Except otherwise stated, any resemblance of fictional people or events in this article to real life ones, is purely coincidental.

Imagine you are a 22-year old Nigerian, and you just got a job in a top financial institution. The company has just finished its training program, and you were specifically told to call people by their first names. Let’s also imagine that you come from a conservative tribe like mine: Yoruba. You will probably struggle with this coming from a home, where everyone was called Uncle, Aunty, Brother, Sister, etc before their names. But you’re smart, and adaptable, so after a few weeks of training school drumming it into your head, you learn it.

Now during one of the sessions, a board member who used to work actively in the company comes to take a class. You want to ask a question, but you can see that he looks older than the people who took the initial sessions, and you are not sure whether “board member” constitutes a person to which this “first name” policy applies to or not. Other people are calling the person “sir”, but your policy-abiding mind tells you this is against company policy: what do you do?

Keep this fictional story in mind as you read. It is a classic case of what happens when a clear rule conflicts with what your gut is telling you to do. We are generally taught that rules and logic lead to better decisions. But is that always true? And is intuition necessarily irrational? These are some of the questions explored in Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer (GG), and they form the basis of this article.

What are Gut Feelings?

According to GG, gut feelings are judgments that we make quickly and feel strongly enough to act upon, even though we cannot fully explain where they came from. That’s why when we have them, we say things like “I’m not sure why, I just feel it in my gut!”

GG argues that these feelings are often based on simple mental shortcuts called heuristics, or what we commonly call rules of thumb. Rather than being inferior to logic, these shortcuts can sometimes help us make better decisions with less information.

Let us go back to our example. If you grew up Yoruba in Nigeria, your default when addressing someone significantly older would probably involve some form of deference: a title, “sir” or “ma”. Alternatively, you could simply look around and copy what everyone else is doing. Both are rules of thumb: when in doubt, defer to an older person; or when unsure, follow the crowd. Either would have led our young employee away from the official company rule.

I was a “victim” of not following one of these rules of thumb a few years ago, and let’s just say it left a permanent scar. Read the post below:

Even if my experience didn’t happen in an open place, I wrongly assumed that my workplace policy would apply even outside it, rather than following a much larger acceptable rule of thumb in Nigeria. My mistake was not that I chose the rule over my gut, but that I did not notice I had walked out of the environment the rule was written for. Suffice to say that I learned my lesson!

Common Rules of Thumb

GG argues that rules of thumb are essential because we cannot perform complex calculations before every decision. Sometimes, we simply need a shortcut that works well enough.

Take the popular 50-30-20 budgeting rule for example: 50% for needs, 30% for wants and 20% for savings. It obviously cannot apply perfectly to everyone, but it gives someone who doesn’t know where to start a useful framework.

The book describes several types of these shortcuts.

One is the recognition heuristic: when choosing between alternatives, we often favour the one we know. That helps explain why someone may stick with Indomie rather than try an unfamiliar noodle brand, even without evidence that Indomie is objectively better.

Another is the one-reason heuristic: rather than evaluate every possible factor, we sometimes choose based on the one or two things that matter most. Think about choosing a spouse. I haven’t yet met anyone who would create a spreadsheet, assign weights to looks, intelligence, faith, height and location, score ten candidates and marry whoever comes first. And if that sounds absurd, consider this: one man in the book actually tried this method, and he still got divorced!

Then there is simply following the default or copying others. If everyone around you is addressing the board member as “sir”, that itself becomes useful information. There is also copying the most successful, which is why companies typically imitate the first successful mover. It is why for instance, most smartphones that came after the iPhone look quite similar.

None of these methods guarantees the perfect answer. The point is that neither does complex analysis. For example, in Nigeria always using “sir/ma” when in doubt is probably safe, but using it for a Silicon Valley engineering team, may lead to them thinking you are junior, rather than just being respectful. Same rule, different environment, different result.

Is God a Satisficer too?

Another useful distinction is between optimising and satisficing. Optimising means examining many possibilities in search of the best answer. Satisficing means choosing an answer that is good enough to solve the problem.

One example in the book is the Ten Commandments. They are remarkably short considering the complexity of human behaviour as far as being morally upright goes. According to GG, even God is a satisficer!

Logic versus Intuition: When Should You Use Which?

This is where another famous book becomes useful.

Many more readers are probably familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes our thinking using two metaphors: System 1, which is fast, automatic and intuitive, and System 2, which is slower, deliberate and effortful. Much of the book explores the biases that can arise when System 1 gives us quick answers and System 2 fails to interrogate them properly. Kahneman and GG therefore sometimes feel like they are looking at the same human brain from opposite directions.

Interestingly, both men actually agree intuition works best where you have real experience of the environment, and under certain conditions. Some conditions that may favour intuition versus more deliberate analysis look like this:

Therefore, the question isn’t whether logic is better than intuition. It is which tool fits.

I have seen some of these things play out at Sycamore. For example, when one of my colleagues is hiring sales people, he always says that anyone who favours commission over salary, is usually someone that believes in his/her performance ability, and is therefore likely to be a great hire. He hasn’t been wrong so far. In credit underwriting, we always look at cashflow over collateral. In fact recently, someone brought a big piece of land to use as collateral. But we explained that we were not in the business of selling lands and are more interested in cashflow. Also, few things tell you more about the character of a borrower than how the applicant has handled previous loan facilities!

A World of Ironies

Kahneman’s work on behavioural economics is incredibly popular and won a Nobel Prize. Ironically, by focusing so much on the flaws of intuition, his book arguably plays into the very “negativity bias” it cautions us against. On the other hand, GG argues that our subconscious is intelligent, but makes his case using careful logic and evidence.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson: we can’t fully separate logic from intuition. In everyday decision-making, we are constantly using a mix of both.

Back to our intro, and the scenario you’re in: have you finally decided on what to do? If it was me, I would trust my gut and simply say “Good morning, sir”.

This was meant to be a piece about how the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) reintroduced Open Market Operations (OMO) bills to retail and local investors, after closing that channel for about 7 years. In fact, I even had a very interesting opening that had a wordplay of OMO, with the Omo detergent, and why we can’t find as much of the washing powder as we used to in Nigeria. I plan to share it later this week when I do a short OMO explainer: watch out for it.

I used ChatGPT and Claude for a lot of the research, but when the output came out, I didn’t like it. It seemed very generic, unoriginal, and filled with jokes and analogies any other AI chat assistant would have come up with.

Unfortunately, people are also getting increasingly good at spotting the fingerprints of AI in articles, slides and reports, which just raises the bar for originality. Take this lady on X for example, she just made a presentation, and was being dragged for using AI for her slides, and she basically had to explain what she did:

I read the speech and it was 100% original, insightful and thoughtful. Unfortunately, Claude has a standard colour scheme for slides, and a way it arranges boxes, that you just know its output when you don’t spend time adjusting for it.

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I know what you are thinking. You’re probably going to tell me that Uncle Tunde, if you want your article to “be original”, you have to improve the quality of your prompts by doing the following:

1. Adding your own personal experiences and perspectives

2. Including data that only you have, can get or that is difficult for AI to get access to. Perhaps data from running Sycamore like I shared in this article.

3. Make standardised templates (for slides, reports, papers, etc) so you don’t have to make adjustments any time you want to do something that is somewhat repetitive.

You know the tricky parts of doing all this, by the time you have prompted, prompted and prompted enough to get what you want, you would have already written (or dictated if you’re using voice) more than 2,000 words, if not more. Which brings us to the obvious point:

“If you have to type 2,000 words or spend hours formatting in the process of using a tool meant to save time and energy, what really is the point?”

Now, that’s not very efficient for a tool that’s meant to make work faster and easier.

As most of us know already, AI is excellent at many parts of the writing process: research, analysing data, brainstorming and even improving sentence structure. It can produce perfectly competent writing, but increasingly, competent is not the same thing as original. And most people have caught on:

To tell you the truth, it’s one of the reasons I write less of my Uncle Tunde explainers these days, and moved more to long form. Because if the explainers contain mainly breakdowns of technical terms, that’s something AI can do. It will return though, as it’s currently undergoing an evolution and rework to come back stronger and better.

Perhaps one effect of AI is that explanation itself is becoming cheaper, while original perspective is becoming more valuable.

The Best Way to Work with AI, in My View

AI has its creative limits when it comes to writing. I tested this extensively across multiple products, when I wrote an article about insights as Nigeria’s startups turned 10. I already had most of my perspectives written down, when I asked each to share insights with me. Most of them were too linear, looking at the issue through one or two lenses, when I wanted perspectives covering regulation, economics, partnerships, business models, etc. Again, you would say that I should have put this in a prompt, and I eventually did. But by the time the prompt was “ready” to my satisfaction, I had already spent almost as much time working on the prompt, as I would have if I had just written the article in the first place. And because I love variations in my writing, it’s not likely that I would use that same prompt in its exact wording again. I would need to change it of course. But I’m learning that that too takes quite a bit of time.

So now my approach (which I need to follow more strictly) is to brainstorm concepts and an outline with AI, but not use it for the writing itself. It will tell you that it will write in your voice, but it never quite does in my experience. It will try to reduce your voice to a formula, and that is very difficult to achieve, because humans have moods, and the way we express ourselves may differ based on which side of the bed we wake up that day.

Feel free to outsource some of your execution to AI, but don’t let it do your thinking for you. End of rant.

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I rarely write about Fintech in Nigeria. Perhaps it’s because I feel so close to the action, that I think my opinion may not be considered on its independent or objective merits, since my company Sycamore is also in the credit business. But I’m making an exception this time for 2 reasons. The first is because last week, I tried to send money to a Sytizen (a staff of Sycamore), and he sent me an Opay account, even if this person receives his monthly salary through his Sycamore wallet. I felt betrayed to say the least! It reminded me of a story about Aliko Dangote’s grandchild asking for Indomie while his own company was producing noodles. I have never been able to properly verify the story, so take it for the illustration rather than the history.

While I was still licking my wounds from the knife this Sytizen put through my back, I found this post on the streets of X:

Up until the post above, I hadn’t heard anything about Opay’s revenue before, not to mention profit. I was genuinely curious to find out more, and that’s the 2nd reason I’m writing this.

On August 13, Nairametrics reported that OPay achieved a net profit of approximately $72.5 million in 2025, rebounding from a $51 million loss in 2024. Revenue grew by 161% to $536.3 million, and transaction volume doubled to $358 billion. Additionally, OPay is preparing for a potential U.S. IPO valued at around $4 billion. Sharing some insights I learned while digging.

First, a sense check on the numbers

The figures regarding OPay’s financials come from an investment document reviewing its audited statements rather than a full public annual report, as reported by Nairametrics. Because OPay is still a private company, complete financial comparisons are still unavailable at this time.

That said, to see if the numbers “make sense” from an industry perspective, I did a check on its two closest competitors (Moniepoint and PalmPay), based on numbers that have been reported on them via different reports, year end summaries, and various interviews. Moniepoint and Palmpay are private companies too so these figures are also not from audited financials, but give us an idea of scale as you can see below:

Translating the figures for annual transaction values to a visual format, also gives us an idea of how close they are:

Note that the user metrics from the earlier table, are not perfectly directly comparable mind you: OPay measures monthly active users, PalmPay references registered and monthly users, and Moniepoint aggregates businesses and individuals. The revenue figures are also two years apart, and given what the naira did in between, the 2023 dollar numbers understate the businesses behind them.

However, the broader context is clear: it tells us the OPay figures are not so far off, and it also demonstrates that multiple Nigerian fintechs are operating at a massive scale.

Background on OPay

OPay began in 2017 when Opera acquired Nigerian payments firm Paycom (incubated by Telnet, which also birthed Interswitch) and rebranded it a year later. A $400 million SoftBank-led round in 2021 pushed its valuation to $2 billion, while we at Sycamore competed for the same customers on under 0.1% of that funding. This life no balance.

Initially a super app offering ORide, OFood, OBus, OTrike, and OExpress to drive payments adoption, OPay shuttered those verticals (often attributed to Lagos’s 2020 motorcycle ban and regulatory shifts) to focus purely on financial services.

Today, OPay is a leading Nigerian transfer platform with 39.3 million monthly active users. Though active in Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan, over 88% of its revenue comes from Nigeria. Despite outsizing major Nigerian commercial banks in active users, its bottom line remains around a tenth of giants like Zenith and GTCO.

Now let’s talk about its revenue, profit and public listing dynamics.

1. If OPay transfers are cheap (or free), how is it making so much money?

OPay reportedly made over $536.3m in revenue in 2025. But OPay to OPay transfers are free, and OPay to other banks cost ten naira per transfer. So where does the money come from?

There are several possible sources beyond transfer fees, from merchant and payment-related income to returns on eligible treasury funds. Without a full revenue breakdown, we cannot tell how much each contributes. But one revenue engine particularly caught my attention: credit.

It’s no surprise that OPay’s total loans disbursed reached about $938 million in 2025, almost four times the previous year. I did a quick check of its interest rate and found:

For a one-month loan from Opay (or EaseMoni, its Microfinance lending product), borrowers will pay roughly 18% per month, 1% per day if there’s any default. Annualise those rates and you begin to see why credit could be a significant revenue engine. In fairness though, it is reported that you can get interest rates for as low as 3% a month, after one has built a credible borrowing history. But the best I could see on my Opay app (I only opened it for this research, I promise), is 12% and that’s for 2 months.

The same way Opay started verticals like ORide and OBus to pull users into its payment services, perhaps, that’s the same role “transfers” is playing to pull users into credit.

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2. How real is the $72.5m net profit?

Things get a bit technical here so stay with me.

OPay reported $72.5 million in net profit, and $152 million in operating cash flow, demonstrating solid underlying earnings and cash generation. Yet reports also show a loss attributable to ordinary shareholders. How can both be true at the same time?

OPay’s investors hold what are called redeemable convertible preferred shares. In simple terms, these are shares with extra protections for investors. “Redeemable” means the investors are entitled to their initial capital plus an agreed return, while “convertible” means those shares can eventually become ordinary shares, including upon a qualifying IPO.

Even when the actual business makes a profit, accounting rules may require the growing amount owed to these preferred investors to be deducted before calculating what is left for ordinary shareholders.

For example, if an investor contributes ₦100 million and their expected return grows by ₦20 million in a year, that increase isn’t an operational expense. However, if the business earns ₦10 million in profit, accounting rules require deducting the investor’s ₦20 million growing claim first, leaving ordinary shareholders with a negative ₦10 million balance. See table below:

The loss attributable to ordinary shareholders does not necessarily mean the underlying business was loss-making at an operating level. OPay still reported $152 million in operating cash flow. The preferred-share obligations help explain how strong operating results and a negative result for ordinary shareholders can exist at the same time. If those preferred shares convert into ordinary shares upon a qualifying IPO, that particular accounting effect would no longer arise in the same way.

The primary issue is whether OPay’s profitability can be sustained as it scales towards an IPO and beyond. With new lending growing 285% in a single year to $938 million, rapid loan expansion naturally creates more risks, which may be adverse if not properly managed.

While OPay has achieved operational success, the performance of this rapidly growing loan book will be an important factor in determining whether its profitability is sustainable.

3. Why is Opay listing in New York, even if it makes 88% of its Revenue in Nigeria?

This one is fairly straight forward. The simple truth is that the USA has much deeper capital markets and liquidity pools, particularly for a company seeking a $4 billion valuation. This X post summed the core of this argument:

The thing about the Nigerian stock market is that it tends to favour highly profitable and dividend-paying companies. U.S. capital markets can be much more generous to high-growth companies. SpaceX, for example, listed recently at a valuation of about $1.8 trillion despite making a loss in the previous year. To use Zenith and GTCO again, they are both valued at less than OPay’s proposed $4 billion valuation even though they make around 10 times its profit. Besides, OPay was already valued at $2 billion about five years ago, so going to IPO in a market that can give its investors a decent return is not an unreasonable thing to do.

