Judging the buyer by markets that don't apply
Many suppliers approach a West African tender the way they'd approach a buyer in the Gulf or Southeast Asia: assume the buyer can move fast, pay near sight, and absorb price swings the way a well-capitalised trading house does. That assumption is wrong more often than it's right. A national oil company or a licensed importer executing a government contract works inside a public budget, a subsidy mechanism, and a central bank approval process. None of that mirrors the financial flexibility of a private buyer in a mature market. Pricing or structuring an offer as if it did is usually the first mistake, and it's the one that makes every mistake after it harder to fix.
Reading bank caution as a lack of seriousness
A recurring complaint from suppliers: "this buyer isn't serious, their bank won't even confirm the LC." That reaction misreads how West African banking actually works. Most buyers operate through a local bank, and that local bank in turn holds correspondent relationships with a handful of top 50 international institutions, Citibank and Société Générale among them. When one of those correspondents agrees to confirm an LC, it is usually on the strength of an established history with that specific issuing bank or client, not because confirmation is owed as a matter of course. A confirmation is the correspondent putting its own name behind the issuing bank's credit standing. Getting one is a signal of financial strength, not a formality.
A refusal to confirm does not necessarily reflect the buyer's creditworthiness. Confirming banks price and grant confirmations deal by deal, weighing country risk, the issuing bank's standing, and their own exposure limits at that moment. A correspondent pulling back from a given country, or repricing its appetite for a region, can just as easily reflect a geopolitical shift as anything specific to the transaction in front of it.
Suppliers who take a declined confirmation personally, or assume bad faith on the buyer's side, close doors that a better understanding of the mechanism would have kept open. The fix is not to give up on the LC route. It's to ask the buyer to substantiate the relationship directly, a record of prior confirmations from the same correspondent, or proof of an existing agreement to supply and resell to a government entity, are both reasonable things to request. And a buyer willing to share that kind of proof is entitled to ask the same in return: evidence that the supplier has performed before, at similar volumes, on similar instruments. That exchange, not a generic confirmation request, is what actually de-risks the deal for both sides.
Quoting as if government payment cycles don't exist
In Benin, Burkina Faso, and similar markets, part of the retail price of fuel is fixed by the state below the actual import cost. The difference is recovered later through a subvention reimbursement, and that reimbursement follows the government's own disbursement schedule, sometimes weeks or months after the cargo has landed. A licensed importer bidding into that system cannot promise payment at sight, because they haven't been paid either. Add the ordinary steps of a public tender, budget approval, and central bank foreign exchange clearance, and a 90 to 120 day deferred LC is not the buyer being difficult. It's the fastest structure the system allows.
Suppliers who quote as if sight payment is realistic, then walk away when the buyer proposes a deferred structure, aren't protecting themselves. They're pricing themselves out of the only arrangement that market can actually offer. Understanding the payment cycle before quoting, not after, is what lets a supplier structure a deal the buyer can execute rather than one they have to reject.
Treating a track record as optional
West African buyers see a high volume of offers that go nowhere: cargo that doesn't exist, refineries that were never contacted, prices that aren't achievable at the stated grade and Incoterm. Because the product feeds national distribution rather than a private client, a failed delivery isn't a commercial inconvenience. It's a supply gap the government has to explain to the public. That's why serious buyers ask hard questions before committing: has this supplier delivered into West Africa before, at this port, at this volume, on this kind of instrument.
Proof of funds or a bank reference confirming general trading capacity is a reasonable starting point, but it answers the wrong question on its own. What buyers need confirmed is regional performance specifically. A supplier who has never discharged in Cotonou or Lomé carries operational risk that a supplier with the same balance sheet but a track record in Rotterdam does not. Suppliers who lead with financial credentials and skip the performance history are missing what the buyer is actually screening for.
Assuming price is negotiable the way it is elsewhere
Suppliers sometimes read a West African buyer's persistence on price as inexperience, or as a bluff to be ignored. It's neither. The buyer carries the price exposure between contract and discharge, the cost of the deferred payment structure, and the currency conversion between the international supply price and a locally regulated price, often set in CFA francs. Every dollar a supplier refuses to sharpen on price is a dollar the buyer has to absorb, recover through a slow reimbursement process, or explain to a ministry. A supplier who understands how thin the buyer's margin for error is will get further than one who assumes the buyer hasn't seen a competitive market before.
None of this makes West African buyers difficult to work with. It makes them buyers operating under constraints most suppliers haven't priced in. The suppliers who take the time to understand deferred LCs, correspondent bank discretion, subvention cycles, and the buyer's own price exposure are the ones who win repeat business in this market. The ones who don't tend to blame the buyer for a mismatch they created themselves.