The Price You See in Kano Is Not the Price That Moves Nigeria's Grain

Walk into Dawanau market or Sabon Gari market in Kano on a Monday morning, inquire the price of grains there, ask a grain aggregator in Kano for prices, then head down to the west to ask the procurement officers in farms and feedmills how much they purchase grains, and you would get a different price for each inquiry. Different prices, same commodity.

I observed directly on the field the different price layers, from the buyer's demand prices, the spot market prices in Kano, the aggregator that sources directly from farmers, to the farmer in Kaduna who just harvested bags of maize to sell. The price discrepancies are real.

Maize price discovery, field research

Before I walked into Dawanau market in Kano, the largest grain wholesale market in West Africa, I checked every published source I could find for Nigerian maize prices.

FEWS NET, the global food security monitoring system, told me that maize prices in Nigeria were below last year's levels and the five-year average in most markets. Directionally useful, but operationally worthless. No number, no location, no grade specification.

The National Bureau of Statistics publishes a high-frequency crowdsourced food price dataset covering all 36 states. The documented coverage is genuinely wide, but the prices collected do not distinguish between the different specifications of maize.

A widely cited commodity price platform put Nigerian maize at 452 Naira per kilogram in Abuja and Lagos in March 2026. This is a retail and end-consumer figure. It is a completely different reality, and a published figure.

My price discovery in Dawanau spot market was 300 to 330 Naira per kg. The only number that determines whether a deal is viable appears in none of the reports that policymakers, development organisations and investors use to make decisions about Nigerian commodity markets.

This is not a data collection failure. It is a structural failure.

Access to pricing information is built on trust. That trust has not been established at scale across the commodity chain, which is why real pricing stays hidden. But access cuts both ways. For those already inside the network, pricing information is not a problem. It is an advantage. They see the number that moves grain across Nigeria. Everyone else, the policymaker, the development program, the startup trying to fix the system, is working in the dark.

This is what market layering looks like in practice. The public price is real. The relationship price is also real.

If the price data that governs billions in agricultural investment is based on the wrong layer of market pricing, who benefits from keeping it wrong?