There’s no template for what she’s building. But she believes that if she gets it right, she’ll solve a problem she’s watched companies ignore for a decade: brands leaving value on the table because they treat partnerships as a nice-to-have rather than operations.

It’s that belief that made her start AlexBoyo World (ABW) four years ago. Today, ABW works with clients like Bujetti, Selar, NaijaSolve, Yield MFB, Itsekiri Homecoming event and Keys2dcity — and Boyo has structured it so she never has to choose between her business and her clients.

“Several brands have approached me for full-time roles, but past experience has taught me that most companies expect total exclusivity. I’m not interested in hiding my own business or shrinking what I’ve built,” she says over a call.

“Now, I’m upfront with them: ‘If you want to work with me, you aren’t just hiring an individual—you’re hiring my entire team.’ Whether I’m supported by five people or ten, the internal structure is my concern; their concern is the results. They’ve agreed to these terms, signed the MOU, and we’ve successfully onboarded the team.”

As we chat, her first event for Bujetti, a financial control platform, takes place tomorrow, and she’s working around the clock to deliver a stellar experience. The goal is to get people to experience the product and generate sign-ups.

“I want organisations to realise that it’s possible to outsource partnerships successfully.”

This negotiation encapsulates Boyo’s thesis: the era of the “partnership manager” as a solitary role within a siloed company is ending. In its place, she is betting on “Partnership as a Service”—a model where strategy and execution are outsourced to specialists who do more than just make introductions.

Boyo has spent the last decade navigating the messy intersection of sales, business development, and marketing at institutions like Jumia, Sterling Bank, Tangerine, and Premia Business Network (PBN). Her observation is consistent: companies are bleeding money because they treat partnerships as a “nice-to-have” rather than operations.

In this conversation, she explains why “brokering deals alone” is a selfish word, what enterprise silos really cost, and how she turned a complimentary event booth into a verified consulting partnership.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.

You’ve worked across eCommerce, banking, insurance, and tech. What’s the consistent failure you see in how African organisations handle partnerships?

The problem is decentralisation without communication. When I was at a financial institution, I moved from marketing to a product role. I wanted to drive credit card usage, so I went out to hunt for lifestyle partners—brands like AXA Mansard and iFitness.

I did the work. I closed the deal with AXA and iFitness. But when we took the MOU to legal, they kicked it back. They told me, “We already signed a deal with these guys six months ago.”

Another department had locked it down, but because there was no centralised partnership system, I had spent weeks chasing a lead we had already converted. That is the enterprise reality. You have the marketing team, the tech team, and the sales team all hunting the same partners, often offering different terms. It’s inefficiency at scale.

So partnerships should be a centralised function like HR or Finance.

Exactly. Organisations need a partnership audit. You need to know who you are already in bed with. If the board says we need $5 billion in revenue for 2026, Strategy and Partnerships should be the first two heads in the room.

Strategy maps the goal; Partnerships map the ecosystem. Then, you distribute the execution to sector-specific managers who report back to a central hub. Without that central brain, you lose leverage.

You have a clear allergy to the word “brokering.” Why?

I don’t really like the word “brokering.” Brokering is introducing Person A to Person B and walking away. Maybe you get a commission, maybe you don’t, but you take no responsibility for the outcome. The industry is full of people who think an introduction is a deliverable. It isn’t.

What does the alternative actually look like in practice?

I’d say sticking around after the connection to execute. If I introduce a client to Bujetti, my job isn’t done when they sign up. My job is to ensure stickiness. We approach it like business consultants. We ask the partner: “What are your goals? What are your actual pain points? How does this integration solve them?”

If you just broker a deal, the relationship dies the moment the champion leaves the company. If you execute a partnership, you embed the product into their operations so deeply that they can’t leave.

Give me a concrete example.

Look at the work we did with Premia Business Network (PBN), a referral-based community of business leaders and Zoho, a cloud-based suite of over 45+ business software applications. Typically, brands like Zoho would just sponsor an event, get a logo on a banner, and hope for brand awareness. That’s low-value.

When I came on as Partnership Lead, we negotiated for PBN to become a technical partner for Zoho. We didn’t just refer community members to Zoho; we built a “PBN Solutions” arm that helped members migrate their actual tech stacks to Zoho. I have to credit PBN Founder, Bola Lawal, for his foresight; he initially offered Zoho a complimentary booth at Growth Con to demonstrate our community’s scale, which paved the way for this high-value collaboration.

So, PBN became a reseller and an implementation partner.

Yes. I stepped up to handle the product demos myself, using my background at Bumpa to bridge the gap.

We consulted with community members—auditing their CRMs, their accounting tools—and then deployed Zoho as the solution.

In less than six months, we hit the revenue threshold to become a verified consulting partner. That is the difference. Brokering would have been introducing Zoho to the community founder. Partnership was building a technical team to implement the software for the end-users. One is a handshake; the other is revenue.

You’ve turned down full-time roles. You’ve said you “lost yourself” in past jobs. What does that mean?

Yes, I’ve resigned from previous roles because the environments often force you to prioritise speed over structure. People want results “now, now.” They want the magic introduction.

But real partnerships are built brick-by-brick. Strategy takes time. I lost myself when I became just an execution arm for someone else’s chaotic vision.

Now you’re hiring for your own agency. Is it easier to build the culture you want?

It’s actually my biggest struggle. I’m a Millennial, and I’m finding a disconnect with the available talent pool. I need execution, not just activity.

There is a “hot and cold” energy I see often—active today, ghosting tomorrow. Partnership roles require an obsession with follow-through. I am trying to build a company where we are “Partnership as a Service.” That means we need people who can execute with the same intensity as a founder. If I can’t find that, I can’t scale.

What’s the hardest leadership lesson you’ve learned running ABW?

That there’s a thinner line between being a toxic boss and being a considerate one than I ever imagined.

I understand the distinction between accountability and toxicity. What surprised me was discovering how close the line can feel when you’re under real pressure.

Last year, ABW went through a difficult stretch. We had lost some deals, the business wasn’t growing as expected, and things were falling through the cracks. At the same time, I had team members who weren’t performing, and daily conversations and corrections weren’t moving the needle.

In that season, I genuinely felt the urge to become a different kind of leader. To shut down, to take everything on myself, to be mean. I thought maybe I was too soft, too empathetic, that being nicer wasn’t working.

But what stopped me was introspection. I had to look within and ask myself: Is this the leader I want to be, or is this just pressure talking? I sought professional support because I recognised that what I was feeling, that frustration, that urge, was something I needed to process properly, not act on.

The unexpected part? I came out of it with more compassion for leaders I had previously judged. I understood, for the first time, why some of my own past toxic bosses may have behaved the way they did. It doesn’t excuse the behaviour, but I now understand the pressure that can drive someone there.

The lesson on the job: empathy is a leadership choice, not just a personality trait. Especially when circumstances push you in the opposite direction.

Hmmm. That deep. You’re moving from consulting to building products in 2026. Why?

Because services don’t scale linearly. I want to build the “dating app for business.”

Right now, if you are a founder in Zamfara with a brilliant prototype but no network, your idea dies. If you are an investor in Silicon Valley looking for that exact innovation, you can’t find him.

We are building a CRM and marketplace that standardises this. I want to turn sales and partnership professionals into verified affiliates. Imagine a platform where you input your project needs, and the algorithm matches you not just with capital, but with partners who have the distribution you lack.

We’ve spent three years doing this manually to understand the friction points. Now we automate it.

Rapid Fire 🔥

What’s one tool you’d marry if you could?
I rely on Claude for structured thinking (it’s topped ChatGPT for me lately) and Selar for growth. Selar is essentially my revenue hub for hosting and selling my masterclasses and digital products.

What’s your content diet? Viral Twitter threads, books or podcasts

I’m not active on Twitter, but I do business podcasts (DOAC) and YouTube videos. I’ve been watching Caleb Ralston lately to understand sustainable brand-building.

For the better part of the last few years, he was a fixture on the timeline—a vocal proponent of growth frameworks and marketing mechanics in the African tech ecosystem. Then, he went quiet.

“I’m tired of the talk,” he says. “I’ve done the phase where everybody speaks for a year or two. I got work from it, but now I want to focus on execution.”

That execution has taken a fascinating, dual-track shape. On one hand, he remains a sharp operator in fintech and brand growth, obsessing over why “hockey stick” charts are mostly fiction and why crypto incentives are fundamentally broken. On the other hand, he is deep in the trenches of the culinary world, trying to solve a unit economics problem that plagues every restaurant owner in Lagos: how to scale without bleeding cash.

His conclusion? You don’t open more branches. You export.

Ajetomobi has sat at the helm of the growth engines of Africa’s top-tier startups, including Flutterwave and Cowrywise. In this conversation, he talks about a few things he doesn’t agree with, the fallacy of “doing more with less,” why airlines are the only ones doing loyalty right, and his thesis on turning Nigerian food into a global CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) powerhouse.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.

You’ve been critical about how AI products are marketed. Why?

Since the Industrial Age, the role of any tool, mechanical or digital, has always been to help people with relevant skills get better and more efficient. The problem with how AI is currently marketed is the promise that you can ‘leapfrog’ foundational knowledge.

They say, ‘You don’t need the background; the AI will do it better than an expert.’ That is fundamentally wrong. For example, I’ve tried design tools where they claim anyone can churn out a compelling creative, and I struggled. But a designer with years of knowledge and experience picked up that same tool and produced something excellent in two minutes. Why? Because he has the core knowledge.

Yes, some things can be done with AI that you don’t really know much about. For example, I use AI for SQL even though I don’t write code, but I don’t ‘leapfrog’ the logic. But I understand data structures. I know how a query should be framed. I did not leapfrog it. I’m using my foundational knowledge to be efficient, not using a tool to replace the need for it. You cannot bypass the core.

Hmmm. So I shouldn’t be too bothered about an AI CMO product in the hands of a novice. You’ve also been critical of how incentives are deployed, particularly in crypto. The industry runs on airdrops and points, but you argue this is actually destroying value.

First off, I believe that Incentives, when properly done, are strong tools for attention and retention. But in crypto, they are distorted. The current model attracts gamers and mercenaries, not users.

The industry suffers from two issues: a lack of true Product-Market Fit (PMF) and a user base looking for the next “100x” return. When you lack PMF, you use incentives to bribe people into the system. The result is a “giga-dump” where users extract value and leave the moment the incentive dries up.

