An economy that once exported newsprint now imports 90% of its printing paper. The cost of that failure is about to multiply.

A Sector Under Pressure

Nigeria’s listed publishing houses have entered 2026 under intensifying financial strain. Despite modest revenue growth, profitability continues to deteriorate as production costs surge.

First-quarter projections for Learn Africa Plc and University Press Plc show combined revenues rising to ₦825 million ($610,000). However, losses after tax have widened to ₦588 million ($435,000), up from ₦533 million ($394,000) in the same period last year – a widening gap between top-line performance and bottom-line sustainability that is becoming an increasingly familiar pattern across African print markets.

Escalating input costs – particularly paper – remain the dominant challenge. Learn Africa reported a 63% rise in cost of sales; University Press a 17% increase. Paper prices have doubled, driven by naira depreciation, global pulp price volatility, and near-total import dependence.

Academy Press Plc stands as a notable outlier, posting a ₦409 million profit ($302,000). Its performance does little, however, to offset a broadly loss-making sector.

The Import Trap

Nigeria imports over 90% of its white-grade printing paper. According to a review of National Bureau of Statistics data, the country spent approximately ₦3.37 trillion ($2.49 billion) on paper imports between 2021 and 2025, with ₦1.1 trillion ($813 million) in 2025 alone – up from ₦412 billion ($1 billion) in 2021, a near-threefold increase in naira terms over four years.

That escalation is not primarily a story of surging literacy or publishing demand – and the dollar figures reveal why. Nigeria is now spending nearly three times as many naira to import less paper in real terms: the naira lost roughly 70% of its value against the dollar between 2021 and 2025, meaning the $1 billion spent in 2021 bought considerably more than the $813 million spent in 2025.

The country is paying more, in its own currency, for a diminishing volume of a product it should not need to import at all. The currency exposure is structural, not cyclical: as long as Nigeria prices its paper in dollars but earns in naira, every monetary shock translates directly into a publishing cost crisis – with no domestic production capacity to absorb the blow.

The tariff architecture makes matters worse. While imported finished books attract zero tariffs, the raw materials needed for local production are heavily taxed – creating a paradox in which foreign printers from India and China can offer 120-day credit terms while local printers must pay for imported paper two months before it arrives. Nigerian publishers are competing with one hand tied behind their back.

The Mills That Died

Yet this is not a story about a country that never tried. Between 1969 and 1986, Nigeria built three state-owned pulp and paper mills: the Nigeria Paper Mill at Jebba, the Iwopin Pulp and Paper Company in Ogun State, and the Nigeria Newsprint Manufacturing Company at Oku Iboku in Akwa Ibom. At their peak, the NNMC was exporting newsprint to the United States, Canada and Ghana. By 1987, Nigeria’s newsprint import bill had fallen to just 12.5%.

By 2002, all three mills had ceased operation. Power insecurity, chronic under-investment, and dependence on imported long-fibre pulp – the kind that requires specific softwood trees Nigeria’s tropical forests do not produce at scale – proved fatal. Deforestation had depleted the plantings of Gmelina arborea and similar fast-growing species that might otherwise have provided a domestic fibre base. Privatisation in the mid-2000s changed nothing. The mills remain, in the words of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s 2025 stakeholder convening, dormant – and the sector has been paying the import premium ever since.

Egypt is frequently cited as a comparative model. It is worth understanding precisely what that comparison entails. Egypt’s paper industry has an annual production capacity of approximately 350,000 tonnes and a market value of $1.2 billion – though it remains heavily reliant on imported wood pulp, which constitutes around 70% of its raw materials.

Egypt manufactures roughly a third of its paper and pulp domestically, and has built two state-supported mills – Edfu and Qena – to bolster that capacity, including tissue paper it exports to the Gulf and Arab countries. Egypt has no more trees than Nigeria. What it has is a long-term industrial strategy, state investment, and a political commitment to partial self-sufficiency. The lesson for Nigeria is not about forestry. It is about institutional will.

Where Nigeria Actually Prints – And What That Costs

Nigeria’s printing geography deserves more attention than it receives. The printing industry contributes conservatively over ₦300 billion yearly to the Nigerian economy, employing hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly. Yet for high-quality print runs – academic texts, government documents, commercially significant trade editions – a substantial share of work is exported to India and China, where access to affordable raw materials and established print infrastructure enables competitive pricing that domestic printers simply cannot match.

This is not a secret. It is an open structural problem: Nigeria exports its print jobs along with its foreign exchange, while domestic printers fight over lower-margin work with imported materials they cannot afford. The physical quality of books arriving from those print runs – visible in markets from Lagos to here in Banjul – is adequate rather than distinguished. It is the quality of a sector managing decline, not building capacity.

The Digital Paradox That Demands a Print Solution

Here is where the long-term picture comes into its own, and where conventional wisdom about digital disruption of print warrants examination.

Nigeria had 107 million internet users at the start of 2025, with online penetration at 45.4% of the total population. That figure is projected to reach 117 million by 2027, when internet penetration is expected to approach 48%.

And Nigeria’s population is not standing still. From its current 242 million, Nigeria is projected to reach 262 million by 2030, 312 million by 2040, and over 400 million by 2050 – when it will be the world’s third most populous nation. The proportion of Nigeria’s population under 40 is projected to reach 81% by 203 – a youth demographic of staggering scale that is simultaneously the country’s digital future and its next generation of readers.

The instinct is to frame digital growth and print as competing forces. It’s the standard western publishing The Sky Is Falling narrative, slowly percolating through into the so-called emerging markets. But it is the wrong frame.

