Two adjacent kilometres of Lagos do more electronics trade than the rest of West Africa combined. Alaba International Market in Ojo (founded as a refugee market by Igbo traders returning from the East after the civil war, formally laid out in 1978) handles brown goods, white goods, audio, video, generators, inverters and solar. Computer Village in Ikeja (which grew out of the Ikeja Computer Centre cluster around Pepple Street from about 1995) handles laptops, phones, accessories, components and repair. Together they clear an estimated ₦4–6 trillion of turnover a year (LCCI, 2022) and employ — directly and through the porters, drivers, technicians and apprentices who orbit them — well over 250,000 people.
The trade architecture is distinctive. An importer in Alaba does not place an order with Hisense Qingdao the way Samsung Nigeria places an order with Samsung Seoul. He flies to Guangzhou every quarter, walks the Tianhe and Huaqiangbei wholesale markets, picks a model that meets a Nigerian price point (₦185,000 for a 43-inch smart TV in 2023), negotiates volume and a label — sometimes the factory brand, sometimes his own brand stencilled on — and ships a 40-foot container through Apapa or Tin Can with the finance arranged on a 60- or 90-day letter of credit from a Lagos commercial bank. The same architecture covers spare parts: a broken LG compressor in Surulere is replaced from an Alaba stall in 48 hours, often with a Chinese-made compatible part costing a third of the LG original.
This is what gives Nigerian electronics its repair-economy character. Where the American or European consumer discards a five-year-old television, the Nigerian consumer takes it to a technician in Lawanson, Mushin, Aba or Onitsha who will replace the panel driver board, the power supply, the backlight strip or the HDMI port for a fraction of the new-unit cost. The Computer Village motherboard-level repair trade — board re-flowing, BGA reballing, IC desoldering on phones — is internationally competitive enough that traders from Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin Republic ship faulty devices into Ikeja for repair and out again. UNIDO estimated in 2020 that this informal repair sector kept roughly ₦310bn of value in the Nigerian economy each year that would otherwise have gone to replacement imports.
Three fragilities sit beneath the volume. First, e-waste: an estimated 500,000 tonnes a year of end-of-life electronics — much of it the tokunbo white-goods stream of Act II — pile up in Alaba's surrounding scrap yards (Olusosun, Katangua), with the mercury, lead and brominated flame retardants leaching into Lagos groundwater. The 2011 NESREA E-Waste Regulations are largely unenforced. Second, counterfeit and substandard product: SON estimates 35–45% of small appliances on Alaba shelves fail the basic safety standard, and fake Schneider/MK sockets and counterfeit Lithium batteries are implicated in a measurable share of Lagos house fires. Third, forced relocation: Computer Village has been under a Lagos State threat of relocation to Katangowa since 2008, and Alaba sits on a federal trunk road that periodically becomes the subject of demolition notices (the governor's pen).
The two markets are, in effect, Nigeria's national electronics ministry. They set the price the consumer pays, the brand mix on Nigerian shelves, the speed at which the smartphone revolution reached Onitsha, and the technical labour pool that keeps fifteen-year-old appliances alive. No Nigerian government policy on industrial electronics has shaped the market the way these two clusters have. They are the value chain — the only domestic value chain the sector has.
Figure 1
Nigerian consumer-electronics market share, 1972–2024 (% by units sold)
Three waves: Japanese assembly, Korean retail dominance, then a Chinese flood out of Alaba and Computer Village. Local assembly never rose above one fifth.