So, who is doing it right?

The airline industry. They are the only ones who have cracked this.

If you look at mileage programs, they drive massive retention because the incentive is embedded in the utility of the product. A category that’s been trying to get it right is supermarkets. They give you points, but the communication is terrible. If I shop for groceries every two weeks, the system should track that average spend and incentivise my next specific visit. Instead, I just accumulate points I forget to use.

The lesson is simple: If your incentive structure doesn’t solve for the next transaction, you are just burning cash.

There is an obsession with the “hockey stick” growth curve among tech companies. Is this expectation realistic for operators on the ground?

It’s an outlier, yet we treat it as the standard. But that’s not even what really bugs me. The bigger issue isn’t just the expectation of growth; it’s the lack of preparation for the drawdowns.

Founders and growth leads rarely define the parameters of a dip. If we drop 10% for three weeks, is that a crisis or a seasonal fluctuation? Does our model allow for a 3% drop every week for a month? Because these parameters aren’t defined, teams panic at normal volatility. You need to know when a dip is a structural failure versus a market cycle.

Hmm. That’s a good one. How do you approach structuring a growth team?

Most people think growth is just the promotional aspect of marketing. Whereas growth in terms of marketing is everyone’s job. I’ve come to agree that marketing, in a way, is actually both growth because it includes product, promotion, pricing and everything. Everyone contributes to business growth by doing their job well. But back to your question, if I were structuring a ‘growth’ team today, I would separate it functionally:

1. Head of Growth/Product: Growth is a product function, as much as it’s a promotional and pricing function.

2. Brand & Acquisition: This team focuses on the top of the funnel: events, paid ads, influencers, and PR.

3. Product Marketers: These people shouldn’t just be generalists. They should have specific features. At Spotify, you might have a product marketer focused entirely on “Shuffle” or “Year in Review.” In fintech, if you have a “Locked Savings” feature, you need someone whose sole KPI is unlocking value from that specific feature.

4. Lifecycle Marketing: They sit between acquisition and sales, focusing on cross-selling and retention. This includes customer success.

In B2B, the sales team sits between Acquisition and Lifecycle. Marketing generates leads (MQLs), Sales closes them, and then Lifecycle/Marketing picks them up again to drive retention and cross-sell.

“Do more with less” is a mantra that has grown popular in recent times. How do you actually operationalise that without just burning out your team?

“Do more with less” is usually just code for chaos. For it to make sense, to me, it means “Narrow Focus.”

You cannot target the whole market and “Do more with less.” You must find a vertical and dominate it. If your market is narrow, your messaging becomes consistent. You stop spending money confusing the audience. You cannot sound like a whiskey brand today and a juice brand tomorrow.

An example of a brand that executed this is Timon; its product is a USD-denominated card which appeals to a wide audience, but we decided to narrow our target audience to travellers. We’ve grown to build a money app for nomads, which includes things like eSIM, travel savings and local payout. The message is tailored towards travellers.

If you spread yourself too thin across too many channels without dominating one, you lose leverage.

Do you have a framework for budget allocation based on this thinking?

Here’s how I approach budget allocation:

• Speculate (10-15%): Take a small slice of the budget to test wild cards.

• Test: Try 5 different channels with that budget.

• Commit (80%): Pick the one channel that brings the most value and dump the majority of your resources there.

Most companies spread their budget too thin across five channels. You lose leverage that way. Find the one channel that works and kill the rest.

Let’s seagway away from growth to a recent tweet I saw. There is a growing sentiment that Neobanks aren’t “proper” banks, that they are just features masquerading as institutions. Do you agree?

My perspective on this has changed. They are called Neo-banks for a reason: “Neo” means new. We need to allow them the grace to evolve.

You cannot expect a toddler to run a marathon. The easiest level to operate on is payments and transfers. That is where they started. Now, we are seeing them move into credit, but they are doing it differently. They are using internal data—cash flow history—to offer zero-collateral loans.

Yes, the interest rates are higher, but that reflects the risk of non-collateralised lending. They are filling a gap for lifestyle banking and retention that traditional banks missed. Judging them by the standards of a 100-year-old commercial bank is a category error.

You have a deep interest in the food business. But you’ve said the money isn’t in the restaurant itself. Break down the unit economics for us.

In Nigeria, the profit margins on a standard restaurant are maybe 10%, often lower. Logistics, power, and raw materials eat everything.

If you want to make money in food, you have two bad options: go ultra-high-end (which has a tiny market cap) or go massive scale (which kills quality control).

So what is the third option?

Gastronomic Tourism and CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) Export.

My long-term thesis is that you don’t scale by opening ten more locations in Lagos. You scale by turning your intellectual property into a product. Think of a specific sauce or a bread mix—like toning down the spice of an Agege bread sauce so it appeals to a global palate—and packaging that for export.

The real money is in the product on the shelf, not the plate on the table. It’s like the alcohol business; the margin is in the bottle, not the bar service. I want to build a brand where the restaurant is just the showroom, but the revenue comes from a product sitting on a shelf in five different countries. That is the only way to bypass the infrastructure problems that kill food businesses here. The long-term goal for us is that we want to export.

Rapid Fire 🔥

What’s your favourite meal?

None. It depends on my mood, but in the spirit of being an Ekiti man, I would say pounded yam. 😅

What’s your favourite productivity tool?

My notes app. I sometimes forget things, so I write everything there.

What’s a book or movie that shaped your thinking?

How to Become a Person of Influence by John Maxwell.

When she took on the responsibility of running Café One, it wasn’t with a grand manifesto or a disruptive playbook. It was with a simple, almost stubborn resolve: it would not fail on her watch.

“I stood in front of my team and said, “It will not be said that when we review the report, the business made a loss, and it was my name on it.”

That sentence captures much of how Nwaozuzu operates. Direct. Grounded. Intolerant of excuses. And deeply committed to building things that last.

Today, she leads Café One, Nigeria’s largest hybrid coffee and coworking space.

In this conversation, Kelechi Nwaozuzu reflects on what it really takes to build a lasting hospitality brand in a market that often rewards noise over substance. We talk about resisting the urge to overcomplicate, learning directly from customers, and why operational discipline matters more than clever ideas.

You studied Computer Science but ended up on the business side. How did that shift happen?

Even while studying Computer Science, I knew I wasn’t going to be a developer. Writing code didn’t interest me. I was more drawn to the business side.

After NYSC in 2017, I joined Union Bank and asked myself a simple question: What do I actually enjoy doing? The answers weren’t technical; they were things like organising events, managing people, talking, and writing. That led me to Corporate Communications, where I worked on the digital desk, writing articles, managing the website, and handling social media.

Over time, I realised I needed stronger business fundamentals, so I left to do my MBA in 2019. About nine months after my MBA in 2021, I joined Sterling Bank through the Management Development Programme, rotating across teams for 18 months.

During a rotation with the Data Team, I was asked to apply data to a business. I chose Café One. I approached it like a mystery shopper and asked, If I were running this business, how would data help me make better decisions? I submitted my findings. Months later, in the most unexpected turn of events, I joined the Cafe One team in 2023. I wasn’t an expert in hospitality or real estate, but I had a plan.

Cafe One Victoria Island, Lagos

What were the early days like when you took over Café One?

I was hungry. Fresh out of business school, at a crossroads in my career, and trying to prove—to myself—that I could do this.

In the first year, we didn’t do anything fancy. We focused on the basics:

Cost Optimisation. We looked at every line item. Where was money going? Were we overpaying for procurement? We tried to ruthlessly drive down operational costs.

Revenue Diversification. We were a co-working space, but we weren’t maximising the asset. We introduced new revenue lines and optimised the pricing on existing co-working services.

Brand Awareness via Digital Channels. We had a fantastic product that nobody knew about. Since I had digital/brand marketing experience, I took this personally. For a long period in 2023, there wasn’t a single caption on our social media that I didn’t write or vet personally. We went heavy on digital channels because that’s where our customers were.

That first year, we roughly tripled our revenue. That validated the business case. In the second year, we expanded and opened about 10-11 new locations.

How did technology support that growth?

We didn’t wait for a perfect app. We started with a simple “self-service link”—basically a web form—so we could start capturing customer data immediately. We ran with that imperfect solution for a long time until we eventually launched the Cafe One App. It taught me that you don’t need the perfect tech stack to start gathering the data you need to grow.

You were given a lot of autonomy. How did you handle the pressure?

Most of the pressure was internal. I felt honoured to be trusted with the opportunity, so I was determined to make it work.

There were nights I’d wake up at 2 a.m. with ideas and message the team—though they knew not to reply until morning.

You went from managing a small team to managing nearly 200 people across multiple locations. How do you maintain standards without micromanaging?

My approach to work is such that I don’t micromanage; I share the vision and let people decide how they want to arrive at the destination.

If our collective goal is to get from London to Lagos, I don’t care if you fly Kenya Airways with a layover or take a direct flight. I don’t care if you prefer the window seat. What I care about is that we arrive at the destination on time and efficiently.

My leadership style is about selling the vision (the destination) and then letting the team own the execution (the route). I don’t care if you fly direct or go via Kenya Airways. If I have to tell you every step to take, then I haven’t hired the right person.

How did you think about hiring and team building?

In the beginning, I had one-on-one chats with every single employee—about 40 to 60 people. It was exhausting, but it was necessary. I take the same approach to hiring, where I sit in on the interviews for all new hires. I used to do this, but now I only sit in on only some key/sensitive roles

I’ve learned that if you hire the right people upfront, you save yourself 80% of the headache later.

Today, we’re close to 200 staff. We invest heavily in them. We have a partnership with a university where some staff work while earning their degrees. When they graduate, they can move into other functions within the business.

Cafe One, Uyo, Akwa Ibom

You place a strong emphasis on learning. How does that show up in practice?

Every year, we have a reading list. Some books are function-specific—for example, product managers read Hooked and other Product Management-related books. Others are general business.

For a long time, “Pour Your Heart Into It” (The Starbucks Book) was our reference point. That and The E-Myth Revisited—which I think every business owner should read and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Beyond books, if someone wants to take a course, we try to support it. Continuous learning is non-negotiable.

