The phrase “Made in Naija” entered common usage around 2019. A generation of fintechs, consumer brands, fashion labels, and food companies began wrapping themselves in the Nigerian flag as a marketing strategy, and the strategy worked. Nigerians, tired of being told their country’s output was second rate, responded to the proposition that something worth buying could be built here. The phrase became shorthand for a particular kind of local pride, tied to a particular moment in the country’s commercial history.
By the time “Made in Naija” became a hashtag, Union Bank had already spent over a century writing loans to the people who actually make things in Nigeria.
This is not said to claim the phrase.
The phrase belongs to whoever uses it well. It is said to point out something that gets lost in the noise of campaigns and launches, which is that the infrastructure of indigenous Nigerian enterprise was built by a generation of bankers, traders, manufacturers, and farmers who never had a hashtag to work with. They had loans. They had relationships with branch managers who knew their business by name. They had working capital lines that were rolled over at moments when a single missed rollover would have ended the enterprise. They had letters of credit stamped in red ink that crossed borders in briefcases. That is how Nigerian businesses actually got built across the last century. The romance of the origin story, told later, is always cleaner than the ledger.
Union Bank opened in 1917 as the Colonial Bank. We became Barclays Bank DCO, then Barclays Bank of Nigeria, then, following the indigenisation decrees of the 1970s, a fully Nigerian owned institution operating under the name we carry today. Across those transitions, our loan book moved with the economy. We financed the groundnut pyramids of Kano before pyramids became a metaphor. We financed the cocoa boards of the South West when cocoa was the country’s largest single export earner. We financed the textile mills of Kaduna when Nigerian textiles clothed most of West Africa. We financed the printers of Shomolu and Mushin, the bakeries of Aba, the engineers of Port Harcourt, and, eventually, the software founders of Yaba whose first business account opened with a green logo before most of them had a co-working space.
None of this was marketed. Most of it was not written down in any form that could be converted into a campaign. It was banking, done vigorously, over decades, in relationships that built themselves up one loan at a time.
In 2025, we empowered over 205,000 small and medium enterprises across Nigeria. We held ₦20.1 billion in active SME loans and ₦375.7 billion in SME deposits. We reactivated over 4,000 previously dormant SME accounts, unlocking ₦16.3 billion in deposits. Through UnionKash, our digital micro credit platform, we disbursed ₦2.9 billion to customers who needed fast, short tenor liquidity to keep their businesses running. Through Alpher, our women focused proposition, we disbursed ₦150 million in cash flow loans to female entrepreneurs in three months and extended approximately ₦106.8 million in discounted credit to seventy one women owned businesses. Through the Kebbi Financial Inclusion Drive in 2022, we brought six thousand rice farmers across four local government areas into the formal financial system. These are not marketing numbers. They are ledger entries. They are what banking the real Nigerian economy actually looks like when the work is done properly.
When we say made-in-Naija, we must understand what is being celebrated: Nigerian fashion is good. Nigerian food is good. Nigerian music has become one of the country’s most valuable cultural exports. Nigerian tech founders are building companies that matter beyond Nigeria’s borders. Made-in-Naija is the proposition that something worth buying can be built here, and this phrase has been one of the most productive ideas to enter Nigerian public life in the last decade.
What we want to say on the occasion of our 109th anniversary is only this: the proposition is older than the phrase. The institutions that backed it were backing it before the phrase arrived, and they will continue to back it after the phrase has been replaced by whatever comes next. Union Bank has been one of those institutions for 109 years. We do not own the hashtag. We own the longer story behind it, and the over 205,000 small businesses currently borrowing from us are the evidence.
If you are building something in Nigeria, for Nigeria, we have financed people like you before. We financed them in 1927, in 1967, in 1997, and in 2017. We will continue to do so.
The country is not finished being built. Neither are we.
