The Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) has said the United States’ decision to impose a 12.5 per cent tariff on imports from Nigeria is unlikely to have a significant impact on Nigeria’s economy.

The think tank disclosed this in a statement by its Chief Executive Officer, Muda Yusuf, on Sunday, citing the dominance of tariff-exempt petroleum exports and the relatively small share of Nigerian exports destined for the US.

On Friday, the United States announced a plan to impose a 12.5 per cent tariff on imports from Nigeria.

The US government said the decision is part of a new trade measure targeting countries that have failed to prohibit the importation of goods produced with forced labour.

CPPE said the tariff is part of a broader policy shift by the United States aimed at protecting domestic industries and strengthening manufacturing competitiveness.

According to the think tank, the new tariff regime is a continuation of the reciprocal tariff policy introduced under US President Donald Trump, though it is now implemented under a different legal framework.

“CPPE’s assessment is that the new tariff regime represents a continuation of the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariff policy, albeit under a different legal framework.

“Following the judicial invalidation of the earlier reciprocal tariffs, the current measures appear to have been restructured under Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act, with allegations relating to forced labour providing the statutory basis for their implementation,” CPPE said.

It added that although the legal basis has changed, the policy objective remains to essentially protect US domestic industries, strengthen American manufacturing competitiveness and advance broader US trade and economic interests.

Impact on Nigeria

The body said the direct economic implications for Nigeria would be limited because most of the country’s exports to the United States are petroleum products, which are exempt from the tariffs.

“Nigeria’s exports to the United States are heavily concentrated in crude oil, liquefied natural gas and other petroleum products, which account for more than 80 per cent of Nigeria’s merchandise exports to the US.

“These products have been exempted from the tariff measures, leaving the bulk of Nigeria’s exports unaffected,” the agency said.

CPPE also stated that the United States is not Nigeria’s largest export destination, noting that Nigeria’s first-quarter 2026 merchandise trade data showed that exports to the US accounted for only 5.56 per cent of total exports valued at about N21.6 trillion.

By comparison, India accounted for 13.09 per cent of Nigeria’s exports during the period, followed by France with 9.29 per cent, the Netherlands with 9.22 per cent and Spain with 7.68 per cent, placing the United States as the country’s fifth-largest export market.

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According to CPPE, these trade patterns reduce Nigeria’s exposure to the new tariff measures, noting that they will only have modest impacts on Nigeria’s export earnings, foreign exchange receipts and macroeconomic performance.

“While some non-oil exporters, particularly in agriculture and manufacturing, may experience reduced competitiveness in the U.S. market, the overall impact on Nigeria’s export earnings, foreign exchange receipts and macroeconomic performance is expected to be modest,” the body said.

The group added that the development reflects a broader shift in global trade towards protectionism and greater use of trade policy to advance domestic economic objectives.

Solution

CPPE urged Nigeria to accelerate export diversification, improve manufacturing competitiveness, deepen domestic value addition and maximise opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area.

It also called on the government to strengthen labour standards, improve supply chain transparency and engage the United States through diplomatic and trade channels to minimise the impact of the measures on affected exporters.

CPPE said the greater challenge for Nigeria lies in navigating an increasingly fragmented and protectionist global trading environment, rather than immediate export challenges.

“Overall, while the new US tariffs have generated understandable concern, their direct economic implications for Nigeria should not be overstated.

“The greater challenge lies not in the immediate loss of export opportunities, but in navigating an increasingly fragmented and protectionist global trading environment,” the think tank said.

The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company — Moonshot AI’s Kimi — reignited debates around American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI.

While there was plenty of conversation on social media, it seems the debate is also happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., where OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly lobbied regulators with concern about open Chinese models.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed why this seems to be such a hot button issue. Beyond suggesting that certain folks should “touch grass” rather than spending their weekends arguing on X, Sean noted that in many ways, this “feels like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts,” with everyone in Silicon Valley “expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away.”

And Kirsten noted that putting heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Keep reading for an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: For folks who have followed the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably be very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; on some benchmarks, it does as well, or at least seems competitive with some of the frontier models; and a certain portion of the tech industry loses their mind. 

Some of this [debate] got extra scrutiny because one of the people posting about it was [an executive] at OpenAI. But in general, there [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat US companies, at least in some aspects, and do it much more cheaply and in a much more open way?

Sean O’Kane: Yeah, there are many elements of this that feel like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts. I think one of my favorites is: Everybody is so ready [for] and so expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away. And I think my favorite example of that this past week was people showing off that “My gosh, Kimi made in 30 minutes an entire replication of macOS.” And yeah, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it’s not an OS.

We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everybody’s so jumpy in the tech industry. And I think in particular, with some of the Chinese models that come out, there’s this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: Go outside, touch grass, it’s the weekend. Everybody in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this jumpiness is really interesting to me because we’re now a week out and I don’t think anybody’s feeling like the end is nigh like they were a week ago.

Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, who tries to unpack the psychosis around this here in the United States. He points to a number of reasons. And concludes — and I don’t want to conclude it for him, but I think that there’s one that rises more to the top than others. 

There’s concerns that these Chinese open weight models might have an implicit bias towards China, there’s another worry about security risks and guardrails. But there’s also a pretty big idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to quote-unquote “win the race”? Is it going to be the US or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of what the fear is. 

I don’t know, Anthony, if you agree with that?

Anthony: I completely agree. I think the China aspect always adds this certain level of hysteria. And that’s not to say that people shouldn’t be concerned about how the U.S. stacks up against China across different industries. But it gets so amped up.

The other thing this reminds me of is the discussion around TikTok a few years ago. And again, it wasn’t that I thought that the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but that the level of how panicked people got — it seems as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just ramp up dramatically.  And then in this case, it’s linked to this discussion about open [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way we can control it is with these proprietary models from these American frontier companies. 

Obviously, most people saying this [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI czar for the Trump administration [and] now has a different role in the Trump administration, was shouting on X about how, “I can’t believe people are opposing data centers, we’re tying ourselves in knots, there’s too much regulation.” And so it’s a way to argue for the positions that they already had around AI. “My gosh, if China beats us, that’s unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.”

Kirsten: Right, and if you were to put across-the-board bans on Chinese open weight models — I’m not saying that there aren’t real concerns here, but let’s just play that out. If we were to do that, it would benefit models created by OpenAI, for instance, and it would force enterprises to use those as opposed to using models like Kimi.

So you really have to ask the question: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Sean: At this point, we should say a lot of this discussion really got kicked off by the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, who was the first one to come out with this really long post mentioning some of these concerns.

Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people disagreed with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was driven by the fact that he kind of just said the thing out loud. He basically said the US should create regulatory FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and muck up the ability for these open weight models to compete with the US. [Ball later backed away from this argument.]

And to me, I think you can read in some of the responses from folks, like, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.”