Some of the books Cafe One staff members are required to read | Credit: Kelechi Nwaozuzu

What’s a mistake that shaped how you operate today?

Yes. One major learning curve involved procurement.

We were trying to cut costs on a particular item—a major expense for us. I found a middleman who promised to bring them in from China at a significantly cheaper rate than our usual supplier.

I was so focused on the cost-saving and the speed that we didn’t do proper due diligence on her company. We didn’t sign a watertight contract. We just wanted to move fast.

The exchange rate shifted, she didn’t pay the supplier fully, and she eventually ghosted us. The supplier came after us, and we ended up paying more to fix the mess than we would have paid the original vendor.

The lesson was clear: never skip due diligence, and always have proper contracts—no matter how much you want to save or how fast you want to move.

It’s been 3 years since you started working on Café One. What is the endgame?

I want to build businesses that outlive me. I’ve never been primarily driven by money—I believe that if you build capacity and solve actual problems, the money always follows. Right now, I’m driven by the challenge of proving that these systems can work efficiently in Nigeria.

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Rapid Fire 🔥

What business decision would you make again without hesitation?

I’ll choose operation efficiency and discipline over time every time. From day one, there’ll be standard operating procedures even if it weren’t a hospitality business. I’ll be intentional about customer experience. Customers feel valued.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about running a hospitality brand?

They think it’s all fun and games, but it’s actually not. It’s one of the operationally demanding businesses you can run. You’re managing people, power, and customer emotions. All that

It’s not a “soft” business. People think because we’re making money and declaring revenues, but in reality, the margins can actually be thin in the hospitality business.
That’s also why operational efficiency is important, because it’ll help you make more money.

What’s a lesson about leadership you only learned on the job?

Leadership is more about building a system than saving the day. If you’re an expert at putting out fires, that’s fine.

But if you’re always putting out fires, it means you’ve built dependence and not a strong team. Real leadership is about creating ownership and making yourself less central to general operations.

Empathy and high standards can live in the same room. You can be empathetic, care deeply about people and still insist on high standards. You don’t have to choose between being nice and effective. Things have improved since I started finding that balance.

You may have noticed a new look in your inbox today.

Since I began this journey in 2023, I’ve been on and off with this publication. But while my consistency hasn’t been perfect, my curiosity about how things actually work on this continent has never wavered.

Today, we are officially relaunching as Questing.

The name change marks a shift in our mission. Moving forward, the heart of this newsletter will be the Questing Interview Series. Every two weeks, I’ll be sitting down with the continent’s most effective entrepreneurs and operators to deconstruct exactly how they build, scale, and win.

No fluff—just the actual playbooks used by people currently in the arena.

The first piece is live: DLM on the “Company Factory” model.

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It’s 4 pm, and David Lanre Messan is just sitting down for his first meal of the day. He’s been in back-to-back meetings since morning, so we keep our cameras off while he eats.

“Don’t be surprised if I release an album next year,” he says casually, after some banter.

DLM, as he’s widely known, has always lived at the intersection of creation and execution. There was a time when he was a music artist, actor, and model — and he doesn’t believe that chapter is closed. Not yet.

Today, his creative energy is focused on a different medium: companies.

Through his venture studio, First Founders, DLM is backing entrepreneurs using a model he believes dramatically improves the odds of building successful businesses in Africa. That conviction didn’t come cheaply. He sunk $1 million of his own money into startups and learned the hard way. He has lost money, burned capital, and learned firsthand why many startups fail long before product-market fit.

The result is a clear — and sometimes contrarian — thesis on how companies should be built, and a growing scepticism of traditional venture capital.

This conversation explores the ideas, scars, and systems behind DLM’s evolution from creator to what he now calls a “company creator.”

You’ve worn many hats: artist, marketer, entrepreneur. How did your upbringing shape that range?

I was born to a teacher father and a trader mother, so I grew up with both intellectual curiosity and gritty commerce in the same house. We weren’t rich in cash, but we were rich in purpose. I watched my parents find food for neighbours even when we didn’t have much ourselves. That stayed with me — accountability, generosity, and the sense that you should solve problems when you see them.

Even though I studied Mass Communication because of my creative leanings, I didn’t wait until I graduated to start a business. I just always felt the need to build.

What was the first business you started, and when did you realise you had a knack for spotting opportunity?

In 2003, I started a small publicity business. I was paid to paste posters and share flyers. It did okay, but it wasn’t remarkable.

The real breakthrough came with my next business, an e-book business. This was before digital downloads were common. I identified a distribution problem and solved it by burning 30 categorised business books onto CDs and adding motivational music. People loved it.

I started that when I was around 22 years old. It was a classic “street-smart” venture that ran for about 3 to 4 years.

At one point, someone ordered ₦3 million worth of CDs just after hearing the idea. The margins were crazy as the CDs cost about ₦600 to produce and sold for ₦3,000. That was my first real taste of leverage. It taught me everything about supply chains, customer psychology, and the importance of distribution—lessons I still use today when building digital products.

You’ve been very open about losing money early in your journey. What went wrong?

As the business grew, I wanted to give back. I started touring schools, teaching abstinence and HIV/AIDS prevention because I noticed many young people were becoming parents earlier than they planned.

But I soon realised moral lectures weren’t enough. Young people were vulnerable because they lacked economic skills. So I shifted into entrepreneurship empowerment and started providing startup capital.

I invested anything from ₦12,000 to about ₦150,000, depending on the business — farming, trading, whatever. Over three years, I invested roughly ₦20 million across different businesses. Every single one failed. I was also scammed in a forex business.

It was youthful inexperience. I didn’t understand structure, capital efficiency, or operations.

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How did that period change how you think about entrepreneurship?

It humbled me. I realised that ideas and good intentions aren’t enough. I was consulting and helping people develop business ideas, but there was no structure. No operational efficiency. No capital discipline. And because of that, many of those businesses didn’t survive.

Eventually, the CD business lost steam because competitors flooded the market, and I had to pause and reassess.

You then stepped into the corporate world. Why was that necessary for you at that stage?

Between 2009 and 2019, I needed to rebuild financially and structurally. I worked at Universal Anchor Consulting and later at Maku Sports. That period taught me discipline and how organisations actually function.

There’s a story about you closing a ₦500 million deal when others couldn’t. What happened?

At Maku Sports, the marketing team was struggling to close a deal for an international squash tournament. I stepped in and proposed mobile glass courts, which completely changed the value proposition. Before, they’d been used to playing squash in a static place, but the idea of moving the location as well was appealing to them.

And they were like, okay, yeah, that’s a great idea. And then that was it. That single move helped generate about ₦500 million in sales.

That period really confirmed that I was a closer. Over the next decade, I led sales and marketing roles, sharpening that muscle.

Yes, and you’ve kept on closing deals since then. What led you to found First Founders, and why a venture studio instead of traditional investing?

I had seen both sides — entrepreneurship without structure and structure without entrepreneurship. In 2020, I decided to combine them.

African startups don’t fail because founders aren’t smart. They fail because there’s no operational efficiency. Writing checks alone doesn’t solve that.

With First Founders, we don’t just invest. We build with founders. We provide shared resources — legal, HR, technical support — so they can survive the valley of death. I don’t see myself just as a founder anymore. I’m a company creator.

You talk a lot about capital efficiency. What does that mean in practice?

Traditional venture capital often gives money to the smartest guy — the one who can talk well — and then allows them to burn cash on big assumptions.

We do the opposite. By sharing resources across multiple startups, we cut build costs by almost 50%. What would normally take $500,000 to build can be done for about $250,000.

My business is a company creation. Our internal question is simple: Did we build a new company this week? At First Founders, we believe companies should be built every day.

Since we shifted focus to the venture studio model, we have built and supported over 10 companies directly through our studio process. We are currently scaling 6 of these.

You’ve said founders shouldn’t start with an MVP, but an MVT. Why?

Founders are told to build Minimum Viable Products, but that’s often too late. You’ve already spent money writing code.

I believe in the Minimum Viable Test. It’s at the point of MVT that you kill. You test assumptions early, before you commit serious capital.

Take Pocket Lawyers. The original idea was affordable lawyers. After four months of testing, we realised customers didn’t want affordable lawyers — they wanted fast lawyers. We pivoted before building the wrong product.

MVPs are meant to gather data and feedback, not just users. Many founders obsess over user acquisition and forget the data that actually tells them what to build next.

What we’ve done instead is build productivity tools for lawyers, while creating clear pathways that connect them to clients.

We’re still operating in the same market, but we’re solving a different problem—because the customer revealed a different need. That ability to listen and adapt is why companies built within a venture studio tend to survive longer.

You’ve linked entrepreneurship to the fight against brain drain. How so?

Entrepreneurship is the only real defence against japa. If the smartest young people leave, the continent is left with crumbs.

My goal is to democratise entrepreneurship — not just to create wealth, but to create opportunity. If we can build a factory of companies, staying in Africa becomes a viable choice for the next generation.

You’re still creating outside of business. Why does storytelling matter to you?

I’m still an active creator. I wrote a fiction book, Spells and Spectacles, and I’m working on a novel about the tech ecosystem. Storytelling helps me make sense of the chaos of business. It’s how I process the world.

Rapid Fire 🔥

What’s one idea about leadership you’ve had to unlearn?

The biggest idea I’ve had to unlearn is that “A leader must have all the answers.”

Early on, I thought leadership was about being the smartest person in the room and giving directions. I’ve had to unlearn that and replace it with the idea that leadership is about creating a safe environment for others to find the answers. Now, I focus more on asking the right questions rather than providing all the solutions.

What’s a decision that looked wrong in the moment but proved right over time?

Deciding to pivot away from traditional consulting to focus on the Venture Studio model looked “wrong” to many people at the time. We had a steady stream of consulting revenue, and moving toward a model where we take equity and “build” alongside founders felt risky and slower to monetise. In the moment, it looked like I was turning away “sure money” for a long-shot bet. Over time, however, it proved right because it allowed us to build actual assets and deep institutional knowledge that consulting alone never could.

What’s a book or movie that shaped your thinking?

The Book: Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. It completely shifted how I view competition. Instead of fighting for space in “red oceans” (crowded markets), I focused on creating “blue oceans”—entirely new markets where competition is irrelevant. This is a core pillar of how we approach business at FirstFounders.

