BY HUMPHREY UKEAJA
Nigeria’s sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) market is not just growing; it is expanding its product lines and accelerating the establishment of new plants in a country already carrying a heavy and costly burden of non-communicable disease (NCD). Evidence indicates that SSB consumption in Nigeria rose by 123 percent between 2008 and 2022, while per capita SSB sales increased by 119.1 percent between 2010 and 2024, placing Nigeria among the fastest-growing SSB markets in Africa, the largest consumer on the continent of soft drinks. The country is also the 4th largest in the world by total volume in 2025. At the same time, the health system is absorbing the consequences of rising obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, conditions that are tightly linked to excess consumption of SSBs and poor dietary environments. Worthy of note is that approximately 81 percent of Nigerian adolescents were found to consume sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) daily, according to a 2025 study.
A Rapidly Expanding Market
Nigeria’s SSB industry has benefited from demographic growth, urbanization, product diversification, and aggressive marketing. The normalization of ultra-processed foods and the false claims in advertising of SSBs have further entrenched these unhealthy products in the core of food consumption in Nigeria. The market is no longer dominated by a narrow set of soft drinks; it now includes carbonated beverages, energy drinks, flavoured fruit drinks, malted drinks with added sugar, and ready-to-drink products targeted at children, adolescents, and low-income consumers. One recent estimate placed Nigeria’s annual SSB consumption at about 38.6 million litres in 2023, a figure that illustrates the scale of market penetration and the social acceptance of sugary drinks in everyday diets.
The consumption pattern matters as much as the volume. Research among adolescents has found prevalence above 70 percent in some settings, showing that SSB intake is deeply embedded early in life. This is concerning because frequent consumption during childhood and adolescence increases cumulative lifetime exposure to excess sugar, leading to overweight, a risk factor for chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, insulin resistance, and metabolic disease. In public health terms, Nigeria is not dealing with isolated consumer choice; it is facing a dangerous generational dietary shift.
Industry Expansion and Revenue Pressure
The beverage industry frequently frames SSB taxation as a threat to economic growth, but market trends point in the opposite direction. SSB sales in Nigeria have expanded substantially over the past decade, with one analysis reporting a 35.77-billion-litre increase between 2010 and 2024. That scale of growth suggests a sector still in expansion mode, not one under existential pressure.
This is the central contradiction in the industry’s argument: if demand is collapsing, revenue should fall; if demand is rising, then the industry is still extracting value from a product that imposes health costs on the public. This contradiction, a good example of the playbook on interfering in public health policies, reflects a deliberate attempt by the industry actors to turn government away from the dangers of their products while profiting at the detriment of Nigerians. Public health advocates have estimated that Nigeria loses more than N200 billion annually due to weak SSB tax implementation and preventable diet-related disease costs. Even if industry profits are not always publicly disclosed in detail, the direction of the market is unmistakable: more products, more shelf space, more consumption, and more commercial competition.
Market Fragmentation and New Entrants
The Nigerian beverage market is increasingly crowded. Alongside multinational brands, local manufacturers are pushing flavoured drinks, juice blends, carbonated variants, and energy beverages into the same consumer space. This indicates a fight for market share rather than a market under threat. In fact, product innovation in the sector is often designed not to reduce sugar consumption, but to repackage it in more appealing forms. In February 2026, a first-class King in Nigeria from Osun State launched a beverage company. Another company opened operations in Aba, Abia State, in March 2026. Also, in March 2026, while in the United Kingdom, the Nigerian government signed a deal for a beverage company to expand its operations with a new 24 million pounds manufacturing facility in Lagos State before the end of 2027
This diversification is strategically important. It shows how the industry adapts to maintain volume growth even when public health policy starts to challenge one product category. Instead of retreating, companies shift branding, expand distribution networks, and target new demographic groups. That is why claims that an SSB tax would “destroy the industry” are a clear lie with the actual structure of the market.
Nigeria’s NCD Burden
Nigeria’s NCD burden is large, rising, and expensive. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), NCDs now account for nearly 30 percent of deaths in the country, with hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and cardiovascular disease among the leading drivers. These conditions are strongly associated with dietary risk factors, including high intake of SSBs, excess body weight, and poor overall diet quality. The policy implications are straightforward: when a country’s disease burden is shifting toward chronic, diet-related illness, fiscal tools such as SSB taxes become essential prevention instruments.
The economic burden is severe as well. Households affected by NCDs often face catastrophic health expenditure, meaning they must spend a dangerously high proportion of income on treatment, diagnostics, medicines, and follow-up care. That burden is especially damaging in a country where more than 80 percent of its population pays out of pocket for healthcare, and there is no effective health insurance scheme. The result is a vicious cycle: sugary drink consumption contributes to disease; disease generates medical costs; medical costs deepen poverty.
The Crowdfunding Reality
A visible sign of this crisis is the growing number of Nigerians turning to online crowdfunding for NCD treatment. People raise money for diabetes management, kidney care, cardiac treatment, amputations, surgeries, and long-term medication because the health system and household finances are often not enough. Crowdfunding is not a policy solution; it is a distress signal.
This trend is important because it demonstrates the social cost of preventable disease in real time. When treatment depends on public appeals, the burden has already shifted from prevention to crisis management, in this case, an unsustainable model of crisis management. Stronger prevention policy, including a more effective SSB tax and complementary policies, would be far more rational than relying on the already stretched public to finance avoidable illness through crowd appeals and family fundraising.
The Job Loss Argument Does Not Hold
One of the beverage industry’s most common objections to a stronger SSB tax is the claim that jobs will be lost. But this argument is weak on both economic and empirical grounds. Beverage production is increasingly automated, especially in production, bottling, packaging, and warehousing. That means employment intensity is lower than industry messaging suggests, and the number of jobs directly tied to sugary drink sales is overstated.
There is also a broader economic logic issue. Tax policy does not eliminate consumer demand; it changes it. When SSB consumption falls, spending is shifted to healthier beverages, food, and other goods with broader social value. The beneficiary of this change is the food industry, as purchases would still be made within their range of healthy products. The relevant question is not whether a tax changes market behaviour; it does, but whether the social gains outweigh the commercial discomfort. In the case of SSBs, the public health gains are likely to be substantial.
Why the Tax Needs to Be Stronger
Nigeria’s current SSB tax remains too low to produce a meaningful public health effect. WHO guidance supports taxing sugary drinks at a level that materially raises retail prices and discourages consumption, rather than simply collecting marginal revenue. If a tax is too small, consumers barely notice it, and the industry absorbs the cost without changing product strategy or pricing behaviour.
A stronger SSB tax would do three things at once. It would reduce demand for unhealthy drinks, generate public revenue that could support health programs, and partially offset the medical and economic harms associated with excess sugar consumption. That is why the debate should not be framed as tax versus jobs, but as prevention versus avoidable disease.
The Core Policy Question
The real question is not whether Nigeria can afford a stronger SSB tax. It is whether Nigeria can afford not to have one. The evidence points to a beverage market that is expanding rapidly, a consumer environment shaped by aggressive marketing, and a disease burden that is increasingly dominated by chronic illnesses linked to diet. In that context, weak taxation functions less as a neutral policy and more as an indirect subsidy for unhealthy consumption.
If Nigeria wants to reduce the rise of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other NCDs, then it must treat sugary drinks as a public health issue, not just a consumer product. The case for a stronger SSB tax is therefore not ideological. It is epidemiological, economic, and increasingly unavoidable.
Ukeaja, a healthy food advocate and Industry Monitoring Officer at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), writes from Abuja.