NIGERIA has moved to position itself as the continental leader in African digital trade, launching a high-level government report that frames seamless cross-border payments as the decisive variable in whether MSMEs can access the $3.5 trillion market promised by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
The “Cross-Border Digital Payments and Identity in Nigeria under the AfCFTA” report, unveiled Monday by Deputy Chief of Staff to the President Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia at a high-level event hosted by the Office of the Vice President in Abuja, names two Nigerian fintechs — PalmPay and Moniepoint — as critical drivers of adoption for the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the infrastructure layer the report identifies as central to continental financial integration.
The report was produced in collaboration with ODI Global under the Supporting Investment and Trade in Africa (SITA) programme – a development-finance-backed initiative that signals the growing external bet on Nigeria as AfCFTA’s anchor economy.
The Infrastructure Argument
The report’s core thesis is blunt: without affordable, trusted cross-border payment rails, African MSMEs cannot scale beyond domestic markets, regardless of what trade agreements are signed at the continental level. To break that logjam, the report calls for accelerated deployment of PAPSS and points to Nigeria’s existing digital identity infrastructure – the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and National Identification Number (NIN) – as the foundation for a workable trust and compliance layer.
Hadejia framed the argument in commercial, not bureaucratic, terms. “Intra-African trade will be driven not only by large corporations but by small businesses empowered through digital trade and e-commerce,” he said, while warning that unresolved issues of trust, identity, and logistics remain the bottleneck.
Strategic Sequencing
Monday’s launch was not Abuja’s first move in this space. The cross-border payments report follows Nigeria’s Digital Trade Strategy and a capacity-building programme for subnational governments – a deliberate sequencing that suggests the federal government is building institutional readiness before attempting mass-market rollout at the state level.
Special Adviser on Job Creation and MSMEs Temitola Adekunle-Johnson acknowledged the structural problem bluntly: cross-border payments in Nigeria and across Africa have historically been “largely informal and inefficient.” The BVN/NIN systems, he argued, represent a turning point – but the report’s recommendations will require regulatory action to convert infrastructure into actual market access for small businesses.
The Fintech Wager
Naming PalmPay and Moniepoint by name in a government policy document is significant. Both firms operate at scale among Nigeria’s unbanked and underbanked population – precisely the demographic AfCFTA’s small-business ambitions depend on. Their inclusion signals that Abuja’s strategy leans on private-sector distribution networks rather than a state-built alternative.
The government’s regulatory commitments – strengthening infrastructure, frameworks, and partnerships – remain high-level for now. The harder test will be whether PAPSS adoption can be mandated or incentivised at a sufficient scale to shift trade flows meaningfully, and whether Nigerian MSMEs can navigate the identity-verification, logistics, and trust barriers the report itself acknowledges remain unresolved.
The event drew officials from AfCFTA, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), and ODI Global – a cross-institutional cast that reflects both the ambition and the complexity of the coordination challenge ahead.
For a $3.5 trillion ambition, the payments infrastructure is the politics.