The Movie: The Pursuit of Happiness. It’s a cliché for a reason. It reinforced the “never give up” DNA that is required when you are building something from nothing in an environment like Nigeria.

📡 The Questing Takeaway

DLM’s evolution proves that in a volatile market, systems beat hype. Whether it was selling CDs in 2003 or building a “company factory” today, his edge is structure.

The Lesson: Don’t build an MVP on hope. Run a Minimum Viable Test (MVT) to gather the data that proves you should build at all.

What’s one assumption you can test for $0 this week? Reply and let’s discuss.

There is an advice that circulates in every co-working space, Twitter thread, and startup mixer in Lagos. It sounds like this:

“Don’t overthink it. Just start. Build the plane on the way down.”

It is a seductive advice. It frames recklessness as bravery. But on this week’s episode of Quest, Temitope Ekundayo (Co-founder, GetEquity) sat down to tell us why that advice is not just wrong but can be dangerous.

Temitope is not your typical tech bro. He is an operator who grew up selling sweets in primary school, reading chemical engineering textbooks for fun, and navigating life with a disability that required corrective surgeries and leg braces.

He doesn’t view business as a fun experiment. He views it as a series of Hard Problems that require surgical precision, not blind optimism.

To better understand how he arrived at this point of view, let’s go back.

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Temitope did not stumble into business; he was born into it. His upbringing provided a dual education in commerce and science. His mother was a nurse who also ran a trading business and a full-scale poultry/agric farm. Temitope was deeply involved, handling purchases at local markets and working on the farm. This taught him the basics of supply, demand, and hard work.

His father was a chemical engineer in oil and gas consulting. Temitope grew up reading his father’s encyclopedias and engineering books, sparking a deep curiosity about how things work.

His first independent venture was selling a candy called “Amaria” in primary school. He bought in bulk and sold to classmates, becoming the “go-to guy” for sweets. While studying Geology (a course he chose because it was the closest thing to his childhood dream of being an astronaut), he remained restless. He dabbled in music (recording a rap song he hopes no one finds) and organised parties and events.

The turning point in his mindset came when he joined AIESEC, a global youth leadership organisation. AIESEC exposed him to international peers and global standards of leadership. It shifted his worldview from local hustles to solving larger societal problems.

Empowered by this new network, he started “consulting” for friends and small business owners. He would write business plans and help them strategise, often learning on the job. This was his first taste of structured business strategy.

Before striking out on his own major ventures, Temitope paid his dues working in varied sectors. These vast experiences influenced his thinking and birthed his ideologies around how people should approach doing business.

Gut feeling is a trap

We love the myth of the intuitive founder. The genius who wakes up with a billion-dollar idea and executes on “vibes.”

But Temitope doesn’t buy into this. “Today, most people start businesses because of a gut feeling,” he says. “But gut feeling doesn’t tell you if a supermarket will succeed on Street A vs. Street B. Research does.”

He brings up the example of Walmart. Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton didn’t dominate the world because they “trusted their gut.” They dominated because they were obsessed with data. They visited competitors. They counted foot traffic. They analysed pricing down to the cent.

Temitope’s argument is simple: Passion creates the spark, but research builds the fire.

If you are launching a product today and haven’t conducted a Strategic Audit, you are essentially taking a gamble.

He encourages people to pressure-test their ideas with structured frameworks like:

• VRIO Analysis: Is your resource Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Organised?

• Porter’s Five Forces: Do you actually have power in your market, or are your suppliers and competitors the ones dictating the terms?

The Fish Paradox and the Fintech bubble

“We are solving the wrong problems.”

If you take one thing away from this interview, let it be this section. Temitope expresses a frustration that many of us feel but rarely articulate: Why is everyone building a Neobank when we don’t have food security?

He dropped a statistic that felt like a punch in the gut:

“We import fish. Almost 1.8 million tons. Yet, we export fish to places like Switzerland. We have the ocean. We have aquatic nature. So what is going on?”

This is what Temitope calls a Hard Problem.

Fintech is “easy” (relatively speaking). It’s software. It’s clean. Agriculture, logistics, and hardware? That’s hard. That’s messy. That involves supply chains, roads, and sweat.

But that is exactly where the opportunity is.

Temitope argues that the next wave of African unicorns won’t be the ones helping us move money; they will be the ones helping us move things. They will be the ones fixing the broken infrastructure that forces a country with an ocean to import frozen fish.

He wants people to stop looking at what is trending on tech news sites and look at what is broken on your street.

His drive

Where does the drive to fix this come from?

For Temitope, it started with a pair of leg braces.

Born with Erb Palsy (a birth injury causing weakness or paralysis in an infant’s arm and shoulder due to damage to the nerves), he spent his childhood in and out of hospitals. In school, kids called his braces funny names.

It would have been easy to retreat. To look for a safe, quiet life. Instead, he leaned in. He accepted the nickname. He adopted a philosophy that borders on aggressive stoicism:

“I was born this way. It’s not my fault. But if I’m going to make anything of this life, it’s on me.”

From Printivo to GetEquity, his career has been about removing friction and creating access. Now, his eyes are set on the bigger picture: conglomerates that tackle agriculture, housing, and infrastructure.

▶️Watch the full interview here:

There is a specific, painful bottleneck that every high-growth operator eventually hits. It’s the moment when “working harder” stops yielding results, and your personal attention to detail—the very thing that got you here—becomes the company’s biggest liability.

We often talk about scaling products, scaling servers, and scaling revenue. We rarely talk about scaling judgment.

In our latest sit-down, I spoke with Yanmo Omorogbe, the co-founder and COO of Bamboo. Over the last five years, she has helped steer the investment platform through over $17.5M in fundraising and expansion into Ghana and South Africa. To observers, Yanmo represents the “cool” head of the industry, offering a composed antidote to the usual startup panic.

But as she revealed in this interview, calmness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a result of growth over the years.

Yanmo didn’t start out “chill.”

In the early days, she read every single customer support ticket. She was the buffer between the world and the product, micromanaging emails, grammar, and tone. Today, she leads a company where she can afford to miss the little things because the big things are taken care of.

Here is how Yanmo Omorogbe moved from micromanager to “Corporate Adult,” and how you can apply her framework to your own operations.

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Involving people in your thinking

The trap for most smart operators is speed. When you see a team member draft a social media post that misses the mark or write an email that lacks empathy, the fastest solution is to fix it yourself.

Yanmo admits she used to do this constantly. But she realised that every time she fixed a problem silently, she was robbing her team of the context needed to fix it themselves next time. She was scaling her output, but not her brain.

Her solution to this was to “involve people in your thinking.”

“I never, ever give feedback without context,” she says. “Even if I do it myself because there’s no time, I try to say: ‘This is what I’ve been doing’ or explain what I was doing.”

This sounds simple, but it is operationally expensive in the short term. It takes five minutes to rewrite an email; it takes twenty minutes to explain why the tone of the original email was off, how it aligns with the brand voice, and why the new version works better.

However, Yanmo argues this is the only way to “scale capacity.” By relentlessly explaining the why—asking annoying questions in meetings, dissecting the data-driven reasons for a decision—you aren’t just getting tasks done. You are sharing the thinking behind your decision-making with your team members.

The goal isn’t for the team to use the exact words Yanmo would use. The goal is for them to think the way the company needs to think. Once that alignment exists, the micromanagement can vanish.

Corporate Adulting

If you have ever worked in a high-pressure startup, you know the culture can sometimes veer into “performative suffering. Think late nights for the sake of late nights, and urgency that feels manufactured.

Yanmo leans into Corporate Adulting—a culture where high personal responsibility replaces the need for managers to ‘chase’ output— to solve this.

“Nobody is in bondage. Nobody is forcing anybody to be here. So if you don’t do this work, just be going. But seeing as we’ve agreed that we want to do this work, let us buy into the mission.”

This take focuses on accountability, stripping away the parent-child dynamic often found in employer-employee relationships. A reminder that employment is a consensual economic transaction.

This philosophy is crucial for Bamboo because they operate fully remote (with the option to work from the office), and because the work is genuinely stressful. Yanmo shares harrowing stories where customers send vile, abusive messages to the support team, only to instantly become polite and charming when Yanmo (the founder) calls them personally.

To survive that kind of emotional whiplash without a boss hovering over your shoulder requires a team that possesses high personal responsibility.

You cannot police resilience; you have to hire adults who possess it.

Proof of Work > Proof of Degree

So, how do you find these “Corporate Adults” who can absorb your thinking and handle the heat?

Yanmo’s approach is meritocratic: She largely ignores the CV.

“I don’t care if you went to university or not... Everybody can write [on a CV]. But if you show me the evidence... I try to index for: What is the experience I’m looking for?”

In the interview, she explains how Bamboo’s hiring process has evolved. They realised that standard proxies for competence (degrees, cover letters) were failing them. A cover letter in 2025 tells you nothing other than a candidate’s ability to use ChatGPT.

Instead, Bamboo has shifted to practical testing. If the role requires communication, the application process includes a writing task. If it requires analysis, they simulate a research project.

It emphasises that your background is just history, but your ability to deliver is the future.

The Evolution of Ambition

Perhaps the most human moment of the conversation is hearing how Yanmo’s definition of success has shifted.

Growing up, her ambition was aesthetic. She wanted to “run Shell” because oil meant money. She wanted to own Birkins because she loved Victoria Beckham. It was a desire for “nice things.”

But as the company has grown, the “nice things” have become secondary to the scale of impact. She references Mark Zuckerberg—not for his wealth, but for the fact that Meta reaches 4 billion active users.

“Success to me [now] looks like doing something impactful at scale.”

This shift has manifested quietly in her life. She reveals she has started a private foundation—not a PR stunt, but a small, registered initiative currently supporting just a few students.

She isn’t just paying their fees; she is curating their reading lists (heavy on the fiction, which she credits for her own creativity) and shaping their worldviews.

She is doing for these students exactly what she does for her team: she isn’t just funding them; she is involving them in her thinking.

▶️ Watch full interview here

One Next Step for You

Audit your feedback loop this week.

The next time you have to correct a team member’s work, pause. Do not just make the edit. Take 10 minutes to record a voice note or write a memo explaining the principle behind the edit.

Ask yourself: Am I fixing the task, or am I training the judgment?

Seated across the table was Chikodi Ukaiwe, recently returned from the UK with a master’s degree, impeccably dressed in a sharp suit and prepared to resume work with his former employer.

He handed over his CV, a testament to years of study and ambition.

The manager took the CV, gave it a quick glance, and with a flick of his wrist, slid it across the table. But the surface was too smooth, too polished, and the paper, instead of stopping neatly, glided off the edge and onto the floor.

They didn’t need to exchange words. The message was clear. Chikodi wasn’t wanted at the bank.

To many, it would have felt like a moment of humiliation — a public slight, the dismissal of years of effort. For Chikodi Ukaiwe, it marked something different: a declaration of war, not on the man himself, but on the rigid, slow-moving system he embodied.

“At that moment,” Chikodi says in our interview, “I said, I’m going to disrupt all of this. I am not going to work in the biggest institution. I am going to disrupt everything.”

And disrupt, he did.

This isn’t just a story about rejection. It’s the origin story of Nigerian e-commerce, told through the eyes of one of its founding architects. A young man, once more obsessed with “girls and PlayStation” than grades, would go on to channel his anger into building two of Africa’s most iconic eCommerce brands, Jumia and Konga.

Today, with Salad Africa, he’s rewriting that story once more, this time for small businesses, the true backbone of the economy.

But let’s rewind a bit, because Chikodi’s journey isn’t linear.

An unlikely tech pioneer

Before the suits, before the startups, Chikodi was, by his own admission, “by far the most troublesome one” in his family. An only boy amidst two older sisters, his university days in 2002 were less about academic rigour and more about, well, the aforementioned girls and PlayStation. He confessed he didn’t even know what a “GPA” was until his second semester.

Yet, even then, the seeds of an entrepreneur were being sown. From selling powdered juices to his neighbours as a child to flipping second-hand phones in computer village while in secondary school, Chikodi possessed an innate understanding of commerce and margins. His family, a blend of Igbo and Yoruba, even joked he had the “perfect mixture for business.”

He didn’t choose Computer Science; his mother did. She, an academic with a sense for the future, steered him toward tech at a time when everyone else chased banking and Oil & Gas.

“It’s a testament to listening to your parents,” Chikodi jokingly says. Even if back then, he thought chemical engineering sounded cooler.

That choice, accidental as it seemed then, would define everything that came after.

His own version of the birth of Jumia

After a frustrating post-university year trying, and failing, to get a UK visa (he was denied five to six times!), Chikodi finally turned his attention to Nigeria. He endured a brief, unsatisfying stint in banking – a world of suits, rigid hours, and a corporate culture that stifled his entrepreneurial spirit. It’s no wonder that a few years later, armed with a Master’s, he’d find himself in that fateful bank office, his CV sliding across the floor.

But as one door slammed (literally), another, far stranger, opened. His girlfriend referred him to “meet some people” for a job interview.

He arrived at an unmarked building in Lekki, wearing his best bank-approved suit.

But his first sight, a lady walking around in shorts at 2 PM, got him rethinking his decision to show up for this interview.

“I thought this was definitely a scam,” he says, describing his initial impression of what would become Jumia. The “founders” — two young men in shorts — seemed too distracted, too informal. Yet, the energy was palpable.

Chikodi joined what was then a merger of small online fashion and phone companies, tasked with leading “partnerships” – a vague role that essentially meant convincing big corporations to take this wild e-commerce idea seriously.

This was 2012, remember. Trust in online transactions was nonexistent. People were still “grappling their heads around the concept of getting a card and trusting the machine within the bank premises, talking to us about taking that card and putting the details online.”

The solution? The legendary J-Force. Chikodi pioneered this army of young people equipped with devices, canvassing communities, explaining e-commerce, and even helping customers place orders. This hands-on approach directly tackled the “trust deficit” and, astonishingly, generated 60% of Jumia’s early Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). Chikodi was in the trenches, building an empire, one sceptical customer at a time.

Jumia vs Konga

As Jumia exploded, another giant was rising: Konga. The rivalry was fierce.

Then came the call. Sim Shagaya, Konga’s founder, wanted to meet. Chikodi vividly recounts the clandestine arrangements: sneaking into Konga’s office through a back elevator, blinds drawn in Sim’s office so no one at Jumia would know he was there. It was like a scene out of a spy movie.

Sim’s pitch wasn’t just about selling; it was about ecosystem building. Payments, logistics, SME empowerment – a vision that resonated deeply with Chikodi’s childhood dream of sustainability and making a real economic impact. Despite Jumia’s efforts to retain him, the vision for an integrated ecosystem at Konga was irresistible. Chikodi made the jump, joining Konga as Vice President in 2014.

At Konga, Chikodi was unleashed. He built the marketplace from scratch, acquiring thousands of merchants from bustling hubs like Alaba and Trade Fair. He helped them set up emails, take product photos, and process orders. He tackled the delivery challenge and, crucially, developed the B2B e-commerce infrastructure, enabling bulk deliveries for giants like Unilever and Guinness – orders worth hundreds of millions of Naira.

At Konga, he got a rare opportunity: the freedom to build and experiment inside a company that had the means to support big ideas. It was a masterclass in internal entrepreneurship — one that would prove invaluable in the years to come.

Over the course of almost two hours, Chikodi shared his story and hard-won truths on business, family (he’s a dad of 3 girls) and rest.

For a high-charging executive who once lived on 16-hour days, now champions scheduled rest as a necessity, not a luxury.

“A startup founder is just like an athlete,” he emphasises. “It is in everybody’s interest that that person is well (mentally, emotionally, physically).”

In the full interview, Chikodi shares more candid insights, hilarious anecdotes, and actionable wisdom for every aspiring entrepreneur.

It’s been a minute. After a brief stint to take the helm at Condia, I’m thrilled to be back in the editor’s chair here at Quest. It feels like returning to a conversation with old friends. And what a conversation we have to mark our return, learning from one of the brightest minds in the world. This newsletter edition is an excerpt from a podcast conversation I had.

Let’s dive in.

We’re taught to chase the top spot. The gold medal. The market leader. In the startup world, it’s about becoming the “category king,” the undisputed number one. We lionise the trailblazers, the first movers, the ones who plant the flag.

But what if this obsession with being first is a trap?

What if the real power, the smarter strategic position, lies in second place?

This is the provocative, counterintuitive idea at the heart of my recent conversation with Adia Soho, a venture builder and operator whose career reads like a masterclass in African tech. As the first-ever female CMO at MTN Nigeria and a leader who has scaled ventures from the seed stage to public listing, Adia has seen the game from every angle. And from her vantage point, being number two isn’t a consolation prize; it’s a strategic choice.

“If you’re the person that’s like, ‘Oh, I see something to optimise, I don’t have as much cash, I don’t have the resources for market validation,’ then go ahead and be number two,” she told me. “But be a very good number two.”

That single idea stopped me in my tracks. It reframes the entire narrative of competition, shifting it from a brute-force race to a calculated game of chess.

On being a fast follower

The allure of being number one is obvious: you set the standard, shape the market, and own the narrative. But the costs are equally massive. The market leader bears the burden of educating customers, spending enormous sums on marketing to create a new category and validate a new behaviour. They absorb the arrows, test the unproven tech, and iron out the kinks.

The number two, Adia argues, gets to play a different game.

She recalled her time at a US telco that was perfectly content being a top-ten player, not number one. Their strategy was simple: “Let Verizon go and test it. When they’re finished, we’ll buy the improved version of that technology. Let them make the market.”

This is the power of the fast follower. You let your competitor spend the money and take the initial risks. You come into a market that’s already been warmed up, armed with several advantages:

• More agile tech: You’re not saddled with the legacy systems the first mover had to build. You can leverage the latest, most efficient best practices from day one.
  

• A clearer target: You can analyse the leader’s product, identify its gaps, and build a better, more refined solution. You innovate on the margins they ignored.
  

• Capital efficiency: Your marketing dollars go further because you’re not creating demand from scratch; you’re capturing it.

This isn’t about being the “tail,” as Adia puts it. It’s about being the “neck”—essential, powerful, and strategically positioned. Google followed Yahoo. Netflix, once a challenger, offered itself to Blockbuster, who famously said no. The history of tech is filled with number twos who eventually took the crown, not by being first, but by being better.

Innovation beyond the obvious

So if you’re not outspending the leader on flashy Super Bowl ads, how do you win? Adia’s answer is to innovate in places others overlook—specifically, in distribution.

Marketing in a market like Nigeria is incredibly difficult and expensive. There are no consolidated channels to reach the whole country. A national campaign is a logistical nightmare. But distribution, she notes, can be a more direct and powerful lever.

She points to the brilliant, scrappy strategy of Biggie Cola against the goliath, Coca-Cola. While Coke was sponsoring global events, Biggie was focused on one thing: being everywhere. They innovated on the ground, ensuring their product was in every neighbourhood kiosk, closer to the customer’s point of need.

This isn’t just for physical products. Adia shared an incredible story from her time at Etisalat, where they ran an exercise to calculate the average distance between every single person in Nigeria and the nearest Etisalat retail outlet. They then tracked how often those outlets ran out of stock. That’s not marketing; that’s a scientific approach to presence. It’s a recognition that the best product in the world is useless if the customer can’t get it when they need it.

This mindset—of finding your unique advantage and doubling down—doesn’t just apply to building billion-dollar companies. It’s a powerful framework for building a career.

The $10k task

As our conversation unfolded, I realised that Adia applies the same rigorous strategic thinking to her own life. When I asked her what she optimises for, her answer was telling.

“Earlier in my career, I optimised for money and interest,” she said. “But now, I optimise for interest.”

This shift is the personal equivalent of choosing to be a strategic number two. It’s about declining opportunities, even lucrative ones, that fall outside your “zone of genius.” It’s about knowing which battles to fight and which to cede.

She introduced a framework that’s been stuck in my mind ever since: the “$10K Task,” created by American productivity expert Khe Hy.

Here’s the thinking behind the framework. Not all tasks are created equal. Some consume hours but add little value, while others can transform a business.

At the base are $10 tasks like scheduling meetings or formatting documents—necessary but low-impact. $100 tasks involve standard execution, such as drafting reports or managing campaigns. $1,000 tasks raise the stakes with high-skill actions like closing a client deal or launching a marketing experiment.

But the real game-changers are $10,000 tasks. These are high-leverage activities that produce ripple effects long after completion: designing a scalable growth model, securing a strategic partnership, or shaping a narrative that positions a company as a market leader. They cannot easily be delegated and demand vision, judgment, and leadership.

For Adia, years ago, speaking on panels was a “$10k task” for her—it helped her find her voice and build her profile. Today, it’s a “$1k task.” The challenge is gone. So what’s her new “$10k task”?

“Teaching people who wonder or want to do it, how I started or how to find their own voice.”

Her focus has shifted from doing to empowering. It’s a beautiful evolution, a recognition that true mastery lies not just in honing your own skills, but in scaling your impact through others. This is how you build a legacy.

This whole philosophy is wrapped in a refreshing humility. Adia describes her career not as a master plan executed to perfection, but as a “backward-looking experience.” It’s only in retrospect that the dots connect into a coherent sentence: “designs, builds, and scales tech ventures.” It’s a liberating thought, freeing us from the pressure of having it all figured out. The key is to simply optimise for interest, focus on your “10k” tasks today, and trust that the story will write itself.

This is just a fraction of the wisdom Adia shared. In our full conversation, we dive deeper into making metrics truly actionable (and creating a “soft life” for managers), her perspectives on AI and the no-code movement, and her deeply personal definition of success, rooted in peace and gratitude.

📺 Watch the full conversation with Adia Soho here:

It’s great to be back

Note

Back at Condia, I launched the Quest podcast with the same name as this newsletter—mainly because no better name came to mind at the time. That was long before I even thought about leaving.

While the podcast technically belongs to Condia, I realised the pilot episodes could be the perfect way to kick things off here.

But AI has always been with us; it only just had its light bulb moment this year. 

As I close out for the year, in this piece I look at what happened this year and the opportunities ahead.

Thomas Edison always liked to go after big things. The American inventor and businessman had sold the quadruplex telegraph for $10,000 ($259,000 in 2023) to his former employer Western Union in 1874 and was finalising his work on the phonograph – a device that recorded sound and could play it back.

But he had his sights on something bigger. His longtime friend had piqued his interest in the newest form of artificial illumination by sending numerous reports and dragging him to see it live in 1876. Straightaway Edison was captivated. 

Jill Jonnes narrates this encounter in Empires of Light:

“Edison was now afire with excitement. Ever the competitor, he turned to his host, William Wallace, and said, “I believe I can beat you making the electric light. I do not think you are working in the right direction. William Wallace, who had been working on arc lights for several years and had his system up and going, was a good sport. He accepted the bet and shook hands on it.

Then Edison rushed back to quiet, bucolic Menlo Park, his research workshop in backwater New Jersey, to throw himself into creating a better and more practical electric light. He worked feverishly, thrilled at the possibilities of this new field. “It was all before me. I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance. I saw that what had been done had never been made practically useful. The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses.”

Over the next decade, Edison will work tirelessly, many times on the verge of bankruptcy, to win the bet and prove that electricity can be practically useful and brought into every home.  

Thomas Edison didn’t discover electricity, which was already used via battery to power telegraphs and telephones, but his invention of the light bulb — and everything else that made it possible to light a house — made electricity more useful to the layman.

AI: The New Electricity 

AI has often been likened to Electricity because it changed how the world operates. Just like electricity, AI has applications in every field. The introduction of the light bulb in the house, brought about electrical appliances as brilliant scientists tinkered with how to solve the problem of keeping foodstuff cold or the radio on for much longer.

Similarly, American Psychologist Frank Rosenblatt's experiment in 1959 on whether a computer programme could learn the difference between pictures of a man and a woman kicked off further enquiries into whether computers can learn to perform intelligent behaviours — which is what AI is all about.

The development of AI was stifled by a lack of computing power and training data, causing it to move slowly over the years until the 2010s which featured milestone moments such as AlphaGo – an AI programme by Google that plays the board game Go – beating a human for the first time. 

Despite all this progress, AI’s defining moment happened last year with the launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT. 

Within five days of its launch in November 2022, the chatbot had a million users. In two months, a hundred million monthly users were using the platform—a number that has now nearly doubled. Where did this astonishingly successful product come from?

In 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. 

The initial company’s mission was to create "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."

Attention is all you need

Unlike most tech start-ups, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit with a board that was responsible for making sure it fulfilled that mission. Efforts in generative AI, a branch of AI dedicated to creating new content, got a renewed vigour with the publishing of the 2017 research paper, “Attention is all you need” by Google DeepMind researchers.

This paper introduced a new architecture called the Transformer and a new way for computers to process information, called attention. Before this paper, computers used something called Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to understand sequences of information. Imagine RNNs as a slow train chugging through the sentence, reading one word at a time. While it works, it's not very efficient and can forget important details at the beginning by the time it reaches the end.

With attention, instead of reading everything at once, the computer can shine its spotlight on different parts of the information, depending on what's most relevant to the task at hand.

The attention mechanism is powerful because it allows computers to understand information in context, just like humans do. The computer is paying attention to the most important parts of the information and ignoring the rest. By focusing on the key points, the Transformer can understand the meaning of information more accurately and generate better outputs.

Early signs from the use of this transformer mechanism were encouraging but not satisfactory. The Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) AI models required more data and better computing hardware. 

By 2019, funding dried up from OpenAI donors — major backer Elon Musk left in 2018 — so Altman changed course by spinning off a for-profit business entity and raising $1 billion from Microsoft. Continuous iterations of Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) AI models from 2018 (GPT-1) finally bore fruit with the launch of GPT-3 which powered the first version of ChatGPT in November 2022.

The AI Craze

The launch of ChatGPT was so impressive that every major company had to modify their plans for 2023 to include some semblance of an AI strategy or even go as far as hiring a Chief AI Officer to steer them on the right path. Investors responded by pouring over $70 billion into AI startups, up from $24 billion in 2022. 

In February 2023, Google responded with the release of its chatbot, Bard; Microsoft integrated OpenAI’s model into its Bing search engine; Meta which had slowed down on its plans to take us to the Metaverse gifted the world with a free AI foundational model (Llama); and OpenAI rival Anthropic released Claude, a “next generation AI assistant”, in March.

Later in the year, IBM, Oracle and Amazon rolled out their generative AI solutions targeted at enterprise clients. 

Apple notably has been absent from the AI craze, choosing to remind its customers that it has always been using AI.  "I think the first thing to know is that if you're an Apple customer today, AI is in all of the products that we produce.” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview. 

“In a very significant way. We don't label it as such. If you're composing a message or an email on the phone, you'll see predictive typing tries to predict your next word so you can quickly choose the word, that's AI….What has gathered people's imagination, I think more recently, is generative AI.”

Rightly so AI itself isn’t new. It was already a routine part of our lives that we hardly recognised or paid attention to it. Popular examples include YouTube’s insanely good algorithm that recommends videos to use, delightful conversations with Siri or Alexa, and automatic detection of fraudulent activity by a financial service company.

What was different was that for the first time, everyone felt like they could see a tangible benefit of AI, like the light bulb. 

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Why Gen AI Matters

The rise of generative AI meant that this was the year we learned to “communicate, create, cheat, and collaborate with robots,” according to the New Yorker. English and

Generative AI models are created by a simple process of large portions of the world’s information on the Internet being put together and analysed with a kind of algorithm that mimics the human brain.  

Based on recurrence and the dataset analysed, the system can compose words, images or audio statistically, based on which words, phrases, images, and sounds typically belong together. Think of it as a sophisticated version of auto-complete when you’re typing. Some parts of this process are a bit mysterious and as such the AI system is known to make up words and sentences on its own i.e. Hallucinate. 

Why does Gen AI matter? I’ll let tech analyst Ben Thompson explain:

“The evolution of human communication has been about removing whatever bottleneck is in this value chain. Before humans could write, information could only be conveyed orally; that meant that the creation, vocalization, delivery, and consumption of an idea were all one-and-the-same. Writing, though, unbundled consumption, increasing the number of people who could consume an idea.

Now the new bottleneck was duplication: to reach more people whatever was written had to be painstakingly duplicated by hand, which dramatically limited what ideas were recorded and preserved. The printing press removed this bottleneck, dramatically increasing the number of ideas that could be economically distributed:

The new bottleneck was distribution, which is to say this was the new place to make money; thus the aforementioned profitability of newspapers. That bottleneck, though, was removed by the Internet, which made distribution free and available to anyone.

What remains is one final bundle: the creation and substantiation of an idea. To use myself as an example, I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet, the ability to distribute them around the globe; however, I still need to write them down, just as an artist needs to create an image, or a musician needs to write a song. What is becoming increasingly clear, though, is that this too is a bottleneck that is on the verge of being removed.”

The cost of content creation has been effectively lowered to zero. You might snicker at the quality of content produced but remember it only keeps getting better. 

Opportunities in GenAI

While some look at this wave through the lens of a doom scenario where AI will take people’s jobs, it’s inevitable and as such, we’ll be better off looking into how best to use it to improve our lives.

An obvious way to approach this is to look at how AI is used in different industries. In healthcare, AI algorithms can analyze medical images and data to identify diseases with greater accuracy and speed, aiding in early diagnosis and treatment. Machines don’t have to shut down unexpectedly during manufacturing processes, AI can analyze sensor data from machinery to predict potential failures and schedule maintenance before breakdowns occur, reducing downtime and costs. 

I could go on and on but I’d take a different way to look at opportunities in the generative AI tech stack. Building generative AI applications involves a complex interplay of different components, often visualized as a "tech stack." Let's dive into the three core layers of this stack: data, infrastructure and AI model/platform.

Data

Data is the lifeblood of AI models, just like petrol is to a car.  Imagine an AI model as a newborn baby. It has the potential to learn and grow, but it needs the right environment and experiences to do so. Data is that environment. By feeding an AI model massive amounts of data, we're essentially showing it the world and teaching it how to function within it. The more data it sees, the better it can understand patterns, make connections, and ultimately perform its intended task.

The quality of the data also directly impacts the quality of the AI model. If you feed a model with inaccurate or incomplete data, it will learn inaccurate or incomplete things.

While it's not clear which data sources proprietary AI models such as OpenAI use, most have admitted to using data from open-sourced websites such as Wikipedia, and social media platforms like Reddit. For context, GPT-2 was partly trained with slightly over 8 million documents with a total of 40 gigabytes of text. Meta’s Llama 2 AI model was trained on about 192 billion tokens (read: words/punctuations)1. 

Creators and online platforms are kicking back against their content being scraped by AI models for free. But it’ll be largely difficult to prove whether their works were used (in the sea of abundant information) and what truly counts as copyright infringement. If they ever eventually win, it won’t stop the movement as AI chatbots can simply get information by asking their users questions.

As New York-based writer and programmer James Somers forecasts:

If it can’t find the right kind of training data, a chatbot might solicit it. I imagine a conversation with some future version of ChatGPT in which, after a period of inactivity, it starts asking me questions. Perhaps, having observed my own questions and follow-ups, it will have developed an idea of what I know about. “You’re a programmer and a writer, aren’t you?” it might say to me. Sure, I’ll respond. “I thought so! I’m trying to get better at technical writing. I wonder if you could help me decide which of the following sentences is best?” Such an A.I. might ask my sister, who works at a construction company, about what’s going on in the local lumber market; it could ask my doctor friend, who does research on cancer, whether he could clear up something in a recent Nature paper. 

The opportunity here is in safeguarding proprietary information and creating a niche AI model on it. For example, most AI models are trained in solely English language. What happens if you could train yours in a local language? Or train a niche AI model based on content not available on the web. Archivi.ng, which is curating archiving old Nigerian newspapers and making them accessible to everyone, is better posed to create a niche AI model.

Infrastructure 

Training complex AI models requires immense computational power to crunch through gigabytes, terabytes, or even petabytes of training datasets.  

This is where powerhouses like Nvidia, AMD and others come in with their superior data centres and chips. When it comes to AI chips, Nvidia is ahead of the pack and it’s difficult to see anyone beating them anytime soon.

Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) and 2 other people, Nvidia’s claim to fame goes way back to its GeForce series launched in 1999. Stephen Witt of the New Yorker explains: 

In 1999, the company, shortly after going public, introduced a graphics card called GeForce, which Dan Vivoli, the company’s head of marketing, called a “graphics-processing unit.” (“We invented the category so we could be the leader in it,” Vivoli said.) 

Unlike general-purpose C.P.U.s, the G.P.U. breaks complex mathematical tasks apart into small calculations, then processes them all at once, in a method known as parallel computing. A C.P.U. functions like a delivery truck, dropping off one package at a time; a G.P.U. is more like a fleet of motorcycles spreading across a city.

What truly prepared Nvidia for the AI revolution was its supercomputing software package, CUDA, which made its GeForce GPU even better. But the general public didn’t seem interested until AI researchers picked it up. In 2009, a research group led by, Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, used Nvidia’s CUDA platform to train a neural network to recognize human speech.  And it performed surprisingly well.

The next decade saw word about Nvidia’s superior chips spread – OpenAI being the buyer of the first AI supercomputer — and Nvidia doubled down on being positioned to lead the AI space whenever it came of age.  

As the AI era emerged in 2023, the stock market rewarded NVIDIA as its share price shot up by about 230%. Its data centre GPU sales rose from $3.6 billion in Q4 2022 to an expected $16 billion in Q4 2023.  AMD comes in a distant second, barely appearing to be a competition. Notably, Apple has been performing its AI functions on its own chips for years now. This AI-specific hardware is tuned to Apple’s own needs and could help Apple emerge as a strong contender in AI infrastructure space, although it’s unlikely that it’ll sell chips to other players.

Several startups such as Cerebras are building generative AI-efficient chips but Nvidia's CEO doesn’t think it’s solely a chip problem.

“You can’t solve this new way of doing computing by just redesigning a chip. Every aspect of the computer has fundamentally changed,” Huang said at a recent event. “That’s everything from networking to switching, to the way the computers as designed to the chips and the software that sits on top of it…It includes a chip but it’s not about that chip.”

There’s a significant barrier in terms of investment cost and technical knowledge preventing new entrants. But keep in mind that IBM used to rule the (personal) computer space and Nokia was once the predominant phone-making company.

AI Models/Platforms

Generative AI platforms are typically user-friendly interfaces and drag-and-drop features to make it easier to build and deploy AI models (algorithms). For example, ChatGPT is the AI platform, while GPT-4 is the AI model.

This space is led by Open AI and its largest shareholder Microsoft which dominates with 39% and 30% marketshare respectively, according to IOT analytics. Microsoft’s platform, Azure AI, offers Azure OpenAI, which uses OpenAI’s LLMs but goes beyond the public ChatGPT offering by promising greater data security and custom AI apps. AWS’ Bedrock service, publicly released in September 2023, provides access to models from several AI companies, such as Anthropic, AI21 labs, and Cohere. 

Generally, considered a leader in the AI space, Google is at best playing catch up right now. A few weeks ago, Google released a preview version of its new multi-modal flagship model, Gemini, which blew our minds away until it was revealed that the demo video exaggerated the model’s capabilities.  

The AI model/platform space is crowded and the abundance of open-sourced (free-to-use) foundational models has only made it more crowded. Based on the availability of many general-purpose models, an obvious opportunity is to focus on AI models that perform well on a particular niche information. Think of an AI model that assists with patient diagnosis in hospitals or one that predicts customer behaviour, identifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and automates repetitive tasks for sales teams. This is where the industry-focused use cases of AI come alive. Business-to-business (B2B) focused models are more prominent in AI models by enterprise companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. They’re better positioned to shine where general-purpose models are found lacking. 

However, with the introduction of GPTs and the GPT store by OpenAI which helps create a tailored version of a chatbot, it’s clear that the general-purpose AI models aren’t resting on their oars.

The biggest opportunties of all though, though, is probably off our radar completely. AI’s light bulb moment has been all about the improvement in the usefulness of AI to more people. It’ll take another decade to see how this plays out.

But it wasn’t always like this. 

How did the fintech space evolve in the last three decades, and what’s next for the industry in Nigeria?

Come along and I will quickly take you through 30 years of fintech’s evolution in Africa’s most populous nation. 

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There are over a hundred movies with a plot centred on the assassination of the American president, but Vantage Point stands out for me. 

The brilliance of the 2008 American political action thriller film is something logical yet profound: it tells an incident from the perspectives of different characters. 

The President of the United States is in Salamanca, Spain, about to address the city in a public square. There’s a jubilant crowd with a few protesters, a cop in plain clothes, his girlfriend with another man, a mother and child, an American tourist with a video camera, and a Secret Service agent newly returned from medical leave. 

As the President gets called onstage to give his speech, shots ring out and the President falls. A few minutes later, there’s a distant explosion and then a bomb goes off in the square. 

Those minutes are retold several times, emphasising different characters' actions. As the movie plot progresses and those minutes are retold, a clearer picture of the actual events unfolds. Case in point: halfway through this movie, if you think you got it all figured out, you haven't got a clue. Ultimately, the movie highlights an important lesson of how we should question the occurrence of an event because not everyone sees things from the same perspective.

An attempt to chronicle the evolution of fintech Nigeria is audacious, so I’ll try to do that by taking into account as many perspectives as I can. To simplify things I’ve had to largely rely on the perspective of banks, startups, consumers, and regulators.

Back to the Origin

It’s difficult to place where the fintech revolution started but I’ll largely attribute it to when financial institutions moved from solely relying on paper records to using computer software. In 1991, John Obaro gave up a plush job as a banker to resell financial software, setting up SystemSpecs. 

👉🏾 RECOMMENDED READ: ‘SystemSpecs: A Transgenerational (Fin)Tech Company’

It’ll take another three years before they’ll start thinking about building local software to solve Nigerian problems, and an additional five before a payment feature initially meant for a product was spun off as a standalone product – Remita. At first, the Nigerian economy was reliant on foreign software.

Over the next five years, the Central Bank of Nigeria and commercial banks will come together to form two important entities: a de facto payment system regulator and a card payment company.

First, in 1993, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) was founded and owned by all licensed banks including the Central Bank of Nigeria. It’ll take another two decades before NIBSS will rise to its full potential by creating NIP (NIBSS Instant Payment), an online real-time Inter-bank payment solution and NAPS (NIBSS Automated Payment Services). These solutions facilitated interbank transactions.

Then four years after the creation of NIBSS, a consortium of Nigerian banks came together to set up the country’s first electronic payment company, Unified Payments, then known as SmartCard Nigeria Plc. Its most important contribution was when it started rolling out a card scheme for Nigerian banks by the year 2000. 

Global payment giant Visa got wind of this and invested in this company; extending its reach into Nigeria. This partnership enabled it to become a principal partner of Visa in 2006, allowing Nigerian banks to issue payment cards to Naira account holders to be used for the first time globally.

Over the past 15 years, Unified Payments has expanded its services to include a switch service, agency banking, and a value-added services platform that offers customers access to services which include the purchase of Airtime. 

A new millennium and new entrants

The dawn of the new millennium saw Nigeria experience increased connectivity due to the privatisation of the telecoms sectors – the total number of telephone connections rose from about 400,000 in 2000 to over 4 million in 2003. 

Brilliant entrepreneurs started looking into what business opportunities this new technology could bring. One of them Mitchell Elegbe was able to marshall a ₦200m ($1.2m) equity deal from some Nigerian banks to finance his new company Interswitch. At that time it didn’t matter that he didn’t have a stake in the company.

“I don’t know if you are aware, but when I started Interswitch I did not have a single share in the business… and I gave up 100% ownership,” Elegbe said in an Interview.

But what Elegbe gave up in terms of ownership, he made up in terms of fast growth. Interswitch, which started as a payment switch for banks, expanded its offering to include payment gateways, merchant acquiring services, mobile money platforms, and e-commerce solutions. Its Verve card scheme is the most successful one by a local company with over 50 million active payment cards. At least 50% of card payments made in Nigeria are made with Verve cards. The company has also made inroads in East Africa –  Kenya and Uganda.

Interswitch’s ubiquitous product lines and fast growth were reflected in the company’s valuation in 2010 when the second infusion of capital came through private equity investment. Helios Investment Partners acquired a 66.67% stake in the company. Interswitch was valued at ₦‎26bn ($163m), according to Elegbe. By 2019, Interswitch’s valuation had ballooned to $1 billion with Visa acquiring a 20% stake.

When you’re backed by Nigerian banks, navigating the murky waters of the financial systems is easier — not necessarily seamless though. 

