“They make you buy new paperwork,” one trucker says. “We probably pay 3,000-4,000 naira (roughly $15-$20) every journey.” When the milk finally arrives on supermarket shelves, it costs around three times what it would in Europe. Cheap long-life imports sell for less than half the price of local milk. Nigeria spends roughly $1m a day on imported milk powder, according to Sahel Capital, a private equity group which recently invested the same amount into Mr Abubakar’s business in the hope of changing that.
Other types of farming are equally fraught.