Nigeria and Türkiye Shift From Arms Sales to Joint Manufacturing
Nigeria and Türkiye agreed to steer their defence relationship away from Nigeria simply buying finished Turkish hardware and toward joint production and technology transfer on Nigerian soil, according to statements from both governments following the 7th Nigeria-Türkiye Defence Industry Business Forum, held August 26 at the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja.
Nigerian Defence Minister General Christopher Musa (retd) and Turkish Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB) Vice President Gökhan Uçar led the talks, which brought together government officials, defence institutions and company representatives from both countries. The two delegations formalised the minutes of the 7th Defence Industry Cooperation Committee (DICC) meeting, a bilateral body that reviews progress on defence-industrial projects agreed between the countries.
“We must progressively move beyond a predominantly buyer-seller relationship towards a more balanced and mutually beneficial partnership,” Musa said at the forum, according to Nigerian and Turkish outlets covering the event.
Where the Relationship Already Stands
Turkish equipment is already a fixture in Nigerian service. Baykar’s Bayraktar TB2 operates with the Nigerian Army under the designation “Project Guardian,” with roughly 43 airframes delivered to date, alongside ASISGUARD Songar armed quadcopters and Otokar Cobra armoured personnel carriers. The current push to localise production builds on a bilateral Defence Cooperation Agreement that Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed in Ankara on January 27, 2026, which set the legal framework for deeper industrial cooperation rather than one-off equipment sales.
The Centrepiece: A Nigerian Drone Assembly Line
The most concrete element of the localisation push is an agreement between DASAL Aviation Technologies, a Turkish maker of multirotor and loitering-munition drones, and NIGUS International Investment Limited, a Nigerian firm acting as strategic platform coordinator. Signed at the SAHA 2026 exhibition in Istanbul in May and referenced repeatedly by officials at the Abuja forum, the agreement covers supply of DASAL MIKON loitering munitions, FALCON R556 multirotor systems and PUHU cargo UAVs, together with a separate local-assembly, systems-integration and maintenance-and-overhaul arrangement to be built in Nigeria.
Turkish and Nigerian trade reporting has cited large indicative quantities for the MIKON order — as many as 100,000 units, alongside roughly 200 FALCON R556 systems and 100 PUHU aircraft — but neither company has published a firm delivery schedule or confirmed how much of that volume is contracted versus a ceiling under a framework agreement. What is confirmed is the intent to build assembly and MRO capacity inside Nigeria rather than ship finished aircraft, with NIGUS positioned to serve both the Nigerian armed forces and, potentially, other buyers in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region.
A Nigerian Industrial Base to Plug Into
Turkish technology transfer has somewhere to land: Nigeria’s own state-linked joint venture, DICON-D7G, has been ramping up production at a Kaduna facility since early 2026, delivering an initial batch of roughly 1,000 DG-103 assault rifles — a locally built variant of the AK-103 — and working toward an annual ammunition target of 60 million rounds. DICON-D7G has also begun producing UAVs and counter-drone systems, and is discussing a further partnership with Eagles International for Defence Systems to add armoured vehicles to its output. Turkish officials have not announced direct involvement in DICON-D7G itself, but the Nigerian venture illustrates the manufacturing base that Ankara’s technology-transfer offer would need to work alongside.
A Naval Track, Still Early
The day after the business forum, on August 27, Uçar visited Nigerian Naval Headquarters in Abuja and met the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Idi Abbas, to discuss cooperation on shipbuilding, naval technology transfer and capacity development. No shipbuilding contract has been announced; the meeting was described by both sides as exploratory, consistent with Türkiye’s pattern of using state shipyards and companies such as its globally ranked defence contractors to court naval customers well before a keel is laid elsewhere.
Why It Matters Beyond West Africa
The shift Nigeria and Türkiye are describing — from arms sales to co-production — mirrors a playbook Ankara has already run with Pakistan and, on the armoured-vehicle side, with Kazakhstan, where Otokar’s Tulpar has moved toward local assembly. Africa has become a genuine third leg of Turkish defence exports alongside the Gulf and South and Southeast Asia, and Nigeria, as the continent’s most populous country and a major buyer of Turkish drones already, is a natural test case for whether that localisation model can be replicated at scale. For DASAL, a far smaller and less internationally known name than Baykar or ASELSAN, a Nigerian assembly line would be its first real venture into offshore production — a meaningful step up for a company that, until this year, was known mainly for smaller multirotor systems sold in more limited numbers.
What happens next is worth watching rather than assuming: the size of the loitering-munition figures in circulation, the pace at which DICC follow-up meetings turn intentions into signed contracts, and whether the naval conversation with Abbas produces an actual shipbuilding agreement will determine whether this month’s forum marks a genuine turning point or another round of memoranda that take years to convert into hardware.
Sources: Nigeria-Türkiye Defence Industry Business Forum statements (Abuja, August 26, 2026), as reported by Military Africa and Nigerian outlets including Blueprint, ThisDay and Businessday; Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON); Nigerian Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation.
