From 2003 until the World Bank suspended the index in 2021 (after the data-manipulation scandal involving Saudi Arabia, China, the UAE and Azerbaijan), the Doing Business rankings provided 17 consecutive years of comparable cross-country data on the cost and time of starting, operating and closing a firm. Nigeria's trajectory across those 17 years is the single cleanest empirical record of why an economy of 230 million people produces so little of what it consumes.
The rankings. Nigeria's best-ever position was 131 of 190 (2020 edition, reflecting 2018–2019 reforms). Its worst was 170 of 190 (2014 edition). In every other year it ranked between 145 and 170. By comparison, in the same 17-year window: Rwanda moved from 158 to 38; Kenya from 132 to 56; Morocco from 115 to 53; Mauritius from 49 to 13; even Côte d'Ivoire (recovering from civil war) moved from 165 to 110. Nigeria's trajectory was, in net, flat.
The components that did not move. Three sub-indices stayed in the worst quartile globally for the entire period the report ran:
- Getting electricity — Nigeria ranked 171 of 190 in the final 2020 edition. The cost to connect a small commercial premises to the grid was measured at 365% of annual income per capita (vs. a sub-Saharan African median of 1,800% — Nigeria was below median here only because GDP per capita is low, not because the absolute cost is). Time to connect: 115 days. Reliability of supply index: 0 out of 8. This is the regulatory bottleneck explored in Why Nigeria Has No Power and the Inverter / Solar Republic story.
- Registering property — Nigeria ranked 183 of 190. The transaction took 105 days and cost 11.1% of property value in stamp duties, governor's consent and registration fees, vs. a high-income OECD average of 4.2% and 23 days. The underlying issue is the Land Use Act of 1978, which vests all urban land in state governors and requires Governor's Consent for every transfer or mortgage — a process that, in Lagos, can take 12–18 months in practice and that effectively prevents mortgage-financed homeownership at scale. This is one of the Seven Pipes that drain household wealth.
- Trading across borders — Nigeria ranked 179 of 190. Border compliance time for an export consignment: 135 hours (vs. OECD high-income 12.5 hours). Documentary compliance time for an import: 154 hours. Border compliance cost for an import: $1,077 per container (vs. OECD high-income $111). This is the gap that makes Cotonou the back-door port for substandard goods and that prices Nigerian-manufactured exports out of the regional market even before they reach the dock.
The sectors most affected are, in declining order of measurable impact:
Manufacturing — the worst hit. A 2023 Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) survey of 423 member firms put self-generated electricity at 27% of total operating cost (vs. 4% in Kenya, 7% in Ghana). Add a port-clearance time that ties up working capital for 11–14 days vs. 2 days in Tema (Ghana) or Lomé (Togo); regulatory inspections by 22 federal and state agencies at the factory gate (NESG audit, 2022); and a credit market that does not extend tenor beyond 18 months. The cumulative arithmetic is that to land the same finished product into the Nigerian consumer market, a Nigerian manufacturer pays 30–45% more in pre-margin costs than a Vietnamese, Turkish or Bangladeshi importer of the same product through the same Apapa port. This is the structural answer to why the textile industry collapsed, why vehicle assembly never recovered, and why most Nigerian-owned manufacturing of scale clusters outside the formal regulatory grid in Nnewi or Aba.
Pharmaceuticals. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Group of MAN estimates that only 30% of medicines consumed in Nigeria are made in Nigeria, down from 60% in 1990. The reasons map onto the Doing Business indices directly: a 600bpd captive-power requirement, 60–90-day port clearance for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and a NAFDAC re-registration regime that costs more in Nigeria than in any other ECOWAS jurisdiction. India and China supply the difference.
Construction / building materials. Lagos State data (2023) puts the median time to obtain a residential building approval at 9 months, vs. a target of 28 days. The 'dealing with construction permits' sub-index ranked Nigeria 172 of 190. The downstream effect is the 20-year housing deficit estimated by the Federal Mortgage Bank at 28 million units, and a cement market in which one firm — Dangote Cement, 60% of Nigerian cement output — sets the price because no second supply chain at scale can clear the regulatory cost.
Logistics and shipping. Apapa and Tin Can Island handle ~80% of Nigerian seaborne trade between them, on an access-road network that has not been re-engineered since 1979. The 2018–2023 'Apapa gridlock' produced peak truck-turnaround times of 14–21 days for a return trip into the port; a 2021 NPA study put the standby cost of trucks waiting to enter the port at ₦1.2 trillion a year. The downstream cost is added to every container of imported pharmaceuticals, electronics, food and machinery.
Why the index was suspended — and why the underlying numbers still matter. The 2021 suspension of *Doing Business* followed the discovery that World Bank staff had been pressured to manipulate the China, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Azerbaijan scores. The methodology itself was not discredited. The successor report, B-READY (first edition published October 2024), retains the underlying sub-indicators on getting electricity, registering property, trading across borders, and enforcing contracts. Nigeria was not in the first B-READY cohort but is scheduled for the 2025 edition. The reform agenda the suspension paused — Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) operational independence, the Apapa port-access road reconstruction, the National Single Window for trade (still 8 years overdue), the electronic Certificate of Occupancy at Lagos State Land Bureau — is what determines whether the 2025 B-READY score will be a continuation of the flat 145–170 range or a genuine break from it.
The bottom line. The most cited number in this story is the wrong one. The headline 'Nigeria ranked 131 of 190 in 2020' obscures the operational reality: a Nigerian manufacturer pays 30–45% more in regulatory and infrastructure costs than a comparator-country importer, and a Nigerian property owner cannot use the most valuable asset on her balance sheet — urban land — as collateral, because the Land Use Act requires a 105-day, 11.1%-of-value transfer process to do so. These are not opinions; they are the measured outputs of the index. They are the reason every other story on this site — credit, wealth, exports, power, textiles, cars — reaches the same structural conclusion.