Electronics · Act I — Sanyo, National, Sharp: The Japanese Era

Between roughly 1968 and 1985, the brown goods in a Nigerian middle-class living room were almost always Japanese. Sanyo, National (Matsushita / Panasonic), Sharp, Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba divided the market for televisions, radios, fans, refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners. The dominance was so complete that 'National' became a generic word for a refrigerator, the way 'Omo' became a generic word for detergent and 'Cabin Biscuit' for cream crackers.

It was not pure import. The oil-boom industrial-policy push of the early 1970s (Indigenisation Decrees of 1972 and 1977) forced foreign brands to assemble locally with Nigerian equity partners. Sanyo set up an assembly plant in Ikeja in 1972 through a joint venture with the Mandilas group. National/Matsushita televisions and radios were assembled by Thorn Electric (Nigeria) and later by AIICO Electronics. Sharp components moved through Henry Stephens and the Leventis trading chain. The result, by the late 1970s, was an electronics industry employing an estimated 22,000 Nigerians across Ikeja, Apapa and Aba — small by Asian standards, real by African ones.

The product line was narrow but consequential. The black-and-white television set (the NTA national network had launched colour broadcast in 1975 for FESTAC 77, but most homes were monochrome until the mid-1980s). The transistor radio, on which an entire generation followed the Biafran war, the 1976 Murtala assassination announcement, and the 1983 Shagari overthrow. The kerosene-or-electric refrigerator — usually a single-door National or Sanyo, which families budgeted for the way later generations budgeted for cars. The ceiling fan and the standing fan, which substituted for the air-conditioning that the broken grid could not power. Cassette decks — National Panasonic stereos — that played the Sunny Adé, Fela, Christy Essien-Igbokwe records of the era.

Two conditions made the Japanese era possible and two conditions ended it. It rested on the overvalued naira of the oil boom (the pound-to-naira pegged 1973 currency traded near parity with the dollar through 1981), which made dollar-priced Japanese components affordable, and on the 40–60% local-assembly tariff wall that kept finished imports out. Both conditions collapsed with the 1986 Structural Adjustment Programme: the naira fell from ₦1 to the dollar to ₦4 in eighteen months and to ₦22 by 1993, while liberalisation gutted the tariff protection that paid for assembly. By 1990 the Sanyo plant in Ikeja was running one shift a week; by 1996 it had stopped.

The Japanese brands themselves did not collapse — they simply withdrew. Sony, Panasonic and Sharp continued to export finished goods to Nigeria, but at price points reachable only by the dollar-earning elite, while the local assembly footprint was abandoned. The vacuum that opened in the mid-1990s was filled first by Korean brands (LG, Samsung, Daewoo, Tec — see Act II) and ultimately by the Chinese (Hisense, TCL, Haier, Skyworth — see Act III). The Japanese era left behind only the vocabulary ('Put on the National', 'pass me the Sony') and the second-hand market: the Sanyo refrigerator a family bought in 1979 was, in 2005, still running on a generator in a tailor's shop in Aba.