O. KAYODE & CO, 1st Floor , 22 Oba Akran Avenue , Ikeja, Lagos (2026)

24/09/2026

Support for small business IP in Nigeria is widening. It still cannot make the first decision for a founder.

At the WIPO Assemblies in Geneva in July, Nigeria's Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment announced a partnership between the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria and the WIPO Nigeria Office to widen access to IP services for micro, small and medium enterprises. WIPO's Director General has said that WIPO supported more than 600 Nigerian MSMEs in 2025 through IP advisory and business development programmes, and has described plans for an IP for Business Centre with SMEDAN.

That is real, and it is arriving. What an advisory clinic cannot do is decide for you which asset matters and in which class.

What should a small Nigerian business protect first? The name, before the product. A founder's instinct is to protect the thing they made, but the thing customers repeat is the name, and it is the name that a competitor can register while you are still perfecting the product.

Then the class. This is where founders lose money. A Nigerian registration is valid only for the class of goods or services applied for, and the Registry's position is that covering further classes means a separate application in each. A cosmetics brand that also sells online and runs training is looking at more than one filing. Decide deliberately which classes the business will actually be in within two years, rather than filing in one and discovering the gap later.

If you are booking into an advisory session, bring four things and the hour will be worth having: the exact name as you use it, written down; a plain description of what you sell; the earliest dated evidence you have of using the name, such as an invoice, a listing or a packaging proof; and anything you have already filed, including applications that went nowhere.

Turn up with that and the advice you get will be about your business rather than about IP in general.

23/09/2026

Nobody has ever thanked me for a diary entry. Some of the most useful work I have done was exactly that.

A renewal date entered three years before it matters. A recordal filed because an address changed. A file note written on a Friday afternoon explaining why a decision was taken, for the benefit of whoever picks the matter up later, who may well be me and may well have forgotten.

None of it is interesting. All of it is somebody's business surviving a bad month.

There is a particular kind of attention that this work asks for, and it took me a while to name it. It is not diligence exactly. It is holding something carefully that belongs to someone else. A trade mark on our register is a livelihood on somebody's file. They are not thinking about the renewal. They are thinking about their supplier, their staff and next month. The renewal is ours to remember.

I notice that the parts of practice that make people's names are the arguments, and the parts that keep clients are the entries nobody sees. Both matter. Only one of them turns up in a profile.

People sometimes ask whether the routine parts of this work get dull. They never have for me, and I think the reason is that they are not routine from the client's side. They are only routine from ours, and the difference between those two views is most of what I understand about being trusted with someone else's assets.

What is the quiet, unglamorous part of your work that you would defend?

22/09/2026

In Nigeria a registration you are not using can be taken off the register on another party's application.

Can a Nigerian trade mark registration be removed for non-use? Yes. Section 31 of the Trade Marks Act allows a registered mark to be taken off the register, in respect of any of the goods for which it is registered, on the application of a person concerned to the court or to the Registrar, on either of two grounds.

The first is that the mark was registered without any bona fide intention that it be used for those goods, and that there has in fact been no bona fide use up to one month before the date of the application. The second is that, up to one month before the application, a continuous period of five years or longer elapsed during which the mark was registered and there was no bona fide use of it for those goods.

For international owners this bites in a particular place. Defensive filings taken out to hold ground in classes the business never entered are the exposed ones, and evidence of use is usually assembled years after the moment it would have been simple to capture.

Three provisions are worth knowing before anyone panics. Under section 33(3), use by a registered user is deemed to be use by the proprietor, which matters wherever a mark is licensed and the licensee is properly recorded. Under section 37, applying the mark in Nigeria to goods for export counts as use. And under section 31(4), non-use shown to be due to special circumstances in the trade, rather than to an intention not to use or to abandon, cannot be relied on for the five year ground.

Section 32 provides a defensive registration for invented words that have become well known, and a mark so registered is not liable to removal under section 31. It is a narrow door. It does not cover ordinary defensive filings.

The practical answer is an evidence habit, not litigation. Keep dated invoices, dated packaging and artwork, dated advertising, distributor correspondence and export documentation, and make sure any licensee is on the register as a registered user. Five minutes a quarter, filed somewhere findable.

18/09/2026

There is one clause in a cross-border licence that I always slow down on, and it is not the one people expect.

It is the scope clause. Not indemnities, not governing law. Scope.

Agreements drafted abroad tend to write scope for elegance. Broad, clean language that covers every eventuality without listing any of them, because listing looks inelegant and invites argument about what was left out. Between two commercial parties who trust each other, that language works perfectly well for years.

Then the agreement has to be read by someone who was never in the negotiation.

