Prior to December 2016, Nigeria imported finished fertiliser products for direct application by farmers, despite the local presence of 63% of raw materials (namely, Urea and Limestone) readily available for fertiliser production within the country. To address this inefficiency, on December 23, 2016, His Excellency, President Muhammadu Buhari, GCON instituted the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative (PFI). The program was to be implemented by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) through its wholly-owned subsidiary, NAIC-NPK Limited.

At inception, the interim goal of the PFI was to facilitate the local production of 1 million metric tonnes of blended NPK fertiliser for the 2017 wet farming season. In the long run, the PFI aims to revive the nation’s moribund domestic fertiliser blending industry and supply chain, reduce the cost of direct fertiliser subsidies to the Federal Government, improve accessibility and deliver commercially significant quantities of affordable and consistently high-quality NPK 20:10:10 fertilisers to the nation’s growing population of smallholder farmers.

As part of its objectives, the project is designed to:

1. Stimulate local production of NPK fertiliser by resuscitating moribund fertilizer plants, the operationalisation of which would create direct and indirect jobs;
2. Make fertiliser readily available to Nigerian farmers at affordable prices;
3. Enhance food security through increased food production;
4. Reduce food-induced inflation;
5. Promote economic activities across the agriculture value chain;
6. Enable foreign exchange savings through an import substitution approach;
7. Conserve government expenditure through a reduction in logistics and other agriculture budgetary costs; and,
8. Facilitate subsidy savings in the fertilizer industry.

• In 2020, to make the program more sustainable following its notable successes and transformative impact over the period, Mr. President approved a program restructure starting in the 2021 cycle. The restructure, inter alia, positioned the initiative as a bulk upstream trader of fertiliser raw materials for onward sale to producers of different variants of NPK fertilisers. Following the restructure, the NSIA remained project managers while the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) became the sole owner of the implementing vehicle NAIC-NPK, re-named PFI-NPK.
• Despite worldwide supply disruptions, rising raw material costs and various macroeconomic challenges, PFI-NPK continues to successfully deliver on its mandate.
• PFI_NPK delivered over 670,000 metric tonnes of NPK in 2023 and is making substantial progress towards delivering 1,000,000MT of NPK in 2024 PFI cycle.

Over the past seven years of implementation (2017 to 2023), the PFI program has:

• Resuscitated and established a total of 80 blending plants across 25 states in all 6 geopolitical zones,
• Facilitated the local production and supply of quality fertiliser at an affordable price,
• Delivered over 4.5 million metric tonnes (about 90 million 50kg Bags) of NPK 20:10:10 fertiliser,
• Enabled about 45% reduction in fertiliser prices,
• Created over 100,000 direct and indirect jobs across the fertiliser value chain,
• Accrued roughly US$200 million annually in FX savings,
• Decreased government expenditure by ₦100 billion in annual budgetary cost savings, and,
• Generated annual savings of ₦60 billion from fertiliser subsidy elimination.