specifically, because the instinct in Nigerian policy circles is to look to Europe or North America and miss what is happening closer to home.

Lesotho issued its first medicinal cannabis cultivation licence in 2017. Zimbabwe licensed production in 2018. Zambia followed in 2019. Malawi — one of Africa’s poorest economies, historically dependent on tobacco — legalised medicinal and industrial cannabis in 2020 as an explicit crop diversification and export strategy. Rwanda established a regulatory framework in 2021. Morocco, which legalised industrial and medicinal cultivation the same year, is now positioning itself as a primary supplier to the European market.

None of these countries has the agricultural scale, the demographic base, the industrial capacity, or the pharmaceutical infrastructure that Nigeria possesses. They moved anyway, because the economics were obvious. Nigeria watched.

None of these countries has the agricultural scale, the demographic base, or the pharmaceutical infrastructure that Nigeria possesses. They moved anyway, because the economics were obvious. Nigeria watched.

The Objections, Briefly

I am not dismissing the counterarguments. The gateway concern — that any cannabis legalisation signals social permissiveness — is not irrational in a country where the NDLEA has spent years containing a significant drug abuse problem. But it is an argument about implementation and communication, not an argument against a medicinal framework. Regulation runs in the opposite direction from permissiveness: it moves supply from uncontrolled black markets, where product quality is unknown, into licensed supply chains where formulations are controlled and use is medically supervised. The religious and cultural sensitivities are real and deserve respect; the policy answer is a framework that is visibly and credibly pharmaceutical, in which the route to a medicinal cannabis product runs through a doctor’s prescription and a licensed pharmacy. Germany’s model, which explicitly separates pharmaceutical cannabis from social use legislation, is one template. Others exist.

The enforcement capacity objection is perhaps the most pointed. If Nigeria cannot currently enforce prohibition, how will it enforce a licensing regime? The answer is that prohibition without enforcement has already produced an outcome: a large, unregulated industry operating entirely outside state visibility. A licensing regime does not need to be perfectly enforced to be an improvement on that baseline.

The Cost of Watching

In finance, inaction has a cost. It does not appear on the ledger the way a bad investment does, which makes it easy to overlook. But opportunity cost is as real as any other kind.

Every year Nigeria does not develop a medicinal cannabis framework, other countries are building the supply chains, establishing regulatory recognition, signing trade agreements, and developing human capital that will define this industry’s structure for the next two decades. The relationships being built now between Moroccan producers and European distributors, between Malawian cultivators and pharmaceutical processors, between Lesotho and the Swiss pharmaceutical supply chain — these are not easily displaced. Nigeria does not need to be first. It is too late for that. But it needs to move before the market structures are so firmly set that entering them requires displacing incumbents rather than simply joining a growing industry.

The window is still open. It is not, however, indefinitely open.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com. She writes from Lagos.