Why Nigeria’s traditional industries remain frozen in time, By Olumide Awoyemi

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for explaining how innovation drives sustained economic growth. Their research reveals a profound truth: for the first time in human history, the last two centuries have witnessed continuous economic growth that has lifted vast numbers out of poverty. But this growth isn’t automatic; it requires the right conditions for innovation to flourish. As the world celebrates this recognition of innovation’s critical role in prosperity, Nigeria must confront an uncomfortable question: why have our most iconic traditional industries – palm oil production, Aso-oke weaving, and staple food like Garri, Fufu, and Elubo processing remained virtually unchanged for generations, trapped in the very stagnation that once defined all of human history?

The Stagnation of Potential

Walk into a traditional palm oil processing community anywhere in Nigeria today, and you might witness scenes nearly identical to those from a hundred years ago. Women still manually crack palm kernels with stones. Small-scale processors still rely on rudimentary boiling and pressing methods that yield low-quality oil with significant waste. The irony is profound: Nigeria, once the world’s leading palm oil producer, now imports palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia — countries that took our seedlings decades ago and transformed the industry through mechanisation, hybrid varieties, and processing innovations.

The story is similar to that of Aso-oke, our magnificent handwoven textile tradition. While Indian handloom industries have successfully integrated power looms that preserve traditional patterns while increasing productivity tenfold, our Aso-oke weavers still work on the same manual looms their great-grandparents used. A single piece can take weeks to complete, making it economically unsustainable for most artisans and prohibitively expensive for average consumers. The craft survives more as a luxury heritage product than as a viable livelihood for the thousands who possess these skills.

Consider cassava processing, the backbone of many rural economies. Despite cassava being a major staple, most smallholder farmers still use labour-intensive, inefficient methods to process it into garri, fufu, or flour. Post-harvest losses remain staggeringly high. Meanwhile, countries like Thailand and Vietnam have developed automated processing facilities, improved varieties, and value-added products that have transformed cassava from a subsistence crop into an industrial commodity worth billions.

 The Cost of Standing Still

Joel Mokyr’s research demonstrates that throughout most of human history, stagnation was the norm. Despite occasional discoveries that temporarily improved living conditions, growth always eventually leveled off. What changed? Mokyr showed that sustained innovation requires not just knowing that something works but understanding why it works scientifically. This scientific understanding allows us to build upon discoveries, creating a self-generating process of continuous improvement.

This insight is devastatingly relevant to Nigeria’s traditional industries. Our palm oil processors know the methods of work they have worked with for generations. But without a scientific understanding of oil extraction efficiency, microbial contamination, or optimal processing temperatures, they cannot systematically improve. Each generation repeats the same practices without the knowledge foundation needed to innovate. We’ve trapped ourselves in precisely the pre-industrial pattern Mokyr identified: occasional improvements that never compound into sustained progress.

The consequences are severe. First, it perpetuates poverty by trapping millions in backbreaking, low-productivity work that yields meagre returns. When a palm oil processor spends twelve hours producing what a semi-automated facility could produce in one hour, we are not preserving tradition; we are institutionalising inefficiency.

Second, we haemorrhage foreign exchange importing products we should be dominating in production. Nigeria spent over $600 million importing palm oil in recent years — oil from trees that originated in our soil. We import textiles that could be produced locally if our traditional weaving sector had scaled through appropriate mechanisation. This represents not just economic loss but a failure to create the conditions for innovation that the Nobel laureates identified as essential for prosperity.

Third, we lose our youth. Bright young people observe the drudgery of traditional production methods and flee to cities or abroad, taking their potential innovation capacity with them. The generational transfer of traditional knowledge breaks down not because young people don’t value their heritage, but because they cannot see a future in it.

Creative Destruction and Vested Interests

Aghion and Howitt’s theory of “creative destruction” offers another lens for understanding our predicament. They showed that when new and better products enter the market, older technologies and the companies behind them lose out. This process is both creative (driving innovation) and destructive (displacing established players). Critically, they demonstrated that creative destruction creates conflicts that must be managed constructively — otherwise, established companies and interest groups will block innovation to protect their positions.

In Nigeria, we see this dynamic playing out tragically. Traditional industry associations sometimes resist mechanization, fearing it will eliminate jobs. Large-scale importers who profit from bringing in palm oil have little incentive to support domestic production modernisation. Even well-meaning cultural preservation efforts can inadvertently oppose technological adaptation, creating a false choice between tradition and progress.

The Nobel Committee’s warning is stark: “Economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.” Nigeria hasn’t fallen back into stagnation in these sectors; we never left it. While other parts of our economy have grown, our traditional industries remain frozen in the pre-growth era that once defined all human societies.

Why Has Innovation Bypassed These Sectors?

The reasons align disturbingly well with what the Nobel laureates identified as barriers to sustained growth. First, we lack the scientific understanding that Mokyr showed was essential. Our artisans possess practical knowledge but often lack the theoretical foundation needed to systematically improve their methods. Research institutions remain frustratingly disconnected from producer communities, failing to provide scientific explanations that would enable cumulative innovation.