Still one can understand why Nigerians would want to participate in the upside of a product they use everyday, especially one that makes most of its money from Nigeria.

Temi Popoola, the GMD of the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) made a version of this argument to the President recently, urging that companies earning their profits here should also list here. He is right and I agree but I would phrase mine differently.

The truth is that Nigerians are not entirely shut out. The same report noted that an offering for Opay of up to $150 million, is being structured for institutional, high net worth and retail participation through vehicles distributed by Zedcrest, a Nigerian financial services firm. But this is an allocation, and receiving an allocation if we’re being honest, is not the same as participating in a market directly, especially when a middleman is involved.

Maybe dual listings - where a company lists its shares on both an international exchange like the NYSE and a local one like the NGX - eventually become part of the answer. Companies like Seplat Energy did this. I’m pretty sure the people that contribute to the company’s value creation, would love to benefit from that value too: as both product users, and shareholders.

So, is OPay okay?

OPay’s achievements are undoubtedly remarkable. The numbers suggest a business operating at enormous scale, generating operating profits and increasingly monetising the ecosystem it has built. But the $72.5 million headline still doesn’t tell us everything. We don’t yet have enough public information about its revenue mix, credit quality and some of the other details that would matter to someone considering OPay as an investment.

Interestingly, when my Sytizen colleague requested that I transfer money to his OPay account, none of those things were probably on his mind. He simply wanted his money to arrive quickly and reliably.

And perhaps that is the distinction.

As a product, OPay appears to be more than okay for millions of Nigerians. As a business, the $72.5 million profit is encouraging. But as a prospective $4 billion investment, there are still questions the headline alone cannot answer.

For now, maybe that’s the real answer to whether OPay is okay: it depends on who’s asking.

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Moove recently became Africa’s latest Unicorn, raising $250 million and reaching a valuation of $2.1 billion. My first encounter with a Moove vehicle was a very pleasant one in 2021 - I was beyond impressed by the number of Uber drivers that told me their “new” looking cars were courtesy of this company called Moove, which allowed them to purchase the cars on a lease, and repay from their earnings over time. Fast forward to 2024 onwards, the story (at least in Nigeria) is different. Most of the Moove vehicles driven by Uber drivers do not seem well kept and are quite uncomfortable - at least all the ones I’ve been in in the last 2 years (primarily Suzuki cars). My best guess is that the unit economics of supplying new or almost new cars to ride-sharing drivers just got tougher with each devaluation round of the naira. But through aggressive country diversification and an autonomous vehicle partnership with Waymo, Moove ensured that its business could thrive with or without the Nigerian business - and thrive it did! Great for the company, but not so great for us Nigerian customers.

What’s the point of my short story above? Now imagine if I published an article about not being happy about the state of Moove’s cars, then somebody shuts me up saying I can’t talk because I’m not a founder in the mobility financing arena. Or as we like to say in local parlance, “if e easy, do am nah”. I would likely be pissed about this, because as a customer (albeit an indirect one), I consider myself a Moove stakeholder, and therefore expect that my opinion on its service would be taken seriously, and not dismissed.

A little backstory

A few days ago, my good man Nnanna published a piece titled Everyone is in the Arena on Notadeepdive. Essentially, the thrust of the article is that when a stakeholder like me, Uncle Tunde, publicly comments on an issue (say the Moove example I gave above), I shouldn’t be shut down simply because “I am not in the arena”. Nnanna’s piece was about some of the feedback that followed GoLemon’s shutdown.

As you can see from my own experience with Moove, I share Nnanna’s sentiments. There are several stakeholders - customers, investors, employees, the media, and government - involved in the success of a company: not just its founders. It’s unfair to only be happy when stakeholders say good things about us, but cry foul play when the criticism is negative. Everyone has a voice and all our voices deserve to be heard.

That said, from this point my opinion diverges with Nnanna. I do not agree that everyone is in the arena per se, and this piece shows why.

Three Distinctions Worth Making

On a normal day, I would have just messaged Nnanna on WhatsApp and we would have had a laugh about this. But this “man in the arena” debate comes up too often and I believe the public will benefit from a healthy public debate. Plus Nnanna sort of gave me permission to write this when he concluded his reply to my comment with this line:

Thanks man!

Anyway, the line “everyone is in the arena” can be deconstructed from 3 different perspectives as follows:

1. Who exactly is “Everyone” and where is the “Arena”?

One of my favourite business books is Rework written by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. The authors mentioned that 2 words you need to be careful of in business are “everyone” and “nobody”. Any time a customer support person says “everyone wants this feature” or “nobody wants this feature”, you have to check the specific data. Chances are that there’s recency bias or a few very happy or angry customers are letting their voices overshadow others.

I believe this is the same issue here. ‘Everyone’ is simply too broad because people contribute differently, and at different levels. But there is another problem: where exactly is the arena? In GoLemon’s case, is it the company, the industry, the country, or even the broader economy? Any of these could be correct depending on the context. It is my view that a more accurate place to place “everyone”, if we must generalise, would be to place them in the stadium, and not necessarily in the arena. Some people are in the audience watching, some are on the sidelines, and even those on the field have different roles like officiating, and of course, we have the players too. See the image below

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2. The stakes are different

Having a legitimate voice does not mean carrying an equivalent stake. Nnanna alludes to this in parts of his article, but I think the distinction is important enough to make explicit. Consider an entrepreneur like Aliko Dangote. Dangote basically put his net worth on the line to make the refinery a reality. It would therefore be strange to treat his exposure as equivalent to that of a journalist analysing the refinery from outside it, with very little exposure to its failure. The journalist still has every right to speak, but the point is simply that the stakes are significantly different.

Although let me be fair, exposure and distance are not the same thing. The customer with money stuck in the app (in the case of GoLemon for example) and the employee who found out from a tweet are also carrying real loss. The arena is not exposure alone, it is exposure plus the decision rights that caused it.

Here is another graphic which attempts to map stakeholders based on their level of exposure to negative outcomes versus their share of voice. While this cannot be universally correct for all scenarios (for instance, early core employees might possess a significantly larger voice than the matrix suggests), it is a useful model to add necessary nuance to the broad idea of “everyone” having a stake in the arena.

3. The view is always clearer from the stands

Hindsight is 20-20, as they say. One of the biggest differences between those in the arena and those in the stands is timing. Most of us get to analyse decisions after they have been made, and often after some of the consequences have become visible. At that point, the view is naturally clearer. It is much easier to explain what should have been done when you already know something about how the story ended. The people closest to the arena, however, had to make their decisions without the luxury of knowing the outcome.

Perhaps one rule of thumb is what I’m now calling the timestamp test. Simply ask: when did this person first express this view? We can broadly group opinions into three:

1. If you held the same position before the outcome became known, your view is fair.

2. If you formed the view afterwards but acknowledge that hindsight helped you reach it, that is also fair. Most useful analysis in business lives here, and I am in this category constantly.

3. If you only formed the view afterwards but present it with an air of “I knew this was going to happen”, then the people in the arena have every right to challenge you. Fair game.

Including this article, if we are being honest. Any opinion about Moove’s raise or GoLemon’s shutdown can only be made with the benefit of hindsight. Acknowledging that is only fair to the employees, investors and founders who had to live through the decisions in real time.

Back to that famous speech

The famous “Man in the Arena” passage comes from a 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic”, by former US President Theodore Roosevelt on citizenship and public life. Perhaps the most interesting part of that speech, for this debate, comes later. Roosevelt speaks directly about the power of journalists, acknowledging their enormous capacity to do good and their equally enormous capacity to do harm. So he clearly did not think everyone outside the arena was merely sitting in the stands eating popcorn. The journalist mattered. So did the customers, vendors, critics and other people whose voices could influence what happened around the arena. But he still did not call them the man in the arena. Perhaps that is the distinction worth preserving: everyone in the stadium can matter without everyone having to be in the arena.

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In July 2026, you might have heard that Nigeria has the best performing stock market in the world, with the equity benchmark return at 67% (in dollar terms). You might have also heard that Nigeria’s quarter one (Q1) real gross domestic product (GDP) growth was at 3.89%, ahead of the IMF’s 3.0% global growth projection for 2026. Not to mention that Nigeria’s external reserves crossed $52 billion in July, the highest in 17 years. Then there’s inflation which was around 15.91% in June 2026, and looks like half of what it was about 2 years ago - we will revisit this later. The Naira-Dollar exchange rate has also improved or has been stable, as January 2025 started with an exchange rate of N1,535 to a dollar, while it’s now around N1,370 to a dollar in 2026.

I could go on and on but you get the picture. In summary, you wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that “the economy is doing well” based on the above. But but…that’s not how you feel right? You’re paying much more for things than you were 3 years ago, which means your purchasing power has effectively reduced, because it’s not likely that your income has grown as fast. This is probably evidenced by the fact that despite the macroeconomic improvements noted above, Nigeria’s poverty rate has increased from about 56% in 2023, to 63% in 2025. Thankfully, the World Bank projects gradual decline from 2026, to about 59% by 2028. See the graph below, comparing GDP growth with poverty rate.

This article will shed some light on why this disconnect is happening, and offer some potential solutions in the process, because I’m of the view that Tinubunomics has improved the government’s financial statement more than the household’s.

I really hope this piece is welcome as a tool for education and addition to the public body of knowledge on this matter, as opposed to just political leverage. A man can dream.

3 Key Reasons Why

The 2 biggest reforms that have had the most impact on Nigerians are the fuel subsidy removal, and the floating of the naira. Technically, we could also say that the subsidy on foreign exchange (FX) was removed too. The most common answer you will hear for why these reforms have not had a noticeable positive impact on Nigerians, despite the good looking indicators, is that the transmission mechanism (to distribute the positive impact to the masses) takes time. This is 100% correct - after all, it took years, if not decades, to create (and accumulate) some of these distortions, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to disappear in 3 years.

There are two major reasons the gains have not reached households, and a third reason many Nigerians do not trust the evidence that conditions are improving:

1. Where the Savings are - Government versus Household Economy

When we say Nigeria’s economy is improving or stabilising, who exactly are we referring to as “Nigeria”? This is a common observation I typically use to poke fun at people sometimes. For instance, someone would say “Nigeria is terrible”, then I quickly say, “hey, since you’re a Nigerian, doesn’t that mean you’re terrible too?”. The conversation usually ends with some sort of clarification that it’s the government being referred to, or at least gets us to focus on whatever specific “terrible aspect” of Nigeria the person was referring to.

Anyway, this is one of such instances. Those reforms led to savings for the government, and not the people. Unfortunately, the government seems to have absorbed the savings in a few ways. Finance minister Taiwo Oyedele named three on 30 July: debt service, now costing as much as 24% against roughly 8% before; the wage bill, after the minimum wage went from N30,000 to N70,000; and student loans, with NELFUND now supporting 1.5 million students. He put the two subsidies at about 5% of GDP. A fourth has been acknowledged by the President himself, and that is the part that has gone to increased federal allocation for states and local governments. Ali Modu Sheriff, former Borno governor, said his state got about N150 billion across eight years while some states now collect up to N55 billion monthly - yet, there doesn’t seem to be as much demand for accountability from the states and local governments, compared to the federal level.

In short, it would appear that the savings from the two most consequential reforms have been absorbed mostly by the economies of the federal, state and local governments, but they haven’t found their way to the household economies yet.

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2. The Benefits Have Gone First to Owners of Financial Assets

To be clear, some people have benefited from the reforms - perhaps too few. Given the monetary policy rate (MPR) at 26.5%, the yields on government securities have been great (16% to 18%). This has made it very profitable for banks and asset managers to make risk-free income from the government (another way the government has benefited from the reforms), while reducing lending to households and the private sector, since lending to a business has to be priced above a risk-free 17%. In fact, Nigeria recorded over $10 billion in capital importation in Q1 of 2026, a massive 84% jump from the same time in 2025. Unfortunately, over 95% of that inflow is Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI), which is mainly investment in financial securities and so can exit at any time, as opposed to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which typically goes to the real economy and infrastructure.

In fairness, some FDI is on the way. The most interesting I have read about recently is the Shell Bonga South West project, which would see the oil giant investing $20 billion in total, after getting some incentives from the government. But the final investment decision won’t be made till 2027, and there is not likely to be any production till 2030 at the earliest because it is a deep water project. This ties back to the earlier point I mentioned about these things taking time.

3. There is alleged “ojoro” in how we measure inflation and growth

For my non-Nigerian readers, ojoro is Nigerian slang, from Yoruba, meaning cheating or rigging a game to favour one side. You will see why it belongs in an economic article shortly.

In the last two years, the government changed how it measures both inflation and the size of the economy. The base years moved from 2009 to 2024 for inflation, and from 2010 to 2019 for GDP. This was overdue. A shopping basket assembled in 2009 tells you very little about how a Nigerian household spends money today in 2026.

The problem was the calculation that followed. Headline inflation was 34.80% in December 2024. In January 2025, on the new basis, it was 24.48%. When I told you inflation is less than half what it was two years ago in the introduction, I was comparing an old basis number to a new one. Ten percentage points came off in a single month without a single price falling in real life. GDP for 2024 was restated at N372.8 trillion, up 34.4% from N277.5 trillion. The measured GDP became a third larger overnight, without any increase in productivity.

Both changes happened while Nigerians were in the thick of the reform shock. So many concluded the government had done ojoro. That conclusion is not unreasonable because every good macro number now has a trust issue attached to it - more on this later.

For the record, I support both exercises. They were technically correct and long overdue. What was missing was the transition. Publishing both the old and new measures side by side for a year would have let Nigerians watch the improvement happen in the measure they already knew. I understand why that was avoided though - it would have been an expensive political decision. But the cost of not doing it was paid in trust, and trust is harder to rebase.

What should happen next?

Broadly speaking there are 3 things that can be done more or better, and I have condensed this into the 3Ps: Protect, Produce and Proof.

We have to protect the most vulnerable in society. Many have said this, but there needs to be stronger social safety nets, which should be tied directly to the savings from the “two subsidy removals”. One of the ones that exist (Federal Government’s Household Prosperity and Empowerment Cash Transfer Programme - paying N75,000 per household in three tranches) has reached 9.2 million households with the first tranche but only 6.5 million with all three, against 17.9 million in the register. There’s definitely room for improvement in the quantum, and efficiency of the programme.

Nigeria needs to produce more. The government does not need to become the producer; it needs to make production easier and more attractive. That means improving electricity and infrastructure, while using credit guarantees and targeted incentives to direct private capital towards businesses and the real economy. The goal should be simple: make it more attractive for banks and investors to finance factories, businesses and jobs than to earn easy returns financing government deficits. I like how China approached this and wrote about it here.

Last but not least, Nigerians need to see the proof of where the gains from the reform are going. I was happy to hear the finance minister say that the federal government would soon publish an analysis of how the subsidy savings have been spent. I look forward to seeing similar initiatives from other tiers of government, even as we do better as citizens to hold them all more accountable.

Building Productivity and Trust

To restate an analogy I have used before, we can view an economy like a company with a financial statement. To improve profitability, we need to either increase income or reduce costs. The reforms have helped the federal government cut costs and increased revenues available to state governments. For households, however, they have significantly increased costs without a commensurate rise in income. The tax reform was a solid attempt, but it does not by itself increase productivity or income.

To improve household welfare, we need higher productivity and incomes. That means attracting more direct investment, redirecting credit towards the real economy and reducing the government’s dominance of available financing. Last but not least, there needs to be more transparency on how this is done, and how all savings are utilised. This transparency should also clearly show the cost saving efforts, and sacrifices that the government is making to move us forward, to demonstrate that it’s not just households that are being asked to be patient.

