Repositioning Nigeria in the Global IP Landscape: A Doctrinal and Political Economy Appraisal of the 2025 National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy

Nigeria's intellectual property (IP) framework has for decades been fragmented and under-enforced, a condition more traceable to an absence of legislation than to weak political prioritisation of IP as a developmental tool. This article asks a precise question: to what extent does the 2025 National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS), approved by the Federal Executive Council on 6 November 2025, function as a political instrument capable of closing this governance gap, and what conditions determine whether it succeeds? Adopting a doctrinal and political economy approach, the article first develops an analytical framework that distinguishes legislative reform, administrative implementation, and political governance failure as separate sources of Nigeria's historical IP underperformance. It then applies this framework in three stages: tracing the historical evolution of Nigerian IP law to show how successive statutory reforms addressed legal form without resolving governance failure; analysing the political economy of the NIPPS's formulation and implementation, including how it negotiates competing interests among the state, private capital, and individual creators; and evaluating the policy's anticipated economic impact on the innovation ecosystem, the digital economy, and local industry competitiveness. The article argues that the NIPPS is a well-designed political instrument whose transformative promise nonetheless remains conditional: it can render IP a genuinely bankable asset for Nigerian SMEs and the creative industries only if sustained political will translates into funding the responsible institutions, resolving stakeholder tensions, and a functioning judicial enforcement architecture.