Second, we haven’t managed the conflicts inherent in creative destruction constructively. Fear of job losses, vested interests in the status quo, and a false dichotomy between “preserving tradition” and “embracing technology” have created political and social barriers to innovation.

Third, as Mokyr emphasised, society must be open to new ideas and allow change. Yet we have sometimes confused cultural preservation with technological stagnation, as if modernizing production methods somehow erased cultural authenticity.

Yet examples from other developing nations prove this doesn’t have to be our reality. Ethiopia has modernised its coffee processing while maintaining its coffee ceremony culture. Indian weavers use computerised jacquard looms to create intricate traditional patterns. Vietnamese farmers use mobile apps to optimize cassava cultivation while still practising intercropping traditions. These countries understand that innovation doesn’t erase culture; it enables it to thrive economically.

A Call to Action: Building the Foundations for Innovation-Driven Growth

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics provides a roadmap. If sustained growth requires scientific understanding, managed creative destruction, and societal openness to change, then Nigeria must systematically address all three in our traditional industries.

Building Scientific Foundations: We need innovation hubs that bring together artisans, engineers, and scientists to document traditional practices scientifically, identify improvement opportunities, and develop appropriate technologies. This isn’t about imposing foreign solutions but about applying the scientific method to indigenous knowledge. Why does one palm oil processor get a better yield than another? What temperatures optimize cassava fermentation? How can traditional dye processes be standardised for quality? What are the optimum physico-chemical properties of cassava derivatives like Garri and Fufu, and how can we get them produced consistently with these qualities everywhere in Nigeria? These questions have scientific answers that would enable systematic improvement.

Managing Creative Destruction Constructively: We must acknowledge that modernisation will disrupt existing arrangements while creating new opportunities. This requires transition support-training programmes that help traditional artisans operate semi-automated equipment, financing mechanisms that enable small-scale producers to adopt better technologies, and social safety nets for those genuinely displaced. The goal isn’t to eliminate jobs but to make existing work more productive and better compensated.

Creating Societal Openness to Innovation: We need a cultural shift that celebrates technological adaptation as a form of cultural preservation, not betrayal. When young engineers and entrepreneurs develop and successfully commercialize better cassava processors, they’re honoring their agricultural heritage, not abandoning it. When fashion designers use computer-aided design to create Aso-oke patterns, they are extending the tradition, not destroying it. This requires public education, showcasing success stories, and retiring the false narrative that tradition and technology are opponents.

Specific Interventions Needed

• Establish regional innovation hubs for industrial process development, prototyping and commercialisation in agricultural and food sciences, focused specifically on traditional processing methods
• Incentivise Big businesses and entrepreneurs to create corporate venture capital funds to back transformative ideas and innovation in key sectors
• Create certification and branding systems that allow modernised traditional products to command premium prices in domestic and export markets, such that locally produced palm oil and Garri should mandatorily conform to predefined physico-chemical attributes, documented in official monographs.
• Develop training programmes that combine traditional craft knowledge with modern engineering and business skills
• Reform policies that inadvertently protect inefficient importation over domestic production modernization
• Build platforms for knowledge exchange between traditional producers and technical innovators

The Stakes Are Existential

The Nobel laureates’ work shows that the sustained economic growth we have witnessed over the past two centuries, the very foundation of modern prosperity, depends on continuous innovation. It’s not guaranteed. Societies can and do fall back into stagnation when they fail to maintain the conditions that enable creative destruction.

Nigeria’s traditional industries aren’t quaint relics to be preserved in amber. They are economic ecosystems supporting millions of livelihoods, representing billions in potential value creation, and embodying irreplaceable cultural heritage. But without innovation, they are dying slowly, unable to compete with imported alternatives, unable to attract new generations, and unable to lift their practitioners out of poverty.

The path forward isn’t about abandoning our heritage for wholesale Westernisation. It’s about applying the lessons of the 2025 Nobel Prize: building scientific understanding of our traditional practices, managing the conflicts inherent in technological change constructively, and creating a society open to innovation. It’s about asking: How can we make palm oil production efficient enough to reclaim our position as a global supplier? How can we modernise Aso-oke weaving so that talented artisans can earn dignified livelihoods while producing at scales that make the craft economically sustainable? How can we process our food staples to high standards with minimal waste and maximum value addition?

These aren’t just economic questions; they are questions about what kind of country we want to be. Will we heed the lessons that earned this year’s Nobel Prize and create the conditions for innovation-driven growth in all our industries? Or will we watch our traditional sectors wither, leaving millions trapped in the stagnation that defined all human history before the modern era of sustained growth?

The laureates have given us the diagnosis and the prescription. Implementation is up to us. The window for action is narrowing, but the prize, a future where traditional industries drive prosperity rather than perpetuate poverty, could not be more valuable.

Olumide Awoyemi is Founder/CEO of Symmex, an industrial–technological solutions provider and developer of Huraflow.