Beyond the distrust of statistics, there is also distrust in Nigeria’s leadership by its people, fuelled by years of unfulfilled promises. If that divide is to be bridged, there’s a need for Nigeria’s leaders to do the work, make the necessary sacrifices, and transparently communicate all that’s being done. Only then, can trust be gradually rebuilt.

Tinubunomics has improved the government’s finances significantly. It now needs to do the same for households.

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A few months ago I read a Frontier Fintech piece by Samora Kariuki called Cheaper, Faster, More Reliable. It compared remittance companies to supermarkets and argued that the winners will be the ones willing to spend money on infrastructure the customer will never see. Customers see low prices, speed and reliability. They do not see the distribution centres, the licences, the treasury systems, the boring operational discipline that makes the promise possible.

I think it is a brilliant article and deserves much more attention than it got. I wrote recently about the Olodo in the mirror, and argued that audiences are not innocent bystanders. We consume, we amplify, we create. If we complain about the quality of what goes viral and then do not amplify the good stuff sitting right in front of us, we are part of the problem. So consider this my amplification, months late.

Anyway, the Walmart comparison stayed with me. Regular readers know I have a weakness for a good analogy, which I confessed to in my piece on Taiwo Oyedele and Nigeria’s $1 Trillion Challenge. So I went and read Sam Walton’s autobiography, Made in America.

As with any decent book, you tend to see some expected and some unexpected things. These are my takeaways and impressions from the book.

Who is Sam Walton and what is Walmart?

For readers unfamiliar with him, Sam Walton was the American entrepreneur who founded Walmart in 1962, after nearly two decades of running smaller variety stores. What began as a single discount store in Arkansas grew, during his lifetime, into the world’s largest retail business and made Walton one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the twentieth century. By the financial year that ended in January 2026, Walmart was turning over about $713 billion a year, running more than 10,900 stores across 19 countries, and had become the first traditional retailer worth over a trillion dollars. It employs roughly 2.1 million people, which makes it the largest private employer on earth. Put differently, one American discount store chain does close to three times Nigeria’s entire annual GDP in sales. Walton himself died in 1992.

The 20-Year Overnight Success

It is tempting to say Sam Walton started late, because the first Walmart opened when he was 44. That is the version people like to repeat on LinkedIn.

But he opened his first business (a Ben Franklin retail store franchise) at 27, after working at J.C. Penney and after years of thinking about retail. Walmart came after nearly two decades of running stores, losing one, learning, testing things. And before all of that, growing up in the Depression, he was delivering newspapers, selling magazine subscriptions, milking cows and waiting tables. His mother pushed him to aim high. Both parents made it clear that children in that house were expected to contribute, not just consume.

So the man was not a late bloomer who stumbled into greatness at 44. He was someone who had been building the same muscle since he was a boy, and who was patient enough to keep at it for twenty years before the thing that made him famous even existed. That is the part I want people to take, not the “he started at 44” meme.

This also fits into my personal agenda of asking people to get some experience (no matter how little) before starting a business, and the fact that overnight successes typically take a decade or more.

Setbacks and Constraints as Opportunities

Something that speaks to me about Sam Walton’s journey, is how some of his biggest setbacks and constraints became blessings in disguise. For example, he lost his first store. He had built the Newport Ben Franklin into a real success and then discovered he had never secured a renewal option in the lease. The landlord took it back for his own son, and he had to move to another town (Bentonville) and start again.

His worst business mistake put him on the road to Walmart. And it taught him to read contracts, which, if we are honest, most of us only learn the same way.

Then there is Helen, his wife. She told him she would live anywhere he wanted, as long as the town had no more than 10,000 people. That boundary set by Sam’s wife, pushed the family into small towns, and small towns became Walmart’s entire competitive position for decades.

Sometimes strategy starts as a constraint. What looks like a limitation is sometimes just a market nobody else bothered to look at.

Money starts with people who already believe you

Walton bought that first store for $25,000. He put in $5,000 and borrowed $20,000 from Helen’s father.

I have said this before in my piece on communities and the FIBB test: the easiest money you will ever raise comes from a community you already belong to. Family, friends, church, school, association, whatever it is. The people who know you finance you, before there is any evidence to look at.

He then borrowed aggressively from banks. By 1970 the family had interests in 32 stores, 78 partners and several million dollars of debt. Going public solved the debt problem and funded the growth.

Not everybody was happy about it, especially his wife. She was very clear about preferring to stay private.

Which is one of the reasons I enjoyed how the book was written. Walton does not get to tell a clean heroic story. Helen, his brother Bud, his children and his executives keep interrupting him, correcting him, and occasionally disagreeing with him outright. It reads less like a founder polishing his legend and more like a family arguing about what actually happened.

Innovation is a habit, not necessarily technology

Walton’s story demolishes the idea that innovation must mean technology.

He innovated in sourcing, pricing, store formats, distribution, staff incentives and information sharing. His Bentonville store became one of the earliest self-service variety stores in America, where customers picked items off the shelf themselves. In 1950 that was radical. Walk into plenty of shops in Nigeria today and it still is not standard.

He also bought a small plane so he could visit stores and scout locations faster. This I found very cool, as I don’t even know if it’s possible to have and fly a private plane around like this in Nigeria on a daily basis.

Sam Walton did not invent the discount store, or the warehouse, or the barcode. What he did was survive long enough, at enough scale, to turn a hundred small operational choices into standard industry practice. Cross-docking, vendor-managed inventory, hub-and-spoke distribution, the Saturday morning meeting. Basically a lot of things that are commonplace now.

And the wealth. Walmart made drivers, store managers and early associates into millionaires. I have written about this in the past, and the fact that we need more Nigerian and African companies to facilitate broader wealth distribution, especially for those who helped build the company.

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No great company is a one-person story

The book carries Sam Walton’s name, but Walmart was also Helen’s story.

She shaped the small-town strategy, objected to risky partnerships, raised their children through Walton’s long absences and brought financial sophistication through her family. Her father supplied early capital and advice. Bud (his brother) provided restraint when Sam wanted to move too quickly.

The children swept floors, carried boxes and delivered merchandise. Walton jokes that they considered themselves “slave labour,” although they were also allowed to invest in stores while young. The family supplied both labour and capital.

The same applies to Walmart’s people. Walton called them “associates,” introduced profit sharing and described the company as a partnership. The name would have been empty without an attempt to share information, responsibility and wealth.

That resonated with me. At Sycamore, we call our people Sytizens because I want them to feel they belong to something, rather than merely work somewhere. Walton’s example is also a challenge: a unique name must eventually be matched by unique economics. People should participate in the wealth they help create.

Think small, especially when you become big

The most contrarian idea in the book is Walton’s insistence on “thinking small.”

He did not mean lacking ambition. He meant preserving the alertness, humility and customer intimacy of a small merchant after becoming a giant corporation. Every store still had to win one customer, one shelf and one day at a time.

Large companies naturally centralise, standardise and slow down. Walton wanted systems without bureaucracy and scale without distance from the customer.

That may be one of the central tests of institution-building: can you become much bigger without becoming less curious?

The part that reads like a Nigerian newspaper

Walton was deeply patriotic. In his last years he pushed a “Buy American” programme and wrote about bringing manufacturing and jobs back home. That was the 1980s. Forty years later an American president is still campaigning on the same sentence.

Even here in Nigeria, we are also arguing about import substitution versus export promotion, still not settled, still going round the same roundabout while our currency reminds us weekly that we have not chosen. Whatever else you think of the debate, an unresolved one is expensive. We should probably finish it.

Biggest strength, and biggest weakness

The great strength of Made in America is the voice. Walton is honest, competitive, restless, curious and sometimes funny about his own faults. The supporting accounts give it credibility. People who clearly loved the man still describe his impatience, his absences and his bad calls.

The weakness is that almost every voice comes from inside the family or inside Walmart.

The book celebrates relentless low prices without ever really asking who pays for them. I wanted to hear from a supplier squeezed on price, a local retailer whose shop closed when Walmart came to town, an associate whose experience was ordinary rather than triumphant.

Including them would have made the book complete.

What I took away

Sam Walton died in April 1992. Jeff Bezos started Amazon two years later, carrying a lot of the same ideas about frugality, customer obsession, and speed into a medium Walton never saw.

Was Walmart built on one spectacular invention or one superhuman founder? Not really. It was built from hundreds of small advantages, discovered through curiosity, embedded in process and compounded over decades by a committed group of people.

The store is what the customer sees but the operating system is the business.

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The World Cup final kicks off in about an hour, and beyond Argentina versus Spain, the loudest debate remains the eternal one: Messi or Ronaldo? In a recent skit, content creator Layi Wasabi effectively declared a man an olodo for choosing Ronaldo as his GOAT. The scene was entirely fictional, of course. But it reminded me of the olodo uprising comment by rapper Ycee that set the internet on fire a few weeks ago, so let me quickly share my perspective before kickoff.

A quick recap for those who missed it. On an episode of the Afropolitan podcast, Ycee lamented that we now celebrate virality over intelligence, and that we accommodate ignorance so much that its champions have started to feel like the majority. He called it an olodo uprising, mentioned popular TikTok streamer Peller by name, and the internet did what the internet does. Peller fired back, fans picked sides, and the actual point got buried in the noise.

Ycee is not the first

As a certified rap head (well, a retired one now), I can tell you this sermon is older than most of the people streaming the drama. Nas made this exact concern one of the central themes of his 2006 album, which he pointedly titled Hip Hop Is Dead. His argument was not that the music had stopped selling. It was selling more than ever. His worry was that it was dying creatively while thriving commercially. Jay-Z went even further on Moment of Clarity and simply confessed:

“I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars.”

Simplifying the message multiplied the money, while lyrically gifted peers stayed critically adored and commercially ignored. And closer to home, M.I Abaga made a related complaint about declining standards in Nigerian rap when he addressed his colleagues in the very title of the song: You Rappers Should Fix Up Your Lives.

Each time, the argument caused discomfort because it questioned two parties at once: what artists were producing, and what audiences were rewarding. That second part is the piece of the Ycee debate this article focuses on. If the same diagnosis keeps repeating across two decades and two continents, maybe the problem is not just the artists. Maybe it’s the audience. Maybe, dear reader, it’s us.

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The mirror: the CAC Framework

Every piece of content (intelligent or olodo) that trends passes through “three gates” at least, and we hold the keys to all three: what we Consume, what we Amplify, and what we Create. Call it the CAC Framework. My fintech people will recognise CAC as customer acquisition cost, and the pun is deliberate, because attention is exactly what is being acquired here. Unfortunately, we keep giving ours away for free.

1. Consume. According to We Are Social’s Digital 2025 report (page 80), Nigerian internet users spend an average of 3 hours and 23 minutes on social media every day, considerably above the global average of 2 hours and 21 minutes. That is almost an entire day every week. And that is a lot of votes, because the algorithm rewards whatever we watch the most.

2. Amplify. Even our criticism is a contribution. In fact, this very article is technically an amplification of the same saga, and the irony is not lost on me. If you tell people a hundred times not to think about an elephant, an elephant is all they will think about. So when we talk about olodo content to mock it, or keep returning to the comments to register our outrage, the platform cannot separate contempt from admiration. It simply counts the engagement and shows the content to more people. And when we screenshot it into our group chats instead, we may bypass the algorithm, but we recruit fresh spectators and extend the content’s life by other means. Either way, the mockery becomes the marketing.

3. Create. A friend of mine recently spent a good while complaining about the quality of a certain popular finance thought leader. His critique was genuine, so I challenged him to start writing and offer readers a better alternative. He told me he was too busy. Somehow, he is never too busy to read the very threads he complains about (that’s another matter anyway). The truth is that our feeds are filled with “olodo content” because too many “intelligent people” have chosen to remain spectators, and an empty stage always goes to whoever shows up.

Although, showing up is only half the work. Intelligent people cannot publish poorly packaged lectures and then blame the audience for scrolling past. If substance wants to compete, it must learn the language of attention: storytelling, humour, clarity, consistency. The answer to shallow content is not boring content. It is compelling content with something underneath it.

Olodo is not an identity

I personally do not believe that anyone is an absolute olodo. Intelligence is contextual. A person can be uninformed in one area and exceptionally skilled in another, and Peller himself has clearly mastered the difficult art of attracting and holding attention, a skill many supposedly serious people underestimate. Even Ycee clarified that his quarrel is not with entertainers, but with the idea that intelligent people cannot also be creators.

Still, honesty demands that we admit our role in this uprising. It did not grow on its own. We fed it, one gate at a time.

So before the final whistle blows tonight, run a quick CAC audit on yourself. What are you consuming? What are you amplifying? And what are you creating? The uprising runs entirely on attention, and the budget for that attention is ours to allocate.

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Before you rush to say no, read this article first.

When I first caught wind that Nigeria’s First Lady was advising citizens to go into Akara, Kuli Kuli or roasted corn business, I didn’t want to pass judgment immediately knowing the polarising nature of trending gist.

Whenever there’s any “hot” topic that sparks passionate debate on social media, I tend to see it like an air conditioner (AC) with just an on-off switch, and without any temperature regulator. So it’s either the AC is on and very cold (that is, you strongly agree), or it just stays off (that is, strongly disagree). There’s often no room to set the AC at say 26℃, or anywhere in the middle that you prefer. No nuance whatsoever. In any case, that’s why I write…but I digress.

When I got around to watching the video, I didn’t think it was so bad, because I interpreted it as an empowerment program (which it actually is) for the most vulnerable Nigerians, for whom ₦50,000 might make a difference in their lives. However, I understood the counter arguments after reading them: part of the role of the First Lady (I’m not entirely sure her statement constitutes official government position, but that’s a discussion for another day), is to inspire hope, and communicate how the government is enabling citizens to reach their full potential. Not give them handouts for what many see as a subsistence life, confined to selling “local food”. You can watch the video for context.

Now I appreciate the views on both sides: what’s wrong with Akara, versus why is a First Lady giving poverty survival strategies, instead of growth ones? I must confess that the optimist in me initially took sides with the first camp, on the grounds that a road side Akara business today, could become an Akara empire tomorrow, given enough time, hard work, resources and of course, luck. But every time someone puts a fantastic argument in favour of selling Akara, one uncomfortable question I’ve seen over and over again is this:

“Would you advise your kids to sell Akara?”

It’s a very valid question. The type that cuts through all the noise, and makes you put your money (or your children in this case), where your mouth is. I have read many arguments in defence of the First Lady’s statement, but I haven’t yet seen a convincing and confident answer to this particular question. So why is this question so uncomfortable to answer, even if some of us believe that an Akara empire can be built? This article will attempt to address just this.

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What is wrong with Akara?

The simple answer is nothing. I think this is one point both sides of the debate agree on. Even those vehemently against the First Lady’s comment, are very quick to point out that there’s dignity in honest labour.

The challenge from my perspective, is that most people have concluded that Akara can only scale so far, which limits its ability to take care of a Nigerian family in 2026. Some have said maybe when things were cheaper, Akara could get the job done. But the general consensus is that our high inflation has changed this over the years.

Beyond obvious things like capital, along with infrastructural plus institutional support, I believe there are 2 reasons why the average middle to upper class Nigerian, wouldn’t want their kids going into Akara business:

1. We don’t believe in Akara (and its premium or global appeal).

In Nigerian pidgin parlance, I’d say “we no rate Akara”. Simply put, most of us do not see Akara on the level of a croissant or pizza. This point is not limited to Akara, mind you. It affects how we treat everything local versus their foreign counterparts, regardless of quality in some cases. We do this for cars, our artists, our clothes, and in this case, our food.

