I have spent enough time around credit committees to know how a good business gets declined. The file belongs to a trader who has moved cocoa, sesame or cashew for a decade, who knows every buying agent between her warehouse and the port, and who has never left a counterparty unpaid. The committee is doing its job. It cannot see the business, because the business has never been written down in the language the committee reads.

Two languages

A credit committee reads balance sheets, cash flow statements, security documents and ratios. It asks what the company is registered to do, whether the accounts show that activity, where repayment will come from and what happens if it does not. Its words are debt service cover, concentration, tenor and collateral.

A trader at the farm gate thinks in bags, grades, seasons and relationships. She knows that the main crop starts arriving in October and the light crop around April, that the buying agent in a particular village delivers if he is paid on time, that a consignment can sit three weeks waiting for a vessel, and that inspection slows down in December. Her words are moisture content, bean count, free on board, and who is paying for the jute bags.

Both are describing the same business. Neither description, on its own, is bankable.

What the committee cannot see

Three things are usually missing from a trader's file, and none of them is a weakness in the business.

The first is the shape of the year. Agribusiness cash is tied up at harvest and released at sale. A set of accounts closed on 31 December shows a company with heavy stock, receivables and very little cash. Read against a calendar-year template, it looks stretched. Read against the season, it is a business that has just completed its most important buying of the year.

The second is the chain of documents. Nigerian export runs on paper. The Form NXP is opened through a bank before shipment, the Clean Certificate of Inspection comes from the pre-shipment agent, the bill of lading follows, and the proceeds come home through the banking system. Most established traders have every one of these for every shipment. Very few keep them in a form an analyst can follow from purchase to proceeds. A file that shows that chain, shipment by shipment, is the most persuasive thing a trader can put in front of a bank.

The third is the gap between registration and reality. A company registered for general merchandise that in fact exports cocoa, or whose accounts show trading income its registered objects never mention, forces the analyst to guess. Banks do not lend on guesses. Lining up what the company is registered to do, what its accounts show and what it is asking to finance removes an objection before anyone raises it.

What the trader cannot see

The trader, for her part, rarely sees what the committee is afraid of. It is seldom the market. It is the window between the bank's money leaving and the goods existing: the advance to a buying agent who disappears, the stock that is not in the warehouse the report describes, the shipment that sails before the NXP is in place, and the proceeds that come home late or not at all. Every condition the bank proposes, from stock monitoring to domiciliation of proceeds to a Murabaha purchase made in the bank's own name, is a way of narrowing that window. A trader who understands this stops reading the conditions as obstruction and starts offering the controls before they are asked for.

Why it matters

Agriculture produced about 26 percent of Nigeria's GDP in the second quarter of 2026. In March of the same year it held about 6.5 percent of the credit banks had extended to the private sector. Part of that gap is structural and will take institutions to close: guarantees, registries, warehouse receipt systems and standard documentation. A surprising share of it is translation. Good businesses are declined because nobody in the room could read them, and the occasional weak one is approved because its file was tidy.

Both sides can move. A trader can keep the document chain, present a seasonal cash flow, and line up registration, accounts and request. A bank can appraise by season, read export documents as controls rather than formalities, and keep someone in the room who has stood in a warehouse. I write for both sides of that table.