A regulator reads scope as a description of what is actually being transferred, and looks for the specifics that elegance deliberately removed. A court reads it against a dispute the drafter never imagined. A finance team reads it looking for the line that authorises a particular payment. The same sentence gives three different answers, and only one of those readers was in the room when it was written.

I have learned to ask a plain question of any scope clause that crosses a border: if a person with no commercial context and a statutory checklist reads this, what will they conclude is being transferred? If I cannot answer that quickly, neither will they, and the delay lands on the party who needs the agreement to work.

The fix is rarely dramatic. It is usually a few more specifics in the right place, agreed early, when specificity is cheap and nobody is waiting on a payment.

What I still find difficult is the tension itself, because the elegant version is often the better contract between the parties and the worse document in front of an institution.

How do you handle that tension in your own drafting?

17/09/2026

Two engagements in August 2026 point the same way for anyone enforcing a brand at the Nigerian border.

On 12 August the Nigeria Customs Service Zone A in Lagos received a delegation from the United States Patent and Trademark Office to develop intelligence sharing, officer training and technology for identifying counterfeit goods. Separately, the United States Mission in Nigeria, with the USPTO and Nigerian agencies, ran a three day IP for Growth in Africa workshop in Lagos.

Read together, and read as capacity rather than as sentiment, the practical point for a foreign rights holder is a narrow one. Officers being trained to recognise a counterfeit still need something to recognise it against, and the only party who can supply that is the owner of the brand.

What can a foreign rights holder do to support Nigerian border enforcement of its brand? Three things, in order.

Register the mark in Nigeria. Section 3 of the Trade Marks Act is blunt: no person may bring proceedings to prevent, or to recover damages for, the infringement of an unregistered trade mark. Passing off survives, but the registered right is the foundation everything else sits on.

Prepare identification material that a non-specialist can use. Not a brand manual. A short document showing genuine packaging, current and superseded, the authorised importers and distributors, the batch and code formats, and the features a counterfeit typically gets wrong.

Keep a current relationship with local counsel who deal with the agencies routinely, because the value of an intelligence sharing channel to a rights holder depends on someone in Nigeria being reachable when a consignment is stopped. The Nigeria Customs Service Act 2023 supplies the border mandate. The rest is preparation.

This is a pattern from August rather than a headline, and the direction of travel is worth planning around.

16/09/2026

A Nigerian patent runs for twenty years from filing. It stops running the moment an annual fee is missed.

How long does a Nigerian patent last, and what keeps it in force? Section 7(1) of the Patents and Designs Act provides that a patent expires at the end of the twentieth year from the date of filing of the relevant patent application. Section 7(2) provides that a patent lapses if the prescribed annual fees are not duly paid. There is a grace period of six months, and if the fees and any prescribed surcharge are paid within it the patent continues as if the fees had been duly paid. The Patents Rules are explicit that an extension beyond six months cannot be obtained. Section 7(3) requires the lapse to be registered and notified.

So the term is twenty years in principle and one year at a time in practice.

Portfolios rarely lapse because anyone decided to abandon them. They lapse because the annuity fell between an overseas renewals team and a local agent whose instruction had quietly expired, and nobody was looking at the same diary.

If you have inherited a Nigerian portfolio, four things are worth checking first. The filing date of each patent, since that is what the twenty years runs from. The last annuity actually paid, as distinct from the last one invoiced. Who holds the current standing instruction to pay, named rather than assumed. And the address for service in Nigeria on the register, because that is where the Registry's notices go and an out of date address is how a portfolio goes quiet.

One provision worth knowing. Under section 10, a patentee may apply for the words "licences of right" to be entered against a patent, and where that entry is made the annual fees payable are reduced by half. It is not right for every asset, since it opens the patent to licence applications, but on a patent that is being maintained rather than worked it can be a sensible piece of housekeeping.

We maintain patent portfolios for domestic and international clients, and we are happy to talk it through at [email protected].

15/09/2026

A NAFDAC public alert can only tell the market how to spot a fake if the brand owner supplies the difference.

Read the 2026 alerts as a set and the pattern is consistent. A complaint reaches the marketing authorisation holder or a NAFDAC office. The holder examines the suspect product against what it knows about its own. NAFDAC then investigates, the Post Marketing Surveillance Directorate visits the point of sale, and the alert goes out carrying the identifying detail.

In Public Alert No. 018/2026, on counterfeit and unregistered infant cereal found on sale in Lagos, the usable detail came from the authorisation holder: the batch code, and the finding that the product had in fact expired despite a printed expiry of 10-2026, which indicated the date coding had been tampered with. In the alerts on counterfeit oncology medicines earlier in the year, the holder compared the complaint samples against genuine retained samples and identified the packaging differences that made the counterfeit identifiable.

In each case the agency moved quickly because someone had already established what genuine looks like.