I’m not sure what to call this other than some sort of local inferiority complex. Even while researching for this article, some people have referred to Akara as “bean cake”. This sounds harmless till you realise that nobody has ever had to call croissant a “laminated buttery pastry”, to appeal to English speakers. To be fair, I think another contributor to this is how we have packaged Akara generally. When one pictures “Akara business”, you’re likely to visualise someone by the road, sweating by a frying pan, and not someone properly dressed in a very clean air conditioned restaurant, speaking well and serving you hot Akara. Perhaps, this local depiction of Akara isn’t entirely our fault. I mean, that’s what we have seen for years, and we have just been gradually conditioned to see things this way. The next point tackles this more directly.

2. Akara’s scale is limited by gaps in education, exposure and imagination.

Following from the first point above (that is, our lack of belief in Akara), many middle class to upper class Nigerians do not typically engage in the Akara business. Because those with the easiest access to capital, networks and global examples rarely enter the business, the people already selling Akara are often left to scale without the tools, time or support required to build beyond survival.

Think about it, a Harvard trained Nigerian who has travelled to more than 10 developed countries, and has enjoyed the way croissants are sold in France, and pizza is sold in Italy. Aside from having more than average resources to properly execute such a business at a certain level, this person has the benefit of ideas drawn from several places through visits, exploration and experience. Such extensive travel or expensive schooling may not even be necessary - just having enough friends, and access to relevant media may be eye opening enough to imagine what’s possible. Unfortunately, the majority of those who engage in selling Akara or other local road-side food, may not even imagine that it is possible to own a four-storey building in the middle of Victoria Island Lagos, that sells well packaged Akara to business executives for their breakfast every day.

Belief and Exposure: The Story of Sooyah Bistro

As far as local food goes, I believe that we can put Suya on a similar level with Akara. And if you’re still not sure, just use the children’s test: “Would I advise my kids to do Suya business?” There you go.

I’m not sure whether Olamidun’s parents approved of her going into the Suya business, but she’s showing us what’s possible with pushing local food at scale with Sooyah Bistro. Founded in 2018 by Olamidun Ogundoyin, a University of Notre Dame MBA holder and corporate consultant, the brand took Suya off street corners, and structured it into a high-growth quick-service restaurant chain. In fact, entertainment artist Banky W. started as a customer before asking to join the business as a co-founder later. Today, the business operates a dozen modern outlets, employs more than 120 staff across its ecosystem, and distributes its own packaged spice line to mainstream supermarkets. Under their witty tagline, “Suya Wey Get Master’s Degree,” Sooyah Bistro shows what is possible when local street food is enabled with the right education, exposure, corporate imagination, and of course, capital (social and financial).

What Comes After the Grant

Let me be clear: for millions of Nigerians (given our poverty level), ₦50,000 is significant regardless of what social media would have us believe. Grassroots intervention like this is legitimate and needed, especially when you consider that the gains from all the economic reforms haven’t particularly trickled down to the most vulnerable yet.

But a grant is a seed, and we keep planting seeds without preparing the soil. Columnist Abimbola Adelakun asked a fair question in her article (even though I disagree with the ad hominem bits of it): years after TraderMoni’s cash handouts, where are the success stories? The answer is that most petty traders run the business and the household from the same pocket, with no records, so any shock quietly eats the capital. Not carelessness; it’s the same education/exposure gap at work, because nobody around her has ever run a business that kept its own account.

The real bridge is pairing the seed money with basic business education, simple records, standardization and repeatable systems, because a structured business can access capital (debt or equity) that grows with it. The grant feeds a family this season, while the bridge hands them a ladder for continuous financial upliftment.

The Answer to the Question

So, would I advise my kids to go into the Akara business? If the picture in their heads is to start by the roadside without a plan to scale, the answer will always be no. But the real tragedy isn’t the road side or the frying pan; it is the economic disconnect.

Right now, those who survive on the business lack the capital and exposure to scale it, while those with the exposure and capital don’t believe the business is worthy of their intellect, or class. Sooyah Bistro (while just one example) proves that the problem was never the food itself; it is bridging the belief gap for the “haves”, and bridging the capital and exposure gap for those already in the business.

Our generation doesn’t need to abandon our local heritage to generate wealth. We just need to build an economy where the best akara seller can become the founder of the next great food company. Then perhaps, we will all be confident to recommend Akara business to our kids.

In June 2026, two financial institutions invited me to speak to their teams about building a strong brand. After the last couple of days, my next invitation might be on crisis management instead!

I was on my first proper vacation in a long time when this started. I had just gotten to Monaco when news of a sudden development affecting parts of our industry reached me. I left almost immediately, heading straight back to Lagos on the next available flight I could find.

This is not our first real crisis. In 2023, we had to publicly distance ourselves from a rogue loan app riding on our name after the FCCPC linked us to it. We moved fast enough that a Public Relations (PR) firm later wrote it up as a case study on crisis communications. Some lessons from that one incident stayed with us, and helped us deal with the current issue.

Here is what this one taught me.

1. Move first, or someone else tells your story

We were among the first companies (if not the first), caught up in the recent industry issue to put out a press release. Most stakeholders and customers heard it from us before they saw it anywhere else. People think silence buys them time in these situations, but it just leaves space for someone else to fill in the gap.

Having a PR firm on retainer from 2023 meant we were not starting from zero. We had a channel to news outlets already, instead of scrambling for one mid-story.

Years of writing publicly under my own name also helped. People believed the statement faster because they already knew the voice behind it. Reputation is built in peacetime and spent in a crisis.

2. Resist the urge to defend yourself

In one week, I was spoken to rudely by someone’s assistant, criticised harshly by a vendor pitching to work with us, and had someone insinuate we were running off with investor funds.

None of them had the full story. Explaining myself to each would have cost more than it gained. A crisis gives people permission to say things they’d normally hold back. Some of it is unfair, some opportunistic, but there are real gems in there sometimes too. Get defensive, and you may just miss valuable feedback.

The same restraint matters more with a regulator. They hold the outcome you need, so cooperating openly beats fighting every point in public.

3. Your team is an audience too

The Sytizens of Sycamore (people that work in Sycamore) organised themselves fast once they understood what was happening, putting safeguards up almost without being told. The board rallied the same way, and with much more vigour than I could have hoped for.

That does not happen if your team feels like outsiders to their own company’s crisis. We often pour energy into the external statement and forget the people answering customer calls need to hear it from us first. They’re also reading your mood as the leader, just as closely as the statement.

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4. This is the worst time to disappear

Cutting the Monaco trip short after one day was not an easy decision. But once I understood what was happening, staying away was never on the table.

When calls get uncomfortable, the temptation is to let the phone ring without picking it up. Don’t. The people calling are often the ones whose trust you’ll need most once it’s over. People forgive uncertainty, but they struggle to forgive absence.

The harder part is managing yourself first. You’re angry about some of it, afraid of other parts, and still expected to sound calm on the next call. Nobody sees that internal emotional rollercoaster, but it’s there and must be worked through gracefully.

5. Business as usual does not get to pause

During all this, nothing slowed down in the background: some Sytizens resigned, customers kept messaging about their loan or investment matters, and even insurance agents still called to pitch policies, as they always do.

Nothing about the business paused just because we were dealing with something serious, so I split the load. A small group, myself included, stayed on the crisis full time. Everyone else stayed focused on running the business, deliberately kept out of every update. Some days I had to step out of crisis conversations on purpose and sit in ordinary meetings, so the rest of the company (and all other stakeholders) could see things were still moving.

6. Spend less energy on the past than the future

You need to understand what happened and what failed that led to the crisis. Skip that, and you risk repeating the issues that led to the current turmoil.

But once you have those answers, replaying the past excessively becomes both satisfying and unhelpful in equal measure. I see a crisis as a sort of tuition fee, an expensive one, for lessons you’d probably never learn otherwise. Don’t waste it. Every crisis leaves you two jobs: survive what happened, build what happens next. The second is definitely more important.

7. It is a reputation and relationship audit

A crisis audits your reputation, personal and corporate, in a way nothing else does. You find out what people actually think when nothing polished is protecting you.

It would be easy to frame this as finding out who your real people are, as if silence means someone failed you. I don’t think that’s fair. Some people simply haven’t heard yet. Others hold back on purpose, assuming you’re already carrying enough.

What I can say honestly is how much it meant watching people show up anyway. Teammates who did more than their role required. Board members who rallied instead of retreating.

My wife most of all. She followed up on things I forgot, made suggestions I hadn’t considered, and prayed more than I probably knew. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.

You can be taught the theory but you only learn it by living through it. I am still learning mine.

It’s been fun watching Feyi Fawehinmi criticise Dangote for the better part of a decade. Whether or not you agree with him, you have to respect the rigour and analytical depth that goes into his articles. FF (or DoubleEph, as he is fondly called) delivered another classic a few days ago, which in his witty fashion he called “emergency detracting” on X, after the Financial Times piece that inspired it.

Dangote has become a polarising subject in some quarters: either the grand industrialist Africa needs, or the wicked monopolist who uses his government connections to squeeze Nigerians for everything they have. There’s little room for nuance or middle ground.

FF’s latest verdict is that Dangote cannot industrialise Africa, because for all he has gained, “he has bequeathed it no technology, no innovation, no diaspora of talent and owns almost all his companies outright.” But is this entirely true? I attempt to answer this, and shed more light on what industrialising a society entails.

What does it mean to “industrialise Africa”?

Two definitions for industrialisation help here. The first, straight from Google, is the transformation of a society from an agrarian, manual-labour economy into one driven by machines and mass production.

The second is from FF himself, and I prefer it because it goes further and states that industrialising a country:

“is not just about what you yourself do, it’s also about the things you seed in the wider economy.”

I like that he uses the word “also” - a conjunction which tells me industrialisation has two parts: “what you yourself do” and “the things you seed in the wider economy”. So let me borrow his framing and split them into first-order effects, and second-order effects.

First-order effects are what the firm builds directly: tonnes of cement, barrels refined, jobs created, capital invested and reinvested, taxes paid, etc. Second-order effects are what the firm sets off around it: innovation, supplier ecosystems, a diaspora of talent, new businesses.

And here is where I agree with FF. On second-order effects, Dangote can do better. The most revealing evidence is that after nearly three decades of Dangote Cement, very few people have spun out to start cement-adjacent businesses. I’m a big fan of company alumni going on to build similar businesses; I wrote about some examples about six years ago. The only example I could think of here is my friend, Ola Daramola, the Group CEO of BlueBulb Financials, who used to work for Dangote, and is now doing incredibly well as an entrepreneur. But even he went into finance, not cement. One person, in a different industry, is not an ecosystem. I won’t pretend otherwise, three decades in, the spillover should be thicker than it is.

Who should industrialise a society?

Three things are worth holding in mind.

First, industrialisation is a process, not a destination. For a country like Nigeria, if we ever get “industrialised,” it will be the work of decades. Second, no single person or company has ever industrialised a society. Not the chaebols (Samsung, LG, Hyundai,etc) alone in Korea, not Rockefeller, Carnegie or Ford alone in America. It is always a cohort. So when Dangote says he is industrialising Africa and FF says he is not, both men already know one company cannot do it. Dangote is speaking aspirationally; FF is rebutting literally.They are arguing past each other. Third, the state is always in the room. Yuen Yuen Ang, in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, calls development the co-evolution of state and market. I see industrialisation the same way. No infrastructure, no institutions, no industrialisation. Someone in FF’s comments (Stephen Brien) made a similar point citing Korea.

Put those together and the question answers itself. Can Dangote industrialise Africa? Of course not, nobody can do so alone. Which is precisely why it’s the wrong question. The right one is whether Dangote is doing the part a pioneer is supposed to do.

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First order effects and the refinery impact

FF’s piece spends most of its energy on the second-order effects and completely ignores the first-order ones. And those are not small. Dangote is one of the largest employers of labour in Nigeria, one of the largest taxpayers, and now owns one of the largest refineries in the world. So even by FF’s own definition, the “things you do” half, Dangote has already delivered. It’s the second half that leaves more to be desired. You can’t write the things-you-do half out of the story and then conclude the man did nothing.

The refinery deserves its own mention too, because FF leaned almost entirely on Dangote the cement titan and barely engaged what it represents. It is the largest single-train refinery in the world, built for roughly 20 billion dollars, about half of Dangote’s own equity. It hit its full 650,000 barrels-per-day nameplate capacity in February 2026 and now runs closer to 700,000. Nigeria, which imported more than 80% of its refined fuel for decades, is now a net exporter of petrol for the first time in a generation, shipping to Europe, the US and beyond. We may still import some of the crude feedstock, but the net effect is firmly positive. Analysts estimate full operation could save Nigeria up to 10 billion dollars a year in foreign exchange, a meaningful factor in steadying the naira. And through the US-Israel-Iran flare-up, Nigeria didn’t record a single petrol supply disruption. For a country that used to form fuel queues at the slightest hiccup, that is real progress. Energy security and FX stability are exactly the kind of thing a pioneer seeds in the wider economy.

On ownership and wealth distribution

One of Feyi’s sharpest criticisms is that Dangote “owns almost all his companies outright”. At 80% to over 90% ownership stakes of his current businesses, this is factually true. But that story also deserves some torch lighting.

Dangote plans to list 10% of the refinery on the NGX in a potentially record-breaking IPO valued over $40 billion. Two key details stand out: his pledge of dollar-denominated dividends to counter devaluation and PenCom’s reported rule waiver allowing pension funds to participate. This move provides ordinary Nigerians a stake in the refinery, broadening ownership in real time if it lists as planned.

Dangote Cement offers a historical precedent. Since its 2010 listing, it has become the NGX’s most valuable company and a consistent dividend payer, enriching long-term shareholders. So when we say nobody will get rich with the IPO, long-term investors in Dangote may disagree. With dollar denominated earnings coming into the picture, it looks even more attractive.

Beyond wealth, this listing is driving national financial education. From students to market women, Nigerians are opening brokerage accounts and learning about capital markets. By fostering this trust, Dangote is deepening the market on a national scale.

Hero or villain?

That question, like the entire premise of this entire debate, is built wrong. Dangote will not industrialise Africa by himself. Nobody will. We need other builders to step up, and we need the government to play its part, because development is co-evolution, never a solo act.

But “he can’t do it alone” is not the same as “he isn’t doing his part.” A pioneer’s job is to prove the thing is possible, absorb the cost of going first, and leave a path others can follow. By building the first major private refinery this nation has seen, operating at a scale no Nigerian entrepreneur has dared, and elevating capital market conversation into public commentary, Dangote is doing exactly that. He has also sparked this genuine conversation we are having now, from the Financial Times to FF to this very article.

Dangote is not Rockefeller, and he may not be anytime soon. But the story of Africa’s industrialisation cannot be told without him - not because he completed the task, but because he was willing to go first.

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Today is my birthday, so no serious article here - just reflection and gratitude, because I have so much to be thankful for.

Instead, here are a few random questions people have asked me over the years and my answers to them.

A quick disclaimer before we begin: don’t take every answer too seriously.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself

My name is Babatunde Akin-Moses. I’m a husband, father to two beautiful girls, entrepreneur, writer, and occasional economist. When I’m not running Sycamore, you’ll probably find me reading, watching a good movie, or trying to dominate a table tennis game.

I believe deeply in Africa’s future, and in the Nigerian dream that only Nigerians can develop Nigeria. I also have a habit of turning ordinary discussions into economic and business lessons, which is why I earned the name uncle Tunde online.

2. What is the difference between Babatunde Akin-Moses and Uncle Tunde?

Babatunde Akin-Moses is the CEO. He’s the guy looking at M&A trends, analyzing economic cycles, sitting in board meetings, and making sure the business strategy makes sense.