A digitally literate population is a more voracious reading population – full stop. Digital platforms improve discoverability. They create reader communities. They generate demand that spills over into physical books, particularly where simple screen fatigue, power outages, or the cultural weight of a physical object shifts preferences.

TNPS has made this argument since 2019, when the idea of a $5 billion African book market was dismissed as fantasy.

UNESCO’s 2025 valuation of the continent’s book market at $7 billion – already exceeding that forecast – should settle the debate.

The question for Nigeria is not whether digital growth drives print demand. It is whether the country has the production infrastructure to meet that demand affordably and locally.

Print-on-Demand: A Bridge, Not a Silver Bullet

Print-on-demand (POD) technology offers one partial answer, and it is one that deserves more serious attention in the Nigerian context than it currently receives.

The global POD market reached approximately $10 billion in 2024 and continues to grow at around 26% annually. For Nigerian publishers, the appeal is structural: POD eliminates the need for large upfront print runs, removes inventory carrying costs, and makes small-run local editions economically viable for the first time.

There are nascent POD operations in Nigeria, and platforms like Quramo Publishing already offer POD services to Nigerian authors. But the constraint is circular: POD economics depend on accessible paper at consistent quality and price. Without a domestic paper supply, POD operations in Nigeria remain dependent on the same import chain that is throttling conventional publishers.

AI adds a further dimension worth noting. AI-assisted editorial production can reduce pre-press costs and turnaround times significantly – making short-run, localised, curriculum-aligned titles more viable than they have ever been.

For educational publishing in a country that has one bookstore per 50,000 people and a student enrolment approaching 50 million, the combination of AI production efficiency and POD distribution is not a marginal opportunity. It is a potential structural transformation – provided the paper is there.

Policy: The Missing Variable

The Nigeria First Policy – designed to prioritise domestic production – has been identified as a potential intervention. Implementation remains inconsistent, particularly within the publishing supply chain. The ongoing crisis in the Gulf and its effect on global shipping and oil-linked currency volatility can only deepen the pressure.

Stakeholders have called for the revival of the dormant mills at Iwopin, Oku Iboku, and Jebba, establishment of a printing and publishing growth fund, and full enforcement of Nigeria First procurement across all government ministries. These are not new recommendations. They have been made, in various forms, for two decades. The political cost of inaction is now measurable in hundreds of millions of naira of publishing losses per quarter.

The View From The Beach

Part 1: Nigeria – A Policy Failure Measured in Losses

Nigeria is the economic powerhouse of Africa. It has the population, the youth demographic, the digital growth trajectory, and the latent demand to support a publishing industry of genuinely transformative scale. What it lacks is paper – not metaphorically, but materially and industrially.

A country that once exported newsprint to North America, and which will be home to 400 million people by 2050, should not be importing 90% of its printing paper. The mills existed. The political will, historically, has not. That is a policy choice, not a geographical inevitability – and it is one that Nigerian publishers, educators, and policymakers are still paying for, quarter by quarter, loss by loss.

The solutions are known. The LCCI stakeholder convening in 2025 restated them plainly: revive the dormant mills, establish a publishing growth fund, enforce Nigeria First procurement consistently across government. None of this is technically difficult. All of it requires institutional commitment that has been promised and, it seems to me at least, withheld for twenty years.

The window for getting this right is not indefinite.

Part 2: The Bigger Picture Nobody in Publishing Is Looking At

Step back from the quarterly loss figures for a moment, and consider what is actually coming.

The UN’s current medium-variant projection puts Africa’s population at approximately 2.5 billion by 2050 – up from 1.55 billion today. Nearly a billion additional people in the next twenty-five years, the overwhelming majority of them young, increasingly urban, and increasingly connected.

Of the eight countries projected to account for more than half of all global population growth between now and 2050, five are in Africa: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Nigeria alone is projected to add roughly 160 million people – approaching the current population of Russia – to reach over 400 million by mid-century, becoming the world’s third most populous nation.

These are not speculative forecasts from optimistic demographers. They are the UN’s own medium-variant projections, and the direction of revision over the past two decades has consistently been upward, because the expected fertility decline has not materialised at the predicted rate.

Let me be frank here: I follow this data professionally and I was not prepared for the scale. I triple-checked this to make sure I was not misreading something.

I doubt many publishers – on the continent or beyond it – are sitting with these numbers in front of them and thinking through what they mean for their industry over the next quarter-century.

They should be.

For educational publishing alone, the arithmetic is staggering. Africa’s student enrolment currently stands at around 329 million. UNESCO’s 2025 valuation of the continent’s book market – already at $7 billion, surpassing TNPS’s own 2019 forecast that drew considerable ridicule at the time – projects growth to $18.5 billion, with educational publishing potentially representing $13 billion of that.

And that projection was made before anyone had fully modelled the demographic curve running from now to 2050.

The books that will need to be written, produced, distributed, and placed in the hands of the next generation of African students do not yet exist. The publishers who will write them are, in many cases, not yet established. The infrastructure – print, digital, distribution, institutional – that will need to support that demand is, as this piece has documented for Nigeria in some detail, acutely under-resourced relative to what is coming.

This is not a niche story about African publishing. This is one of the largest market development stories in the history of the global publishing industry – and it is being covered, if at all, as a footnote.

TNPS has been tracking this shift since 2017. The continent’s centre of gravity in global publishing is moving, and it is moving faster than the industry has recognised.

Nigeria’s paper crisis is a symptom of infrastructure unready for the scale of what the next twenty-five years will require. The crisis is real and urgent.

But too, the opportunity on the other side of it is of an entirely different order of magnitude.

Those numbers are now too large to ignore. Whether the global publishing industry will notice before someone else builds the market is the question worth asking.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter.