How to vet a sesame exporter in Nigeria.

Can you verify a Nigerian exporter without leaving your desk?

Largely, yes. Two of the three registrations that matter are publicly searchable at no cost, and a company that cannot produce all three is not an exporter yet. The checks below take about twenty minutes and should happen before you discuss price, not after you have agreed one.

Ask for these four things in your first substantive email. A real exporter sends them without hesitation, because they are asked for them constantly:

How do you check an RC number?

The Corporate Affairs Commission runs a public company search. You can look a company up by name or by its RC number, and it will tell you whether that registration exists and the status attached to it. An RC number that returns nothing is the end of the conversation: it means the number is fabricated or the registration was never completed.

Two practical cautions. First, match the exact legal name, not the trading name — many Nigerian firms trade under a shorter brand than the one on the certificate, which is normal, but the quotation, the certificate and the bank account should all reconcile to the same registered entity. Second, treat a screenshot of a certificate as worth nothing. Certificates are trivially edited. The registry lookup is the check; the PDF is just the claim.

How do you check NEPC registration?

This is the check almost no buyer runs, and it is the most specific to exporting. Registration with the Nigerian Export Promotion Council is a prerequisite for exporting non-oil goods from Nigeria: without a valid Exporter's Certificate a company cannot process the Form NXP that its bank must endorse before a shipment can legally proceed. An unregistered "exporter" is therefore not merely unaccredited — it structurally cannot ship in its own name, and would have to route your cargo through somebody else's paperwork.

NEPC publishes a verification portal for exactly this purpose. It is free, needs no login, and accepts either the company name or the certificate registration number, returning whether the certificate is genuine and current. The link is in the sources at the foot of this page.

So the question to ask is not "are you NEPC registered?", to which everyone says yes. It is "what is your NEPC certificate number?", followed by looking it up yourself. Ask also when it expires: the certificate is renewable rather than permanent, and a lapsed one stops shipments as effectively as never having had it.

What does registration NOT prove?

This is where desk verification stops, and it is worth being blunt about it, because a buyer who over-reads a registry check is exposed in a different way rather than a smaller one.

Registration proves a legal entity exists and is permitted to export. It says nothing whatsoever about whether that entity has ever aggregated a tonne of sesame, has access to cleaning capacity, can fund a position, or has shipped a container in its life. A company incorporated last month with a valid NEPC certificate clears every check on this page. Registries establish identity, not capability — and identity is only the part that lets you pursue someone if it goes wrong.

Two further limits worth knowing. A registration can be current while the company is dormant or trading in an entirely different sector, so read the registered objects and ask how long they have actually traded sesame. And arrears on annual returns are common among Nigerian SMEs and are not by themselves evidence of anything sinister, though they are a reasonable thing to ask about.

Capability is established by the second half of this checklist: samples, references, inspection and a conversation about process. Do both halves.

Verify the company exists and answers

Beyond the registries, test responsiveness with substance: send a real specification and ask for a formal quotation. Competent exporters answer specification questions precisely, on moisture limits, loadability per FCL and inspection options, because they handle them daily. Vague answers to precise questions tell you everything.

Check too that the website, the email domain and the name on the quotation agree with each other. An exporter quoting from a free mailbox, with a company name that does not match its own domain, is asking you to accept an unnecessary ambiguity at exactly the point where ambiguity is expensive.

The five checks before a first contract

Before signing anything, work through this sequence:

1. 01Written quotation against your specification — grade, packing, Incoterm, shipment window, validity
2. 02Pre-shipment sample — 500 g to 1 kg of the offered lot, couriered, with a sealed retention sample held against shipment
3. 03Third-party inspection named in the contract — SGS, Intertek and Cotecna all operate at Lagos and origin warehouses
4. 04Documentary payment mechanism — L/C or cash-against-documents for a first trade; never a large clean advance to an unverified counterparty
5. 05A verifying phone or video call — walk through their process from farm gate to port; genuine operators enjoy this conversation

Red flags that should end the conversation

Certain patterns recur in every commodity-fraud story. Treat any of these as disqualifying:

• —Prices dramatically below the market — origin economics bind every honest exporter equally
• —Pressure to pay a full advance quickly, or banking details that change mid-transaction
• —Refusal of third-party inspection, or insistence on an inspection agency you cannot verify
• —No specification in writing, or specifications that shift between messages
• —Documents promised only after payment that should exist before it — company registration, sample COAs

Why does the payment step deserve its own paranoia?

Because it is where the money actually leaves, and because the most common loss in this trade is not a bad exporter at all. It is a genuine exporter, a genuine contract, and a third party who has been reading the email thread and sends amended banking details at the right moment. The counterparty you verified is real; the account is not.

The defence is procedural, not perceptive — you will not spot it by being careful, because a good interception looks exactly like your existing correspondence:

1. 01Verify banking details by voice, on a number you sourced yourself, never one contained in the email carrying the details
2. 02Treat any mid-transaction change of account as fraudulent until proven otherwise on a call — legitimate changes are rare and exporters expect the challenge
3. 03Require the account name to match the CAC-registered company name exactly; be sceptical of payment to a personal account or to a third country with no connection to the trade
4. 04Prefer a documentary mechanism for a first trade — an L/C or cash against documents — over a clean advance to a counterparty you have not traded with
5. 05Send a small first shipment before a large one; one container of history is worth more than any amount of desk verification

What a serious exporter expects from you

Due diligence runs both ways. A capable exporter will qualify you as a buyer: a clear specification, a realistic quantity, a named destination port and a credible payment mechanism. The best trading relationships in this market are built by two parties who both checked, and both passed. Verification is not an insult in the sesame trade; it is the handshake.

Run this checklist on us, and start with the part you can do without asking. AgroMax Limited is registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission as RC 9745814, and holds Nigerian Export Promotion Council Exporter's Registration Certificate 0045234, valid to 25 August 2028. Both are published on our own site for the specific purpose of being typed into the two portals linked below. Then ask us for a sample against a written specification, and name your inspection agency in the contract. An exporter who finds any of that tiresome is telling you something.