Uncle Tunde is the translator. He’s the guy who writes this newsletter and authored “Economics with Uncle Tunde.” His entire job is taking the complex, sometimes unnecessarily confusing world of finance and economics, and breaking it down into something you can actually use over a cup of coffee. Babatunde wears the suit; Uncle Tunde wears the native or casual.

3. What made you want to go into entrepreneurship?

My decision to go into entrepreneurship was influenced by all the books I read when I was growing up and one of my mentors that was into entrepreneurship at the time. And by the age of 17 years old, all of those influences came to a crescendo and I decided I was going to be an entrepreneur. But I also decided that I would work for like 5 to 10 years first to save and get some experience - perhaps that’s what makes my path somewhat different.

4. What do you say to a young person out there looking for a job or wanting to start a business?

For those looking for a job, I will say, become a high agency person. High agency means you stop asking “why me?” and start asking “what’s next?” Stop saying “This is the problem” and start saying “this is what I think we can do to solve the problem” Also, honor people, showcase your work & expertise more, and seek out insightful information - through books, movies and conversations.

If you want to start a business, I will advise one works for a few years so they can gain the much needed experience and network before starting their own business. Because you get invaluable knowledge, and build your network which will make starting the business easier in the future.

5. Do you think a married man and woman should split bills 50-50?

I will answer this one carefully because my wife reads everything I publish. My honest take is that it depends on the personal context. In fairness, marriage is rarely about identical numbers, it’s about proportional effort relative to capacity. Some seasons you carry more, some seasons they do. The couples I admire most don’t keep score, they keep showing up for each other and the growth of the family. Personally, what I saw my dad do is carry most of the financial responsibility of the household, which is what I do now. But I recognise that we may see these things differently.

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6. You hardly talk about relationships - oya give us some insightful marriage advice

I am not a marriage counselor and anyone who takes relationship advice from a fintech founder should ask themselves some serious questions. What I will say is that marriage is a decision taken in good faith, and the moment either side starts negotiating to win rather than to stay together, then things can get quite turbulent from there.

7. Your social media profile says you’re an avid believer in the Nigerian dream. What does that even mean?

It means I believe that Nigeria will get better, and will eventually work for the benefit of the majority. Not because I ignore the problems. Quite the opposite. In fact I believe that Nigeria has wicked problems. However, I believe we have the raw materials here: the people, the resources, the climate, the hustle, and the ambition, are just as good as anywhere in the world, and the gap between where we are and where we should be is mostly about a handful of fixable frictions, not some permanent national flaw.

In essence, my optimism is not based on the fact that things are fine or perfect right now. It is based on the fact that as long as there are builders (no matter how few) willing to put in the work to make things better, then we have reasons to stay positive.

8. If you were president, what’s your top 3 things to tackle and why? And who’s your preferred presidential candidate for Nigeria’s 2027 elections?

Top three things:

Improvement of human capital (education + health care), because every other fix is temporary if we don’t have a productive populace. Deal with insecurity because there’s no life without physical and psychological safety. Last but not least, is widespread business enablement. Essentially, things that will catalyst the rise and growth of many businesses that can scale. Because it’s businesses that will solve most of our problems.

As for my preferred presidential candidate for 2027, I have successfully survived this birthday without creating enemies and would like to continue doing so.

9. What are the most impactful things parents can give their children?

Belief, education (formal and informal), and strong moral compass . The kinds that imbue kids with enough confidence to make them believe, “I can figure this out.” I think one of the things my parents gave me when I was a child that has a big influence on my life till today was the books to read they gave me when I was young. Those books had a great influence on my life and they shaped the way I see the world up till today. They helped me build optimism and a sense of duty.

10. What are you most proud of?

Professionally: The amazing team at Sycamore. I was really proud to watch us cross our 7-year anniversary mark this past March. Going from a living room idea to where we are now is surreal. Also, finally publishing “Economics with Uncle Tunde” and getting those concepts into people’s hands.

Personally: My family. Hands down.

11. What do you plan to do after Sycamore?

I’d prefer to answer this when Sycamore has produced 100 millionaire Sytizens😁. Seriously though, I intend to keep venture building till the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t mind serving the government in some capacity, and maybe lecturing eventually. Those to me, are excellent ways of giving back. But for now, the grind continues.

12. Any parting words of wisdom?

Don’t let the pursuit of your goals make you miss out on your actual life. Read widely, question your own biases, find other sources of happiness besides your work, take your work seriously, but never take *yourself* too seriously.

And, of course, make sure you share this Substack with a friend.

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You have probably heard that Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire after the initial public offering of SpaceX. I am sure you will read plenty of motivational and biographical pieces about how Elon built this wealth over the next few days. Lucky for you, this isn’t one of those write-ups.

The original idea for this article was to explore why Africa has only 23 billionaires, even though the continent represents almost 20% of the world’s population. With Elon’s new status, he is now almost 8 times wealthier than all African billionaires combined. If only we could lay claim to him, given that he is originally from South Africa!

So rather than write about why Africa doesn’t have many billionaires, I decided to dream bigger: when will Africa get its first trillionaire? To answer that, we need to understand what actually creates trillion-dollar fortunes.

How Trillionaires Are Made

In reviewing how people have built extreme wealth, I have observed at least three ingredients that show up repeatedly.

1. Massive Opportunity. This is about the size of the market being served, the timing of the business, and whatever shift or wave is defining that era. Usually these markets are large but fragmented, until someone figures out how to unify and serve them at scale. Think of the dozens of smaller search companies that existed before Google arrived.

2. Ownership. It is equity in businesses, not salaries or revenue, that has produced outsized wealth in most parts of the world. There are very few people who have genuinely “earned” their way to billionaire status through income alone.

3. Fit-for-Purpose Capital. Capital is essential for starting and growing a business, but it needs to be the right kind. Patient for long-term bets. Debt or equity depending on the situation. Private or public depending on the stage. This is one area where the United States absolutely dominates. With just 4% of the world’s population, it accounts for roughly 44% to 50% of total global stock market capitalisation. That concentration of long-term, risk-tolerant capital simply does not exist anywhere else in the world at the same depth.

When opportunity, ownership, and capital stay together long enough, extraordinary wealth emerges.

So how does Africa score against this formula?

Africa Has More Ingredients Than We Think

Africa is not completely lacking the ingredients for extreme wealth creation. But ingredients alone do not make a meal. You still need a pot and a source of heat. Without them, even the best ingredients take longer to become dinner, or may not cook properly at all.

Africa may already possess some of the ingredients required to produce a trillionaire. The question is whether the environment allows those ingredients to compound efficiently.

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The Frictions holding Africa back

Let us not call them barriers or excuses. Frictions is the right word.

1. Scale Friction. Building across 54 countries is harder than building across one. Fragmentation cuts both ways: it creates massive opportunity, but also causes significant friction for anyone trying to reach continental scale.

2. Currency Friction. Wealth is primarily measured in dollars, while value is often created locally in weaker currencies. Consider a company that raised funding in 2020 when the exchange rate was roughly N360 to $1, now navigating a rate closer to N1,360 to $1. That company has had to roughly quadruple its naira revenue just to remain at the same valuation in dollar terms. You can be creating genuine local value and still be losing ground globally.

3. Mobility Friction. In Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk, there’s a story of him flying to Russia on a whim in SpaceX’s early days to buy secondhand missiles. He could do that because he could. For Uncle Tunde in Lagos for instance, that kind of spontaneous global movement simply isn’t possible with an African passport. And it is not just about people. This restricted mobility also limits how freely goods, trade, and ideas move across borders, and has prevented Africa from fully harnessing its own continental market.

4. Capital Friction. We have fewer large pools of patient growth capital and fewer exits creating reinvestment flywheels. To illustrate: the entire African continent has roughly one-fifth the number of listed companies compared to the United States. Some foreign investors even require Nigerian startups to show evidence of an offshore parent company before releasing funds. The financial infrastructure for long-term wealth creation still lags behind the continent’s ambitions.

5. Institutional Friction. These are mostly government related: Regulatory uncertainty, policy inconsistency, and infrastructure gaps all raise the cost of building and scaling. This is the friction most people focus on, and for good reason. For example, it’s estimated that almost half of Africa’s population is without stable electricity.

Because of these frictions, African entrepreneurs are trying to build while carrying weights their global peers rarely have to lift. None of these make success impossible - just a lot harder.

What Will Create Africa’s First Trillionaire: Bytes or Atoms?

A friend of mine likes to say we need more atoms than bytes. Atoms being real economy businesses. Bytes being software.

Most people assume software will produce the next generation of billionaires and trillionaires, perhaps because Bill Gates was the world’s richest person for so long. But history tells a different story. The largest fortunes have often been built by solving physical bottlenecks at scale. Rockefeller and oil. Carnegie and steel. Ford and manufacturing. And right now, both Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, hold the majority of their wealth in real economy businesses. SpaceX makes rockets. Tesla makes cars. Dangote makes cement and refines oil.

Africa’s first trillionaire will likely not come from software alone. They will come from someone who uses technology to solve a physical, continental-scale problem and owns a meaningful piece of what they build. Possible candidates include energy, logistics, financial infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, or something we have not yet identified.

Why I Am Optimistic

Several of these frictions are already easing.

African integration is making slow but real progress. The AfCFTA’s Guided Trade Initiative now covers 39 countries, and intra-African trade reached $192 billion in 2023, with projections significantly higher under full implementation.

Capital markets are gradually deepening, with pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and diaspora-linked family offices beginning to play a more active role. The critical next step is enhancing public capital markets specifically, since it is public listings that have historically produced the most outsized wealth outcomes. More founders are explicitly targeting continental or pan-African models, and the African diaspora is increasingly becoming a bridge rather than a brain drain, connecting local execution to global capital and customers.

So, When Should We Expect This Trillionaire?

This is the question the whole article has been building toward, and I want to give you an honest answer rather than a vague one.

Here is my argument.

Dangote, Africa’s richest man, is currently worth approximately $30 to $35 billion. To reach $1 trillion from that position requires roughly a 30-fold increase in wealth. That sounds enormous, but consider that Elon Musk’s own net worth grew from approximately $25 billion in 2019 to over $1 trillion today, a 40-fold increase in just seven years, driven almost entirely by platform-scale compounding across SpaceX and Tesla.

The difference is the friction. Dangote operates in naira, across fragmented markets, with limited access to deep public capital. Those frictions do not make the journey impossible. But they do make it slower.

“My honest estimate is this: if current trends continue and meaningful progress is made on capital markets and continental integration, then a 30 to 40 year timeline - roughly a generation from now - to Africa’s first trillionaire becomes plausible. That places the milestone somewhere between 2056 and 2066.

But Africa’s first trillionaire will almost certainly not be someone who waits for all the frictions to disappear. They will be someone who builds a business large enough, and structured wisely enough, that the frictions become irrelevant to the scale of what they have created. That is what Dangote did with cement. What the next generation needs to do is find an opportunity with ten times the addressable market, and hold on to it.

In Closing

We have been building our company Sycamore for over seven years now. During that time, I’ve often been struck by how much extra effort and creative energy African founders must invest in solving problems that many of our counterparts elsewhere never even encounter: erratic power supply, currency volatility, restrictive international mobility, and limited access to patient capital. Over time, I’ve come to see that we are not just building businesses. We are also constantly building around these frictions.

That reality is exactly why I remain optimistic about Africa’s future. If founders can create meaningful, scalable companies despite these conditions, then the potential becomes even greater as those frictions gradually ease.The question is no longer whether Africa will produce a trillionaire. It is how quickly we can reduce the friction standing between today’s founders and the scale they are capable of achieving.

Nigeria needs larger institutions to drive growth, but true development isn’t driven by a single variable; it requires a complex web of actors evolving together. This has always been my stand. Reading Yuen Yuen Ang’s “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap” cements this view by upending the traditional debate over whether good governance must precede economic growth, or vice versa. Ang argues that development is not a linear sequence, but a co-evolutionary process where states and markets constantly interact and reshape one another over time.

Standard economic theories rigidly suggest that a society must possess flawless, modern systems like pristine legal frameworks and total transparency before unlocking prosperity. Yet, looking at Nigeria, from the open-air expanses of Alaba Market to the tech clusters of Yaba, waiting for perfect conditions is an impossible luxury. Progress happens because people navigate around the structural gaps, proving that societies transform from the ground up through adaptation rather than imported perfection.

1. The Coevolution of Progress and Order

When I think of market order, I visualize the organized madness of a local mechanics’ village. On the first day of operations, there are no formal zoning laws, no digital inventory systems, and no written consumer protection codes. There is only a shared space, a collection of tools, and a mutual need to trade. The sophisticated structures arrive much later, funded by the profits of those early, messy transactions.

This dynamic became clear when a past airport taxi business idea of ours never kicked off. An airport official’s talk of vague regulations and hurdles scared us away, even though no formal structure for the business actually existed yet. Looking back, we should have just started and dealt with the regulations later.

This reality mirrors Ang’s concept of coevolution, upending the standard consensus that treats development as a linear equation where you insert perfect institutions to receive growth. In everyday life, these two elements chase each other in a continuous loop, where the market and its structures constantly reshape one another.

In Nigeria, waiting for top-tier frameworks before building is a formula for stagnation, as seen in Nollywood’s evolution. The industry didn’t begin with multi-million-dollar studios or airtight intellectual property courts, but with VHS tapes, cheap cameras, and informal stalls in Idumota. The chaotic trade generated massive value, and only after reaching critical mass did it drive the demand for modern cinemas and streaming platforms, proving that perfect governance is not a prerequisite for human ingenuity.

2. Utilizing the Materials Close at Hand

Data from the Nigerian Informal Economy Report shows that roughly 80% of the country’s employment exists within the informal sector, where over 70% of business owners launch without bank loans, venture capital, or written contracts. While an outside analyst might view an economy operating so heavily outside formal banking and legal structures as fragile, this ecosystem generates over half of the nation’s GDP. It drives massive survival and wealth without relying on pristine institutional frameworks.

This reality anchors Ang’s argument that developing societies must “build with the wood that is at hand.” In the early stages of a market, sophisticated courts and formalized capital markets are out of reach. Instead of pausing progress to mourn what is missing, communities instinctively tap into their existing cultural raw materials to create security and establish trust.

This asset-based reality is vividly expressed through the Igba-Boi (Igbo Apprenticeship) system, which underpins major commercial hubs from Aba to Nnewi. Free from venture pitches, collateral, or legal briefs, this engine runs entirely on community oversight, mutual obligation, and family ties. An apprentice exchanges years of labor for real-time business education and a baseline “settlement” capital to launch their own venture.

What classical economics labels a “weak” institution is actually a highly sophisticated wealth-distribution and risk-mitigation tool. It proves that the most resilient path forward is not forcing an imported blueprint onto an unready environment, but leveraging the operational power within tools already available in the local landscape.

3. The Power of Organic Improvisation

A live Afrobeat ensemble perfectly exemplifies organic coordination. There is no rigid, classical sheet music dictating every microscopic movement of the fingers. Instead, the band leader establishes a steady, unmistakable baseline rhythm. Within that overarching frame, individual percussionists and horn players are free to improvise, reacting in real-time to the energy of the room and the unique texture of the crowd.

This balance captures what Ang terms “directed improvisation.” Massive organizations and societies rarely transform through rigid, hyper-detailed master plans. When the top levels of management or government try to dictate every micro-step from a distant office, they inadvertently paralyze the people on the ground who actually understand the terrain.

In Nigeria’s vast informal economy, the most resilient solutions are almost always those born from localized improvisation within a broad cultural direction. Consider how urban transport networks adapt. When formal city planning failed to provide adequate transit for expanding mega-cities, local operators did not wait for state-sponsored bus transit systems. They improvised using minivans and motorcycles, mapping out highly complex, self-organizing routes that change dynamically based on traffic, weather, and passenger demand. The role of broader leadership is not to micromanage these organic responses, but to provide the enabling environment, the steady baseline rhythm, so that local actors can refine and scale their improvisations safely.

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4. Embracing Strategic Flexibility over Rigid Rules

Driving on Lagos roads during a heavy downpour offers a masterclass in real-time adaptation. As the rain blinds the windshield, traffic piles up instantly, and familiar thoroughfares become completely unmotorable. Survival in that chaos requires a hyper-alertness to hidden potholes and a willingness to abandon the pre-planned map entirely. One must instinctively pivot to alternative, unpaved side streets, routes that might look less ideal on paper but offer the only viable path to escape the gridlock and safely reach the destination.

Ang notes that during China’s transition, the central government frequently avoided passing hyper-specific, unyielding laws, opting instead for broad guidelines and strategic ambiguity. This gave local administrators the legal and psychological cushion to experiment with new economic ideas without the fear that an unconventional choice would lead to immediate career ruin.

In local corporate and communal spaces, a hyper-obsession with rigid, borrowed rules often stifles native problem-solving. When a policy is written too strictly, individuals become more interested in ticking compliance boxes than in achieving actual performance. One observes the power of shifting away from this rigidity in the dramatic disruption of the Nigerian financial sector by platforms like OPay and Moniepoint.

Instead of forcing rigid Western banking apps or traditional brick-and-mortar models onto the population, these fintech platforms embraced strategic flexibility. Recognizing that millions in underserved communities were locked out by strict documentation or a lack of nearby branches, they bypassed traditional limitations and deployed millions of POS machines directly into everyday spaces. By turning neighborhood provision shops, kiosks, and local traders into human ATMs, they maintained the operational agility needed to morph around the precise cash habits of the average consumer and bring vital financial services directly to the people.

5. Transitioning Systems as the Landscape Matures

Data tracking corporate longevity shows that approximately 80% of micro, small, and medium enterprises fail within their first five years of operation. While a lack of initial capital is frequently blamed, deep-dive organizational assessments reveal a more nuanced structural hurdle: the inability to scale past a founding team’s personal circle. In the earliest stages of a business, nearly 90% of deals, supply chains, and credit extensions are secured purely through personal handshakes and verbal agreements. Yet, as an enterprise grows, relying solely on these informal relationships becomes the exact bottleneck that stunts its survival, preventing it from ever accessing institutional funding or global markets.

This operational ceiling mirrors Ang’s insights on institutional transition. The informal deals, flexible arrangements, and personalized agreements that are absolutely vital for kickstarting an economy or a business from zero can become major liabilities once that ecosystem reaches a certain level of complexity. As a market matures, the stakes become higher, transactions become too vast for a single founder to oversee, and personal trust between neighbors must inevitably be replaced by an impersonal trust in standardized rules and legal protections.

Within our commercial landscape, one often notices this invisible wall. A family enterprise, a local cooperative, or a tech startup can achieve remarkable initial traction based entirely on raw hustle, internal flexibility, and localized goodwill. However, to scale into a multi-generational institution that can attract international capital, survive the exit of its founders, or list on an exchange, it must consciously transition. It requires standardized accounting, independent audits, written contracts, and formal corporate governance. The beauty of this evolutionary journey is recognizing that the informal, relationship-driven past was not a mistake or a sign of backwardness; it was simply a necessary, highly functional stepping stone toward a structured and sustainable future.

What the Book Left Unsaid

However, as compelling as Ang’s framework is, I finished the book with a few glaring reservations about things I fully expected to see but didn’t.

• The Omission of Education: The book didn’t really talk much about the critical role of education. For any co-evolutionary loop to successfully scale from informal to formal, the quality of the human capital matters. I believe one cannot build complex, mature institutions without an educated workforce capable of running them.

• The Silence on Healthcare: Similarly, the book largely ignored the vital role of healthcare. A sickly population cannot sustain the rigorous labor and productivity required to kickstart a struggling market into a prosperous one.

• A Sanitized Version of Poverty: Most importantly, the picture of poverty in the book was not painted in a very stark way, certainly not the brutal reality you see daily in places like Nigeria or across Africa. Ang’s depiction felt sanitized; it read more like a guide on how to get from average to prosperous, rather than how a society drags itself from the crushing depths of absolute poverty to prosperity.

Conclusion

Real progress is never about importing flawless blueprints from a distant land; it is an internal, iterative journey of using the tools at hand, embracing trial and error, and letting systems grow organically out of the mud of reality. This is why Yuen Yuen Ang’s work stands out as the first book I have read to boldly admit that you can build a prosperous economy on weak institutions. I especially loved that Nollywood was referenced to illustrate this, proving a massive industry can thrive without upfront institutional support.

Ultimately, Nigeria’s transformation relies on embracing this co-evolutionary loop, whether through the agility of fintech POS networks or the localized sophistication of the Igba-Boi system. By shifting from a rigid checklist of prerequisites to a dynamic process of adaptation, we can stop mourning what we lack and start amplifying what we do best. Giving human ingenuity the strategic flexibility to experiment and grow is the only way to build the robust, indigenous institutions that will sustain our future from the ground up. I will rate the book 6.5/10.

One of the most frustrating questions I get during investor pitches is about market share. Someone asked me recently, and I almost replied:

“If I tell you Sycamore has 2% of the SME credit market in Nigeria, what exactly are you going to do with that information? And how would either of us know if the number is even correct?”

I managed to keep the thought to myself. At least I hope I did. I’ve had reservations about market share for years. I first encountered it while studying for my professional accounting exams, and then again in business school.

The problem was that the more I thought about it, the less useful it seemed to me. Take SME lending in Nigeria. Is it even possible to accurately estimate the total amount of credit given out by banks, fintechs, money lenders, finance houses, family members, and every other source of capital? And even if we could, what decision would that number help me make on Monday morning?

This article is my first rant piece about a popular business concept that I think receives far more attention than it deserves.

What is market share and how did it get so popular?

Market share is simply the value of sales a company makes in a given period, divided by the total sales value of the whole industry. So if your sales figure in year 1 is 50, and the entire industry (you and your competitors combined) sell a total of 500, your market share is 10%.

While the concept itself originated in the early 20th century when mass production was becoming a thing, it was really Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Growth-Share Matrix that made it really popular from the 1970s upward. The whole idea was that larger companies could lower their unit costs as they got bigger, and this should make them more profitable over time. Interestingly, perhaps one of the most enduring concepts from the growth share matrix is the cash cow, as we now use it everyday in both personal and business settings, to refer to our most robust source of income.

The Growth-Share Matrix quickly became popular because it was memorable, easy to understand and allowed for comparison with rivals. The fact that many fortune 500 companies were using it, also created a sort of FOMO (fear of missing out) amongst industry players, because managers didn’t want to go to board meetings and be asked “why are we not using the Growth-Share Matrix to analyse this market?”. Following this mass adoption, market share as a business metric has been popularised by management consultants and business schools.

That said, there are several problems with market share as a business metric, and I will share some in the next section.

The Problems with Market Share

Until I started writing this article, I had no idea there was already extensive academic push back on the limitations of market share, since I came to the conclusion on my own. What I add here is the perspective of someone running a business from a developing country:

1. It discourages innovation and market creation. This is the most dangerous problem of all. When you anchor your thinking to an existing market share figure, you instinctively frame growth as taking a slice from someone else. You start thinking about how to compete rather than how to create. That mindset is the enemy of breakthrough businesses.

Think about what would have happened if Uber had obsessed over market share in the taxi industry before it launched. Or if MTN had looked at the number of telephone lines in Nigeria and decided the opportunity was too small. Neither company would have moved. The most transformative businesses do not fight over existing markets. They build new ones entirely. Market share thinking would have stopped both of them before they started.

2. It assumes a finite market size. Another major issue I have with market share is that it presumes the market size is finite. Which isn’t the case for most industries, particularly for those of us in emerging markets. Using my industry for example, it would be nearly impossible to put a cap for the SME credit in Nigeria because there is just so much more demand than supply.

3. It also assumes sufficient and accurate data. For certain industries, it is just difficult, if not impossible to get accurate data, especially in a country like Nigeria where there are just over a 100 publicly listed companies. How exactly is one meant to get the data for thousands of companies, that are informal and private?

4. It is not very useful in a fragmented market. In a market where there are lots of players, there is not much value in trying to estimate one’s share of the market. Take for example, one wants to start a bakery in Nigeria. People mostly buy bread from their neighbourhood so there would be thousands of bakeries in the country. Even if we estimate that a particular bakery has 2% of the market, that’s not information that’s worth spending a lot of time on.

5. It is a rearview mirror. It looks mostly at what has happened in the past, which makes it more of a lagging indicator. Before any decision can be taken on it, the facts may have changed since it is not the kind of data that can be gotten in real time, coupled with the fact that it relies on data from 3rd parties to compute, whose veracity one has no control over.

6. It does not account for substitutes, who are not direct competitors. Sometimes, the things that solve your customers’ problems may not even be direct competitors. I have heard insurance players talk about how they compete with prayers, and even those of us in credit, compete with soft loans from family and friends. Market share won’t show these.

No wonder BCG’s founder Bruce D. Henderson, later proclaimed that “market share is malarkey” (that is nonsense), in a 1989 article he wrote on The Origin of Strategy. So even the man that popularised the concept, eventually turned against it!

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A Test for Better Metrics - The BMAD Test

Here is where I want to spend a moment, because this is the more important contribution of this article. The real problem is not just that market share is a bad metric. It is that most businesses never stop to ask what makes a metric worth tracking in the first place. So I developed a simple test for that. I call it the BMAD Test:

1. Behaviour: Does its usage drive and encourage the right behaviour for the business?

2. Mission aligned: Does its improvement align with the mission of the business?

3. Actionable: Does it give us actionable feedback on which decisions can be made?

4. Definition and measurement: Can it be reliably defined and measured?

Run market share through BMAD and its weaknesses become obvious. Below is how it compares against alternatives that actually pass the test, using Sycamore as the case study:

Does this mean Market Share is useless?

Of course not. I think it’s important to always understand your industry, how the top players thrive and make customers happy - there’s always things to learn from those. Particularly, I think market share is mainly useful in 3 scenarios: for those in very mature industries in very advanced markets (like aviation in the USA), for the biggest companies in their markets (say top 10), and to fulfill due diligence requirements in business plans and funding applications. For example, despite my misgivings when the person asked me, I still had to come up with something because it was a mandatory request, and I needed to get the funding!

That said, I still wouldn’t obsess over market share even in these 3 scenarios, as market dynamics can change very quickly, even in mature markets.

Position versus Progress

Market share is not going away. Not if consultants and business schools have anything to do with it. Once a concept makes it into textbooks, it becomes almost impossible to dislodge regardless of its limitations.

What I would advocate for instead is a simple reframe. Stop asking what percentage of the market you own. Start asking whether you created more value for your customers today than you did yesterday, and whether you will create even more tomorrow.

One metric measures position, while the other measures progress. If I had to pick only one to obsess over, I know exactly which one I would choose. After all, customers don’t benefit because you gained market share: they benefit because you created value.

My dad is probably the oldest Arsenal fan I know.

He has supported Arsenal for practically my entire life, which means well over 30 years now. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when I heard he bought food and drinks for his colleagues and patients (he’s a medical doctor) after Arsenal finally won the English Premier League again after a 22-year wait.

As I reflected on his excitement, and that of millions of Arsenal fans around the world, I found myself thinking about a few broader lessons. Since I lack the tactical football depth (and experience) to break down how they won on the pitch, consider these simply a few reflections on business, psychology, and human behavior through the lens of Arsenal’s victory.

Enjoy.

1. Fresh Hires vs Experienced Talent

There was a joke we used to make during my consulting days: Arsenal was basically the consulting firm of football.

The logic is consistent. Consulting firms are built to hire fresh graduates, develop and promote the best ones all the way to partner. Arsenal did the same by discovering raw talent, building them up, and watching them peak in north London. The difference is that consulting firms get to keep their partners. Arsenal kept losing their best players to wealthier clubs.

At some point though, development alone stops being enough. At Sycamore, the shift happened when we started hiring seasoned professionals alongside younger talent, people who had seen scale before, and solved problems we were encountering for the first time. Arsenal made the same move, adding Declan Rice and others to a young core that was already promising.

Fresh energy helps you compete, but experience helps you win. The hard part is knowing where you actually are.

2. Extreme Emotional Ownership

“You can’t beat me at Emirates.”

I first heard statements like this at university and genuinely thought people were planning to fight each other at Arsenal’s stadium. It took hearing “Do you know how much I bought Wayne Rooney?” before I understood what was happening. People had made their football clubs part of their identities.

Take Tony Elumelu. One of Africa’s most successful businessmen by any measure, yet I’ve heard he still asks people in interviews whether they have a UBA account. A billionaire, decades into his journey, still personally invested in whether a stranger banks with his institution. That’s what we call “carrying the matter for head”.

It also explains why side hustles are genuinely hard. Extreme ownership of two things simultaneously is exhausting. It’s like being a deeply loyal fan of two EPL clubs at once. It’s technically possible, but ask any real football fan (not me obviously) and they’ll tell you it doesn’t really work that way.

The people who build exceptional things tend to have that same singular intensity. It is difficult to build anything great without some degree of emotional obsession.

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3. Nigerians Love Football. Just Not Nigerian Football

Nigerians really love football. It’s one of the few things that unites us, even amid polarising issues like tribe and religion. The data supports this too.

A GeoPoll Africa Football Survey conducted in May 2026 found that 96% of Nigerian respondents actively follow the sport (link embedded), the joint highest engagement level across all five countries surveyed.

But here’s the nuance. An NOI Polls survey found that nearly 60% of Nigerian football fans follow the EPL, compared to just 2% who follow local clubs. Brazil tells a different story. Despite being arguably the most football-obsessed nation on earth, 89% of Brazilian sports fans prioritize their domestic league, following clubs like Flamengo with its 32 million strong local fanbase, even while watching European football.

The gap for Nigerians is more trust than passion. European football has been packaged as excellence, structure, and consistency over decades. The local alternative hasn’t built the same credibility yet. That’s why I’m excited about what local football clubs like Sporting Lagos FC are doing. The club has sparked a genuine interest in local football among a young demographic that the Nigerian league has struggled to reach.

This pattern extends well beyond football, into how Nigerians think about foreign education, foreign brands, and foreign validation generally. I don’t think Nigerians hate local things. I think Nigerians desperately want quality they can proudly associate with. When it exists locally, the loyalty follows. When it doesn’t, people look elsewhere.

That distinction is critical for anyone trying to build something meaningful in Nigeria.

4. Outcome Bias

I recently saw a tweet that said: “No matter what you do in life, just win.”

It’s funny because it’s partly true. But it points to a real cognitive trap that psychologists call outcome bias: judging the quality of a decision by its result, rather than by the reasoning behind it at the time.

Consider this: if someone jumps off a bridge, miraculously survives without injury, and becomes famous, does that make the decision smart? Obviously not. Yet we make milder versions of this error constantly in business and life.

Our results reflect decisions made months or years earlier, filtered through execution, luck, and timing. Arsenal finishing second multiple times was evidence of a process that was gradually working.

In business and investing, sound strategies get abandoned too early because short-term results disappoint. Flawed strategies get celebrated because they got lucky. The outcomes looked similar but the underlying decision quality was entirely different.

The discipline is learning to evaluate decisions by the quality of the thinking at the time, not just by what happened afterward.