So what does a brand owner need to have ready before it reports a counterfeit product in Nigeria? Retained samples of the genuine product, held and dated. A written record of your batch and date coding conventions, so a deviation can be described rather than merely felt. Current NAFDAC registration documents. Dated packaging artwork, including superseded versions, since counterfeiters often copy last year's pack. And a named person who can respond the same week.

The reporting routes are published: the nearest NAFDAC office, the agency's substandard and falsified alert address, and the Post Marketing Surveillance Directorate. Alerts are also uploaded to the WHO Global Surveillance and Monitoring System, so the record travels further than Nigeria.

The system responds. It responds faster to a brand owner who arrives with a reference rather than a suspicion.

10/09/2026

A trade mark licence into Nigeria can be perfectly valid between the parties and still leave the royalties stuck.

Does a licence in Nigeria need to be registered with anyone other than the Registry? Often yes. Under section 4(d) of the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion Act, agreements transferring foreign technology to a Nigerian party are registrable with NOTAP. The categories are broad and cover the use of trade marks, the right to use patented inventions, technical expertise in the form of plans, diagrams and operating manuals, basic or detailed engineering, the supply of machinery and plant, and the provision of operating staff, managerial assistance and training.

The timing is specific. Section 5(2) requires registration not later than sixty days from the ex*****on or conclusion of the agreement.

The consequence of not registering is narrower than people assume, and more painful. Section 7(1) provides that no payment may be made in Nigeria to the credit of a person outside Nigeria by or on the authority of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of Nigeria or a licensed Nigerian bank in respect of a registrable agreement, unless the certificate of registration and a certified copy of the agreement are presented. On its face the Act blocks the official payment route. It does not say the contract is void. The licensor may hold a valid agreement and still be unable to move the money.

Section 6(2) then lists the grounds on which the director shall not register. Several of them are drafting choices rather than commercial ones: a term expressed to exceed ten years, an obligation on the Nigerian party to submit to a foreign jurisdiction on the interpretation or enforcement of the agreement in Nigeria, consideration that is not commensurate with the technology acquired.

Which is the point worth taking away. Registration is much easier to secure when the agreement is drafted with these requirements in view than when it is retrofitted after signature and after the first invoice.

09/09/2026

"We filed internationally, so we're covered." I have been hearing that sentence for three decades, usually by email, usually late.

It is never said carelessly. It is said by competent people who did everything their system asked of them. They ran a global filing programme, the designations went in, the certificate came back, and the certificate is genuinely impressive.

Nigeria is simply not on it, because Nigeria is not part of that system.

What interests me is not the gap itself. It is that the gap is invisible from the inside. A system that works beautifully produces a document that looks complete, and a document that looks complete stops anyone asking the next question. The failure is not in anyone's competence. It is in the fact that the missing country leaves no trace in the paperwork.

Which raises the awkward question of whose job it is to notice. The instructing client assumes the programme covers the markets they named. The person running the programme covers the markets the system reaches. Somewhere between those two reasonable positions, a market nobody is responsible for goes unprotected, and it usually surfaces when someone else has already registered the name there.

I have watched this happen often enough that I no longer think of it as an error. It is a structural blind spot, and structural blind spots are closed by process, not by care.

The version I have seen work is unglamorous. A single standing question at the point of instruction: which of our markets sit outside the system we are filing through, and who is handling those?

For those of you managing international portfolios, where in your process does that question actually get asked?

08/09/2026

International Literacy Day falls today, 8 September. Literacy depends on a publishing industry that can afford to keep publishing.

UNESCO marks the sixtieth anniversary of the day this year under the theme "Literacy for people, the planet and prosperity". In Nigeria the practical threat to that is book piracy, which takes the return out of publishing before an author or a publisher sees any of it.

In December 2025 the Nigerian Copyright Commission destroyed pirated books it valued at ₦141,550,000, seized over roughly three years from bookshops and markets in Abeokuta and Sango-Otta in Ogun State and in Ibadan. The Commission noted that some sellers could not show where their stock had come from, and pointed to binding, colour, paper grammage and point of purchase as the features that separate an original from a copy.

What can a Nigerian author or publisher actually do about pirated copies of their book? The complaint route runs to the Commission, which holds enforcement powers under the Copyright Act 2022. What decides whether an action can proceed is documentation. That means evidence of authorship and a clean chain of title, so the publishing or commissioning agreement, any assignment or licence, and the record of who holds which rights in which territory. It also means production evidence: print runs, printer invoices, distribution records and dated copies of the genuine edition, which is what allows a copy to be shown to be a copy.

Assemble that while the book is being published, not on the day the pirated edition turns up. In our experience the cases that move are the ones where the paperwork already existed.

The day is worth marking. It is worth more if the industry behind it can be defended.

O. KAYODE & CO

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