Nigeria Sets 180-Day Digital Free Zones Deadline

President Bola Tinubu has given the Federal Government 180 days to produce a roadmap for the full launch of Nigeria’s Digital Free Zones-  a plan aimed at making it easier for tech and service companies to raise international capital, create jobs locally, and serve global markets from Nigerian soil, rather than from abroad.

The directive was announced in a statement by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga, instructing Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment Dr Jumoke Oduwole  who coordinates the Presidential Steering Committee on Digital Free Zones that Tinubu chairs  to build the roadmap alongside the Itana Innovation project. That puts the deadline at roughly midMarch 2027.

Tinubu’s own words, as carried across multiple outlets that ran the statement verbatim, framed it as a matter of national ambition rather than technical policy, “Nigeria has the talent, enterprise and ambition to build companies that can compete anywhere.”

 The problem this is meant to solve

For years, the standard path for a Nigerian startup chasing serious capital ran through incorporation abroad. A founder could build the product, hire the team and run operations entirely out of Lagos  but the company itself, its intellectual property and its cap table typically moved to Delaware or the UK, because that’s what foreign investors required before writing a check. Nigeria’s free-zone rules , which the government itself describes as over thirty years old, weren’t built for remote-first, digital businesses. On top of that, naira volatility made incorporating locally a harder sell than going abroad. The economic value those companies created  jobs, tax revenue, professional services  was effectively exported along with the paperwork.

Where the model already exists

The government isn’t building this from scratch. Itana, the only entity licensed by the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) as a Digital Free Zone, has been running a version of this idea since, well before the presidential directive. Andela and Flutterwave cofounder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji first talked publicly about building a jurisdiction for the digital economy in January 2020. The project, initially called Talent City, secured its first physical site inside Alaro City, Lagos, in January 2022.

It rebranded to Itana, raised a $2 million pre-seed round in 2023 from investors including LocalGlobe, Amplo, Pronomos Capital and Future Africa, and has since grown into the $500 million project the Presidency now leans on, with the Africa Finance Corporation backing it and, according to Africa Finance Corporation, (AFC’s) own statement, describing itself as “proud to be a pioneer alongside Itana, in building Africa’s first” digital economic zone.

Structurally, Itana works less like an industrial park and more like a jurisdiction-as-a-service: companies incorporate remotely, get access to banking, tax and immigration handling through what the company calls a one-stop-shop platform.

What the government has already done to prepare the ground

The Digital Free Zones directive is the newest of three related moves the government has made since mid2026. On 17 August, it unveiled the National Digital Cloud Policy, aimed at drawing investment into cloud and datacentre infrastructure so Nigeria hosts more of its own digital economy rather than renting it from abroad  targeting $750 million in private investment over 24 months, with the ministry pointing to state purchasing power as the main lever: “A central feature of the Policy is the use of Government’s collective purchasing power.”

Two weeks later, on 31 August, Information Minister Mohammed Idris launched “Hire from Nigeria” in Abuja  a campaign to market Nigerian professionals to global employers directly, tied to a target of one million exportlinked jobs. Idris’s pitch: “A young Nigerian does not have to leave the country to participate.”

What’s still unanswered

The “how” of the roadmap remains the least defined part of the announcement. Turning one company’s licensed model into a national framework requires coordination across tax authorities, the Central Bank, immigration and arbitration bodies, none of which has been detailed publicly yet. Nor has the government said whether a company incorporated inside a Digital Free Zone would actually be shielded from the currency volatility and capital repatriation friction that made the offshore route attractive in the first place. That question is likely to matter more to founders than the incorporation process itself.

The bottom line

Cloud policy addresses where digital business runs. “Hire from Nigeria” addresses who does the work. Digital Free Zones addresses where the company is legally based. Together, the three form a single stack rolled out over one quarter infrastructure, workforce, jurisdiction. The 180day roadmap, due around midMarch 2027, is now the piece that has to turn that ambition into something founders can actually use.