5. Return on Suffering

When you make an investment, you expect a return on the capital you put at risk. This is the same logic I apply here.

Getting a victory after years of losses carries a different kind of feeling than winning regularly. That’s why we love an underdog story. Arsenal’s title is 22 years of accumulated suffering finally paying out. A return most annual champions never experience.

You see this in businesses too. The strongest teams are rarely the ones with the easiest journeys. They’re the ones that survived tight cash flow, failed launches, customer complaints, and periods where nobody believed in them. At Sycamore, there was one particular license we thought was going to take us 6 months to get. It ended up taking over 2 years. When it finally came, it made the delay so much more worth it!

Shared difficulty creates something success alone cannot manufacture: stories, inside jokes, identity, loyalty, perspective.

Success feels sweeter when people remember what it took to get there.

Final Thoughts

22 years is a long time. A 20-year-old today has never seen Arsenal win the league in their lifetime. What strikes me most isn’t the trophy itself, but what the wait reveals about loyalty, identity, and believing in something through a long drought.

When I asked my dad how he stayed faithful through all the disappointments, he said: “Tunde, I tried so many times but I just couldn’t bring myself to stop supporting Arsenal. It is my club.”

Turns out 22 years of loyalty has a return too. Congratulations Arsenal fans, you earned this.

“Another WhatsApp group?”

Those were the exact words in my head in March 2022 when my friend Olatunde Victor Adeoluwa (OVA) walked into my office and told me about Premia Business Network (PBN). He described it as a referral-only community of African professionals across multiple countries, and named several mutual friends who were already members. I expressed interest, OVA recommended me, and I was added a few days later.

PBN recently turned five years old. I’ve now been an active member for four years. As I read fellow Premians sharing their stories, I find myself reflecting on a bigger question: what actually makes a community valuable? This piece is my attempt to answer that, for PBN and for every other community I belong to.

How I think about community

Whenever aspiring or new entrepreneurs ask me about raising money, my answer is usually simple: start from any of the communities you have already been a part of. The point doesn’t usually land until I explain what I mean by community. For me, a community is any group of people with shared beliefs, interests, and objectives. Which means your family is a community. So is your workplace, your church, your old school, even your gym. We all belong to some form of community, whether or not we are conscious of it. The question is rarely whether you have a community. The real question is whether yours is valuable.

Is my Community Valuable? Take the FIBB Test

In thinking through what makes a community valuable for me, I’ve come up with a way to make that assessment through what I’m calling “The FIBB Test”. FIBB stands for friends, insights, business and belonging. Let’s unpack them individually, and I’ll use my experience in PBN as a case study for this.

1. Friends: I think that one should genuinely make 1 or 2 good friends, from a community one takes seriously. Some say that don’t make friends at work for instance - a notion I strongly disagree with. If you spend most of your time working, it makes no sense (to me), not to pick one or two friends along the way. I’ve made some of my closest friends at work. Heck, I even met my wife at work😀

I’ve made several deep friendships in PBN - too many to mention. One of the things PBN has done is create an avenue for me to connect with people who I only knew from a distance or social media, turn into meaningful relationships, through various events and meetups. So PBN passes on this front.

2. Insights: Insights are deep understanding of an issue, or problems. I use insights instead of knowledge, because the latter is much more commoditised thanks to the internet and AI. Insights are rarer, and give one a new level of understanding. A good community should foster insights. PBN passes on this front too. Particularly for me in finance, I’ve learned so much just following conversations in the banking and finance group. Whenever a new policy comes out, you can be sure people will dissect it from multiple angles. This, for me, is invaluable.

3. Business: Business here is used broadly to signify professional support that covers commerce, career and entrepreneurial growth. Communities should help one improve professionally - it is why a lot of churches have business and career programs for instance.

I have done quite a lot of business in PBN. Even the “B” in the name stands for business so that speaks for itself. It also helps to know that it’s a community of professional highflyers too. For example, in the NSIA prize for innovation in 2024, the top 3 companies (out of 7,000 participants), were PBN members.

4. Belonging: Belonging is the hardest to define but the easiest to feel. It’s the sense that you are in the right room, among the right people, and that you don’t have to shrink or perform to be accepted there. It naturally includes psychological safety, confidentiality, and mutual respect.

Different members will naturally have different experiences of belonging in PBN, but it has been positive for me. The sub-groups cater for people with specific interests, and the community rallies round when people need additional support. In fact when I joined, the leadership of the group was in the middle of trying to help someone recover money from a transaction that had gone bad. It was inspiring seeing the level of effort that was made on behalf of a Premian (a member of PBN). Another incident I remember was a fellow Premian (Sani) hosting my wife and I in his London home, just because he heard we were in town.

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No Community is Perfect

Does this mean that PBN is perfect because it passes the FIBB test? Of course not! No community is perfect. In fact, in using the test, anyone may choose to assign different weights to each criterion. Someone has even suggested that they joined PBN for strictly business. For such a person, their weight for “friends” would be zero, or perhaps they only have “business” as the sole consideration for their own value. I think that is fine too.

In any case, here are at least 4 reasons that communities can seem frustrating:

1. Communities are made of people and people are not perfect. We can disappoint, we can have agendas, or we may just be having a bad day. This means that community members can not always be at 100% - a reality of life.

2. We don’t get to choose all the communities we are part of. Communities like PBN may be optional but we don’t get to choose our families, and we didn’t choose some of our schools. Naturally, we can’t exactly control what happens in these places, and it’s not so straightforward to just leave some of them.

3. You only get value when you give value. Some of us expect to get so much, even when we haven’t put in any time and effort in making the community better. Value exchange is a two-way street.

4. Belonging is not access. This is one of the biggest mistakes many of us make - to believe we automatically have access to people we share communities with. I’ll admit I even made this mistake in my first year in PBN. I recall being publicly embarrassed by someone I thought was “my guy” simply because we were both in PBN. While it was a painful lesson, I think it was a good reminder for me to learn that you don’t try to get value from a relationship that you’ve not invested in.

Closing Thoughts: The Blessing of Communities

I’m very intentional about communities. From my schools, to my church, to professional networks like PBN, Cascador and Endeavour. Whenever someone tells me they belong to any one of these, I feel an instant connection. And why not? I met my wife through a work community, found business partners through school, and discovered some of my closest friends through PBN.

Congratulations to PBN on five years. You are a great community.

To everyone else reading this: take a moment to audit the rooms you consistently occupy. The communities you show up for shape your standards. Your standards shape your decisions. And your decisions, more than almost anything else, shape your life. Choose your rooms wisely, and when you find good ones, show up fully.

A week ago, Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda said his company is struggling to fill 500 roles. He pointed to 5 reasons: Nigeria’s education system, excessive social media consumption, our value system, lack of role models, and mass emigration (Japa).

The comments sparked intense debate: some called the 500-vacancy figure exaggerated, others felt he was unfairly harsh on Nigerian youth and the education system that produced him. I don’t think Tosin is entirely wrong. But his five reasons don’t tell the full story. I offer a more complete way to diagnose (and potentially solve) the problem.

My Experience

I want to contrast Tosin’s experience with mine as a fintech entrepreneur. Scaled down to size of course since Moniepoint is a bigger company.

At the beginning of 2026, my company, Sycamore, had 25 open roles. Out of a staff strength of 170 Sytizens (aka people of Sycamore), that’s roughly 15% vacancies. If Moniepoint has 500 vacancies out of 3,500 people, that’s 14%. So relatively speaking, our realities are not proportionally different.

Clearly, this sort of vacancy proportion, relatively speaking, is not unique to Moniepoint.

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A Classic Wicked Problem, and a Normal Feature

I see a part of this issue as a wicked problem. When I used the term in one of my previous articles on Why Nigeria needs research for wicked problems, some people thought I made the term up. The term “Wicked Problem” was coined by design thinkers in the 1970s, to refer to complex social, or cultural issues that are quite difficult to solve because they have no single root cause, and the requirements change often.

As I will demonstrate in the next section, companies like Sycamore and Moniepoint will always have vacancies, because of the wicked nature of the problem (s), and the nature of our businesses.

Why 500 vacancies (may) exist

I don’t think Tosin is wrong with the 5 reasons he gave: I just think that it isn’t the full picture.

To categorise the issue in a way we can understand and proffer solutions to, we can look at them from 4 perspectives:

1. Things that are internal to the company

2. Things that are external to the company

3. Things that are structural (more fundamental and long-term) in nature

4. Things that are dynamic (more recurring and periodic) in nature

Putting these together, we can get a 2 by 2 matrix (I call it the “The Talent Constraint Matrix”) that looks something like this:

Let’s look at each bucket in more detail, and discuss potential ways to address them:

A. Internal structural constraints - These are deep internal company policies and practices that weaken a company’s long-term talent capacity. They include things like culture, compensation, poor training or lack of training at all. That’s why people asked Tosin if the company is willing to pay for the talent it wants. Although evidence suggests that Moniepoint pays well above market value in Nigeria.

The fix here is straightforward leadership action: benchmark compensation annually, build structured training programmes, and treat talent development with the same urgency as sales targets.

B. Internal dynamic constraints - These are short term operational conditions created by what the company is doing at the time, or things happening in the company at the moment. These include rapid expansion, hiring challenges, intentional scaling down or attrition spikes. If a company always has 20 open roles for example, because it’s opening a new branch or country outlet every other day, then the vacancy is because the company is growing fast, and not because of talent quality or availability.

Now this particular group is part of why there will always be vacancies in companies like Sycamore and Moniepoint. Recall I said we had 25 vacancies at the beginning of the year at Sycamore. Well, as of May 2026, we still have about 15, even if we have already filled those 25. Not because we haven’t filled those roles, but because new roles have been created, and some people have also exited the business. This dynamic simply comes with the territory of rapid growth; the solution is not to stop expanding but to build hiring systems that anticipate it.

C. External structural constraints - These are institutional and long term fundamental issues affecting talent supply, that are out of the company’s control. This is where quality education falls under. Much has been said about quality education in Nigeria, and Feyi Fawehinmi has this excellent piece on why the education problem in Nigeria is an obligation of the elite to solve.

Another structural challenge is the level of maturity of the industry. For instance, look at this role still listed on Moniepoint’s careers page:

I don’t think any company in the history of Nigeria has deployed as many POS (Point of Sale) terminals as Moniepoint. So I’m not sure how much of an academic and technical training pipeline we have for such a skill set. The same with telecoms in Nigeria: until the industry matured, before MTN and co came in, how much capacity did we have for deep technical know-how in that industry? I think we just didn’t have the industrial demand to require certain talent being available in the first place.

This is where we in the private sector must step up. The same elites (who built fintech unicorns for example) should fund targeted apprenticeship schemes and partner with universities to create pipelines for niche skills (POS engineering, compliance tech, etc.). Feyi Fawehinmi’s piece already points the way.

D. External dynamic constraints - These are periodic changing market and economic conditions that are outside the company’s control. People leaving the country fall here (aka japa), and the declining purchasing power of the naira which forces people to seek global opportunities, due to inflation and volatile foreign exchange (FX).

Not much can be done to control this category to be honest. For example, people exit Nigeria sometimes for dissatisfaction with the country and not necessarily the company. We cannot stop japa, but we can blunt its impact with biannual pay adjustments tied to macro and the company’s realities, remote-first policies, and equity grants that make staying financially attractive.

In Conclusion: An Incomplete Story

The reality of these kinds of conversations is that they quickly become polarising, with everyone pushing the narrative angle they feel most passionate about. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us in her viral video about the danger of a single story, it is not that people are wrong: they are simply incomplete. I believe that is exactly what happened here. We received a CEO’s honest but necessarily abbreviated take on a complex challenge. In fairness to Tosin, he named five real issues. The responses, however, have largely zoomed in on only a few (education, values, japa, and employer pay), while leaving other pieces unexamined.

The Talent Constraint Matrix is my attempt to complete the picture. It shows that the vacancy rate many scaling fintechs face (even if the headline “500” figure is debatable) sits at the intersection of internal choices, growth dynamics, systemic weaknesses, and market realities.

Solving a wicked problem like this demands a holistic view. Companies must treat talent development with the same rigour as product roadmaps and sales targets. The private sector elite must invest in industry-specific apprenticeships and technical pipelines. And we must manage the unmanageable - japa, inflation, FX - with competitive pay, flexible work, and equity that makes staying worthwhile. Only this multifaceted approach will move us forward.

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A book about “how to make money” made over $100 million in 3 days. That alone should get anyone’s attention.

As part of my weekly writing cadence, I write about one book I read the previous month. This time, it’s Alex Hormozi’s $100m Money Models: How To Make Money.

It’s a bold title. Almost too bold actually. But what interested me more was not the promise of the book, but the result of the launch.

How does a book sell 3 million copies in 24 hours? Let’s take a look.

Why I bought this book

I first got fascinated by sales offers from regularly reading my friend on Facebook, Chioma Ifeanyi-Eze. I think Chioma is one of the best business teachers on social media, and she often writes about the importance of creating great offers to improve sales. In a quest to improve my ability to craft good offers, I read Akin Alabi’s book “How to Sell to Nigerians”, and it was quite eye opening. But I didn’t learn deeply about creating great offers, till I read Alex Hormozi’s 2021 book titled “$100m Offers: How to Make Offers so good, people feel stupid saying No”. It was brilliant, actionable and insightful. To an extent, it even helped with crafting our highest converting billboard at Sycamore (see image below). I’ve been following Alex Hormozi ever since.

Isn’t Alex Hormozi another get-rich business guru?

I know, I know. You are tired of business gurus and motivational speakers, those people who inspire or teach business theories but whose advice doesn’t hold up in the real world. Rather than try to convince you, let me share the test questions I use to decide if a “business guru” is worth following:

1. Does the person have a domain expertise or some level of success before becoming a general “business expert”? In Alex Hormozi’s case, he ran a successful gym chain, and started teaching about running gyms specifically, before talking about business in general. Pass.

2. Does the person have any unique and actionable insight that can be reasonably attributed to them? I think Alex Hormozi does. I particularly love his value equation framework, and find it quite practical. Pass.

3. Has the person been associated with any scam or scandal? If yes, what was the outcome and what was the response of the person’s community of followers? I found no such incidents associated with Alex Hormozi. Pass.

These are just tests I personally use to filter genuine business teachers, and it has held up for me so far. That said, legitimacy does not mean perfect or infallibility as you will see in the rest of the article.

So, what is this $100m Money Models book about?

According to Hormozi, a “Money Model” is a deliberate sequence of offers designed to attract customers, maximize their spending, and keep them coming back as long as possible. The goal? Generate enough cash from customers that you don’t need outside capital.The book breaks this into a simple three-stage framework:

Stage 1: Get Cash: Use “Attraction Offers” to bring in new customers. Think giveaways, but also creative ideas like “Win your money back” guarantees.

Stage 2: Get More Cash: Deploy upsells and downsells to increase the average transaction value right away. When a customer says yes to the initial offer, immediately present something more valuable. If they hesitate, offer a lighter (cheaper) version.

Stage 3: Get the Most Cash: Introduce “continuity” offers like memberships, loyalty programs, and subscriptions for recurring revenue.The ideas are creative and practical, but they didn’t feel as groundbreaking as the material in his earlier books. If you sell regularly, much of this will feel familiar.

Then how on Earth did this book sell 3 million copies in 24 hours?

Three main reasons:

1. He and his team reportedly spent over $4 million on marketing.

2. Alex Hormozi and his wife Leila already have a massive, loyal audience (millions of followers, including over 4 million YouTube subscribers).

3. Most cleverly, they used one of his own Money Models, as I explain below.

Instead of selling single copies at the normal price, they offered bundles with coaching and other materials priced from $6,000 to $25,000. At $30 per book, buying $6,000 worth meant taking home 200 copies. The result is a Guinness World Record for the most non-fiction books sold in 24 hours and over $100 million in revenue in three days. The man demonstrated the concept in real time.

Alex and Leila Hormozi with Guinness World Record Certificate

What’s great about this book

Like Hormozi’s other books, the writing is clear, direct, and easy to read. At under 200 pages, it’s refreshingly concise. The advice is practical and can be applied quickly. The content is also available across formats: ebook, audiobook, and video lessons on Acquisition.com. This multi-modal format inspired me to create accompanying videos for my “Economics with Uncle Tunde” book on Uncletunde.com, and it’s been helpful because people consume content differently. Thanks Alex!

Together with $100M Offers and $100M Leads, this series makes excellent training material for anyone in sales, marketing, or customer experience.

What’s not so great about this book

If you’re already experienced in selling, you won’t find many fundamental new insights. It’s strong on creative tactics but mostly covers the standard customer lifecycle.

The book also assumes prior knowledge: it works best as a sequel to $100M Offers. Some ideas are geared more toward service businesses. As someone in finance, I can’t implement many of them due to regulations, even though the underlying principles remain useful. For example, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has very strict marketing regulations that tightly control the use of giveaways for instance. To be fair, the book does mention that some tactics may require legal clearance, even if it does not give specific industry guidance. This means that teams that want to apply some of the suggestions in this book, would have to consider what is permissible in their sectors.

Finally, the model relies heavily on a skilled salesperson’s ability to read reactions and negotiate in real time. That limits its usefulness for pure self-service or automated sales channels interaction. So the more regulated and automated your business is, the less room you have to play with it within the context of advice in the book.

Conclusion

This is my least favorite book from Alex Hormozi. I picked up some useful tricks and creative ideas, but I didn’t walk away feeling truly enlightened. Still, none of that stopped it from shattering a world record. Something doesn’t have to be particularly novel to be highly effective.

Most of all, it shows the power of years of consistently delivering free value to a community. The Hormozis have earned this success, and the numbers make that pretty hard to argue with.

Book rating: 5.5/10
Book launch strategy rating: 10/10

One of my favourite ways to understand complex issues is to apply an analogy. So let us compare Nigeria to a company: a large, dynamic company, with over 200 million stakeholders. When a company struggles with profitability, management typically thinks of raising revenue, cutting costs, or doing both. Cutting costs is often the quicker win: you just cut back on some services, or perhaps lay off some employees. In Nigeria’s case however, even if we eliminated every kobo of waste and corruption tomorrow, our population and development needs mean resources would still fall short without significantly higher, and sustainable income. I believe we have more of a revenue than a cost problem. In most countries, taxes are the primary source of revenue.

Following this logic, it makes complete sense that President Tinubu’s new Minister of Finance (MoF) and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, appointed in April 2026, is a tax and fiscal policy expert in the person of Taiwo Oyedele. What is the task ahead of him, and can he deliver? That is what this article is about.

Who is Taiwo Oyedele?

Taiwo Oyedele was born on June 18, 1975, in Ikaram-Akoko, Ondo State, and raised in modest circumstances - I mean a real village. His brief bio in the book The Road to Victoria Island (by Suraj Oyewale) has stories about just how modest his background was. For example, he had to work weekends on a farm to pay N50 school fees, and couldn’t afford to buy a West African Examinations Council (WAEC) form, till a village group gave him a scholarship since he was the best in his class. The form was N495.

He self-funded much of his education, earning an HND in Accountancy from YABATECH, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1999, and joining PwC as a NYSC corps member in 2001. What follows is one of the most inspiring grass to grace tales you will read anywhere, as Taiwo’s rise to partnership in PwC (in 7.5 years) is notably recognised as one of the fastest climbs to partnership in the firm’s Nigerian history. About two decades later, he became Fiscal Policy Partner and Africa Tax Leader, advising institutions and governments, across more than 30 countries. Most recently, he chaired the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, where he led proposals around tax harmonisation, a unified revenue service, and improving Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio.

I have known Taiwo for some time, and that familiarity makes it important to separate the person from the role. But it also gives insight into how he thinks.

At a policy level, his work has consistently reflected a few ideas: expand the tax base rather than simply increase rates, improve compliance before increasing burden, and align incentives instead of relying purely on enforcement. These have been his consistent views and he even wrote a book about them - Insights on taxation and fiscal policy - more than a decade ago.

In terms of leadership and attitude, most who followed the tax reforms could attest to Taiwo’s firm but amicable approach to addressing controversial issues, without necessarily being disagreeable even in the face of provocation. Take this post by Dr. Joe Abah for instance.

Taiwo has a reputation as a data-driven, calm communicator who explains complex fiscal issues accessibly. He tends to respond to criticism with facts and emphasises stakeholder alignment, qualities essential for any great leader.

While this is all good and lovely, are they enough to get the job done? Let’s talk about the job itself.

The Job of the Minister of Finance (MoF): More than just CFO

In corporate terms, the Minister of Finance functions as sort of Nigeria’s CFO. While a CFO is in charge of various functions such as financial reporting, budgeting, treasury management and tax, the MoF oversees the national budget, fiscal policy, revenue mobilisation, debt management, and expenditure priorities. The added title of Coordinating Minister of the Economy, formalised in 2011 for Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to enhance policy coherence, elevates the role. It positions the holder as conductor of the government’s overall economic agenda (which is why its holder oversees the Economic Management Team). This sits alongside the independent CBN Governor (monetary policy and stability) and the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment (growth and FDI).

So while the CBN governor and Minister for Industry, Trade and Investment does not report to the MoF, the way a company treasurer or financial accountant will report to the CFO, the coordinating minister of economy is meant to ensure alignment and coordination, in line with the government’s objectives. Which brings us to a critical question: what is the government’s objective?

The $1 Trillion Imperative & Distributed Responsibilities

Nigeria’s nominal GDP stands at approximately $377 billion. The administration’s $1 trillion economy target by around 2030 (many have argued that this is unrealistic but that’s another matter) requires sustained real GDP growth well above the 4.1% projected for 2026.

Breaking down the requirements reveals distributed responsibilities:

• Broad-based growth leads with the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment (akin to a Chief Growth Officer), supported by sector ministries.

• Fiscal capacity (revenue, debt, sustainability) sits primarily with the Finance Minister: the true CFO role. This has to do with revenue and expenses.

• Monetary and financial stability belongs to the CBN Governor.

• Investment and capital formation is shared across all three.

This is why the “Coordinating Minister” role is key: it exists to bridge silos and ensure fiscal, monetary, trade, and investment policies reinforce one another.

Despite the powers of the coordinating minister, there are still some key limitations. For example, the MoF has limited powers to dictate how the state governors (and their commissioners of finance) spend their money after the relevant allocation. And while the MoF has coordinating powers, it cannot dictate what the CBN does, due to its autonomy. That’s why whoever holds the role must be savvy about collaboration and relationship management, because the outcome of the MoF efforts depends on many parties who cannot be directly controlled.

So, can a tax expert make a great finance minister?

Even though this appointment is only a few days old from the time of this publication, many debates have already ensued about whether a tax expert can do the job of the MoF. For me, this has only shown how little people understand what exactly the role of the finance minister is.

Take this debate on one of my favorite podcasts for instance, Drinks and Mics (start from 26:16 minutes). Basically, the moderator’s concern (which is genuine by the way) is whether Taiwo has sufficient international relationships, to get us good deals with the World Bank, IMF, etc. But these are “capital related” conversations, not revenue ones.

I liken this situation with a small business having cash flow issues. The prompt to “go to IMF”, is like asking the entrepreneur to focus on raising capital, as opposed to generating revenue/money from sales of the company’s product (that is, from taxes for a country). Is any of these approaches ultimately superior? We can have that debate. But even if you choose the “raise capital” route, the business is still not a going concern, if it cannot generate revenue on a sustainable basis.

Besides, history shows effective leaders lean into their strengths. Let us look at 2 quick examples:

1. When Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was Finance Minister (from 2003 to 2006), she leaned heavily from her 25 years of World Bank experience, using her global network to secure Nigeria a massive Paris Club debt relief. Her tenure was defined more by debt resolution and macro credibility than by tax expansion.

2. When Sanusi Lamido Sanusi became CBN Governor, his background as a Chief Risk Officer (from First Bank) defined his tenure, leading to aggressive corporate governance reforms and banking consolidation, based on risk assessments carried out on the banks.

We can therefore say it is normal for a leader to lead with his/her strengths, while delivering through broader leadership, relationship management, and political navigation. Taiwo’s success (like most leaders) will ultimately hinge on exactly these abilities: executing reforms while fostering alignment across pillars and tiers of government.

Analysis and Conclusion: The Real Test

Taiwo’s transition from policy advisor to executor means he now owns the outcomes, not just the recommendations. The real test will be navigating political patronage networks, managing bureaucracy, and ensuring his fiscal agenda stays aligned with the CBN’s monetary direction. Keen observers will be watching a few things: whether tax-to-GDP improves, whether debt service to revenue stabilises, whether fiscal spending becomes more productive, and whether all the reforms eventually trickle down to the vast majority. If those answers turn positive, Taiwo will have earned his stripes beyond reasonable doubt.

But beyond the numbers, I find something inspiring about this appointment. The boy from Ikaram-Akoko who farmed weekends to pay school fees, who could not afford a N495 WAEC form, now holds one of the most consequential economic roles on the continent. Goes to show how much is possible with hard work, consistency, and opportunity meeting preparation.

Early in 2026, Dr. Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, announced a massive ₦12 billion funding initiative aimed at accelerating local research and development within our tech and digital economy sectors. Not too long after this, I also saw the National Laureate Prize, offering up to ₦20 million for top research projects, unveiled by the Ministry of Education.

At first, when I saw these initiatives, I instinctively thought they were great ideas, especially understanding the critical role that research and academia have played in a lot of the technological breakthroughs we all enjoy today.

Turns out, a lot of people are skeptical for the following reasons:

1. “Will the money actually reach them?” There is a strong, historically backed assumption that the funds will be mismanaged, hijacked by bureaucracy, or simply fail to reach the actual researchers doing the work.

2. “Great grammar, zero products.” Academic research in Nigeria often ends up as bulky thesis papers gathering dust in university libraries, rather than evolving into practical, commercial solutions.

3. “Is research our biggest problem right now?” The argument is that a country struggling with basic infrastructure like roads and electricity has no business prioritizing high-level academic research.

In this article, I explain why the combination of government, academia (via research), and the private sector all have critical roles in the development of this nation. Specifically, I believe that Nigeria has focused almost exclusively on the government and the private sector, with a glaring lack of input from academia.

Government, Academia, and Private Sector (GAP): The Triple Helix

I first realised the critical importance of the collaboration among government, academia, and the private sector (let’s call them GAP collectively) when I read The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. Over and over, the pattern kept repeating itself:

1. Government provides the initial funding and patient capital for research into a broad, high-risk area.

2. Professors and scholars utilize this funding to make a breakthrough discovery in one or more specific fields.

3. Someone smart from the private sector finds this research (sometimes unintentionally), packages it, and commercializes it at scale.

This discovery is usually one that solves a problem for a lot of people and makes some others wealthy in the process. As people get wealthy from this solution, they pay more taxes. So it’s a win for all the GAP parties.

GAP as the Triple Helix Framework

I was feeling pretty excited when GAP dawned on me. As a patriotic Nigerian, I thought I had found the solution to all Nigeria’s problems: get the government to fund research, commercialize it as a businessman, and make an impact. My life was set!

Unfortunately, I’m not the first to put GAP together. In fact, the originators (Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff in the 1990s) had a better name for it. They call it the Triple Helix Framework. Their thesis was straightforward: the potential for innovation and economic development in a modern society lies in a prominent role for universities, and the deliberate collaboration of government, academia, and industry to generate entirely new institutional and social formats.

Triple Helix (or GAP) in Action

Let us look at some real-life global examples of GAP in action:

1. The Internet: The U.S. Department of Defense (government) funded the early ARPANET. Researchers at universities like UCLA and MIT (academia) built the foundational protocols. Eventually, tech companies and ISPs (private sector) commercialized it into the web we use today.

2. Covid-19 Vaccines: Governments globally poured billions into funding via initiatives like Operation Warp Speed. Decades of mRNA research conducted at institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University were leveraged. Then, pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and AstraZeneca manufactured and distributed the vaccines worldwide.

3. Semiconductors: Early on, the government funded solid-state physics for aerospace and defense needs. Universities like Stanford provided the deep academic breakthroughs, which were then picked up by companies like Intel and TSMC to power every electronic device we own today.

GAP in Nigeria: The Nicosan Story

Let us bring it closer to home. A notable example of GAP in Nigeria is Nicosan, a drug developed for sickle cell anemia. For decades, traditional practitioners used herbal recipes to manage crises. The National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (a government-funded body) took this indigenous knowledge, developed a biochemical formulation, and secured the patents. They then licensed the rights to private sector pharmaceutical companies for mass production. While it perfectly illustrates the three actors collaborating to solve a deeply localized problem, subsequent management and funding bottlenecks meant the drug’s commercial success didn’t quite meet initial expectations. Still, it proves the framework can actually be assembled here.

Academia (and Research) as the Missing Link

Now we come to why initiatives like the ones flagged off by Bosun Tijani and the Ministry of Education are critical to Nigeria’s progress and development.

1. Gross Underfunding: Education and research are severely undercapitalized in Nigeria. For context, Nigeria historically spends roughly 0.2% of its GDP on Research and Development, compared to the global average of about 1.7%, and over 3% in highly innovative economies. These prizes and funds are a practical way to inject much-needed capital into the system.

2. Localizing Global Solutions: Nigeria has some deep, wicked problems. While similar issues have been solved in other places, local research is required to customize those frameworks for our specific socio-cultural and economic realities. We cannot just copy and paste.

3. Driving Prosperity: In The Prosperity Paradox, Clayton Christensen and Efosa Ojomo argue that if you want to lift a lot of people out of poverty, it’s better to work towards making them prosperous through market-creating innovations, as opposed to just trying to “eradicate” poverty. I think this is profoundly true. Bringing more money to academia and actively working towards commercialization helps us solve at least two basic problems: it funds education and creates new industries and jobs.

But we have bigger problems...

How can you be talking research when we don’t have roads, light, or water?

That’s a valid pushback, honestly. I’d say it’s sort of a chicken-and-egg situation: one could argue that we don’t have sustainable solutions to some of these basic problems precisely because we have not done the rigorous, localized work of figuring out exactly how they should work for us. That, my friends, is one of the core functions of research.

Take, for example, the recent viral debate on social media about whether mud houses are better for Nigeria. I found the conversation intriguing, and I think this is a perfect example of where research can help. It is not just about whether the mud itself makes architectural sense; we need research into the economics of it, the local value chain, the long-term sustainability, and scalability. Research also has elements of experimentation and development, which are practical bits that happen far outside the classroom.

A Challenge to the Private Sector

So far, I have talked a lot about government funding. But in the Triple Helix, the private sector is not meant to be a passive beneficiary just waiting around for professors to invent things. Nigerian businesses, startups, and capital allocators need to actively bridge this gap. This means directly funding specific academic chairs, establishing incubators on university campuses, and actively scouting for theses that can be commercialised before they gather dust. We cannot just wait for the finished product; we have to be active participants in the developmental pipeline.

Conclusion: The Perfect Silver Bullet?

There are no silver bullets to complex problems. I’ve written about this before. And like every initiative, one hopes for great execution that is efficient and effective. That said, I strongly believe it is a great, practical step in the right direction. We often think about national development strictly in terms of the government and private sectors, when really those are just two legs of a tripod. We would do well to encourage actions that heavily support the third.