Founded a year after Interswitch, eTranzact followed a somewhat different route. 38-year-old Valentine Obi saw an opportunity to reduce the amount of cash in circulation. eTranzact focused solely on being a payment switch and gateway with some attempts at rolling a card scheme that didn’t pan out as expected. Still, it pioneered mobile banking, USSD, and cardless withdrawal. It provided interbank switch service before NIBSS became functional. 

👉🏾 RECOMMENDED READ: ‘eTranzact: The most valuable Nigerian publicly listed fintech company’

Being the only pure-play fintech company listed on the Nigerian stock exchange revealed a few things about the intricacies of being a regulated financial service company. Its existence has been threatened more by fraud and sanctions than new entrants in the space.

Mobile Money

Mobile Money – the ability to store, send and receive money through mobile devices – offered a faster path to financial inclusion but the apex regulatory body had always been sceptical about giving powers to non-financial institutions. 

Until 2009, when the CBN introduced the regulatory framework for Mobile Money Services in Nigeria. Later that year, Tayo Oviosu co-founded Paga, a mobile payments company with Jay Alabraba. The company name Paga is a Spanish word that means “to pay”. Paga will go on to popularise mobile money among the unbanked in Nigeria. 

By 2011, the CBN issued its first set of mobile money licenses, companies like Paga, eTranzact, MKudi, FETS Limited were among the first non-bank-led mobile money operators to get a license.

While mobile money became regulated in the early 2010s, mobile money activities had been in existence since as early as 2005. Here’s Niyi Tolulope, eTranzact CEO recounting an experience in 2005.

There was a World Bank-assisted project where some of the [eTranzact] executives went to Kano State to pitch cattle rearers and traders. We were presenting this e-wallet that day and one Alhaji stood up and said “So you can put money in this wallet and I will travel and nobody knows there is money in it? And when I get there I can use it?” All of us said “Yes”. The man brought out ₦‎200,000 cash and said, “Put this in the wallet.” We signed him up immediately. He was probably one of the first people we had back then.

Commercial banks also hopped on the mobile money train. So far 13 out of 24 Commercial Banks are licensed mobile money operators.

2010s: Beyond Payments

With the foundations of payment infrastructure being laid, the next decade ushered in a wave of new fintech companies like VoguePay (2012), Paystack (2015), MoniePoint (known as TeamApt in 2015), Flutterwave (2016), and PalmPay (2018). 

New use cases were found and financial/ banking services were unbundled. This was also aided by improvements in internet penetration, national identity system and supporting regulatory frameworks.

• Piggy Vest (2016) and Cowrywise (2017) – Saving and Investment 

• Trove (2018) and RiseVest (2019) – Wealth management 

• Migo (2013) and Fair Money (2017) – Digital lending

• Wallets Africa (2018)  and Opay (2018) – Mobile wallet

• Helicarrier (2017) and Quidax (2018) - Crypto 

• One Pipe (2018) and Mono (2020) – Embedded finance/ API

• Prospa (2019) and Brass (2020) – Business Banking

A map of the Nigerian Fintech space

Here’s how some of these startups came about. Ambitious individuals saw an opportunity to leverage existing technology to solve different problems. 

Piggvest, formerly known as Piggybank, started with a simple idea of automating standing orders for payments to enable effortless saving of funds. What would have required visiting the bank to fill out a form was replaced with a few clicks. And it worked seamlessly. Before the predatory lenders came online, Migo and Fair Money figured out how to lend money digitally without running out of business. 

As the crypto revolution was picking up steam Hellicarrier (then known as Buycoins) and Quidax saw an opportunity in providing a marketplace/exchange for people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. This was a better option than trading with a total stranger on Telegram or Twitter. 

By democratising access to global and local stocks Trove and RiseVest unlocked a burgeoning retail investment market. They made it easier for people to have wealth management services which had been sort of exclusive to high network individuals. 

Digital wallets were offered as a better alternative to traditional bank accounts which often had down times and complicated rules around how funds were moved. While it wasn’t exactly true, as the digital wallets were often also reliant on the same infrastructure (think: NIBBS) that banks relied on, the optionality of having your funds in different places made it worth trying them out. Wallets Africa and OPay made this popular. 

The list of innovations goes on and on.

The proliferation of fintech startups has raised questions such as whether there are too many fintech startups. Yes, there’s a disproportionate amount of fintech companies in Nigeria but I disagree that there are too many fintech companies. The real concern is that too many fintech companies are playing in the same sub-sector: Payment. Almost half (43%) of the 290 Nigerian fintech companies surveyed in the 2020 Nigeria Fintech Census report are in the payment and remittance sub-sector. 

Different views

Do the new entrants pose a threat to the older players? I don’t think so yet.

Early players, from before 2010, like Interswitch and eTranzact are focused on serving big companies and the government, while the new entrants are focused on SMEs and individuals. It’s understandable considering sunk costs and no foreign capital backing. Fintech analyst Maro Elias explains it:

“Fintech 1.0 players were content with serving largely bigger players which made sense considering payments is largely a scale business with 1.5% being the standard MSC (Merchant Service Charge) price for collections in Nigeria. The math makes sense if you look at it – it’s way more economically sound to serve a customer processing ₦‎200,000 ($482.71) in average transaction amount who pushes 10,000 transactions monthly capped at ₦‎2,000 ($4.83) than to serve a customer who pushes ₦5,000 ($12.07) in average transaction amount at 100,000 transactions monthly. Option one gives you ₦‎20 million ($48,270.7) a month in gross revenues, while option 2 gives you ₦‎3.75 million ($18101.5) a month in gross revenues, a clear 150%+ difference.”

Despite all the talk of fintech coming to displace banks, the banks responded a bit slower because the new entrants weren’t hurting their numbers and at best their customers’ needs were met by the new fintech companies. 

In response to the rise of fintech companies, many major banks created fintech startup incubation programmes and started investing in existing fintech companies, acquiring or launching their fintech startup arm.  An example of this is the EcoBank Challenge which identifies and partners with fintechs that are mature enough to scale. Guarantee Trust Bank, one of Nigeria’s largest banks, created Habari, to rival against the likes of Flutterwave and Paystack. In terms of partnerships, Neobanks like Kuda and Sparkle partner with existing traditional banks to handle some of their core banking functions. 

There was some discomfort around how the fintech space wasn’t regulated enough, this often led to the sudden introduction of regulations. But over the years, numerous partnerships between fintech companies and financial institutions have reduced those clamours. 

For the regulator despite being cautious and struggling to catch up, the rise of fintech startups has been a big win as an increase in financial inclusion is tied to the growth of the economy — Nigeria’s financial inclusion rate grew from 30% in 2010 to 45% by 2020. The fintech players also reduced the reliance on cash, fostering the government cash economy drive. A cashless economy has two implications: less money is spent on printing cash and the government has better visibility of how money is moving in the economy. 

Consumers on the other hand are somewhat spoilt for choice on what services to use. Often sceptical about the reliability of new products but willing to try them out.

Image from a McKinsey report that identified a few opportunities (White space) in the African Fintech space.

What’s next? 

The first generation of fintech companies laid the foundation for infrastructure, and with little foreign investor exposure, they chased profitability. The second generation is building on it by fostering the democratisation of financial services and chasing scale which will in turn lead to profitability. 

To stand out fintech companies will have to do more, less or something entirely different.

Adding more features to a product or launching new products is an obvious differentiation tactic. Wealthtech platforms such as Piggyvest and Cowrywise have done this by evolving from just being savings platforms to including the ability for users to invest their funds into different investment options.

Flutterwave started in 2016 as a payment gateway for Africans and has today built an ecosystem of products such as lifestyle payments solution Barter, the Flutterwave Store and the Flutterwave Capital, which offers small businesses quick loans. MoniePoint has also done something similar, it went from building Point of Sale (POS) terminal applications for some of Nigeria’s biggest payment terminal service providers to building one of Nigeria’s largest business payment and banking platforms, with more than 400,000 businesses. It processes about $100 billion annually. 

Increasing your product offerings gives you more opportunities to provide value to your existing and new customers, thereby creating more reasons for them to use your product.  It’s important to note here that diversification can lead to spreading your resources too thin, thereby affecting the quality of the service you render.

Fintech companies can also opt to do less. In a world where many neobanks typically target the general population, female-focused fintech startup Herconomy went niche and decided to build a neobank for women. Instead of focusing on a broad market, consider a segment. It could be a savings platform for kids that doubles as a financial literacy platform. 

Earlier, I pointed out that almost 50% of Nigerian fintech companies focus on payment and remittance. Another way fintech companies can stand out is by focusing on solving different and challenging problems. 

Grey Finance was founded to solve the difficulties Nigerians faced when exchanging foreign currencies in their domiciliary accounts for Naira due to the country’s multiple exchange rates and scarcity of foreign exchange. Payourse is solving a similar problem by allowing people to change crypto to Naira. In addition, Payourse also built Simpa, a no-code tool that helps people build crypto exchanges within minutes.  

For many operators in digital financial services, executing their business activities involves a lot of API integrations from many sources which could be time and money-consuming. Fortunately, a new wave of API fintech startups like One Pipe and Mono have chosen to do the legwork by aggregating different APIs and simplifying pricing such that integrations can go from 6 months down to 2 weeks.

On-demand salary access is a huge opportunity in Africa because millions of employees are trapped in an eternal debt cycle as they struggle to match their income to their daily expenses, emergencies, and opportunities. Startups like Earnipay are solving this problem alongside other Payroll tech companies.

Image from a McKinsey report that identified a few opportunities in the African Fintech space.

There’s still a lot of innovation that can happen in the web3 space beyond building crypto exchanges. Personal finance is due for more disruption as it can get more personalised. Regulation technology solutions, which deal with managing regulatory processes within the financial industry, can also be a game changer as many fintech companies strive to remain compliant. 

Democratisation is the watchword for the future of technology and fintech won’t be any different. In the next 30 years, just maybe as Angela Strange famously postulated, “Every company will be a fintech company.”

Thanks to Victor for editing.

I was midway through writing a piece on the early days in the Nigerian fintech space when I zoomed in on one of the players and got intrigued.

So now I have a half-written abandoned article lying somewhere – that I'll finish sometime in the future – and this completed one you’re about to read.

There’s a recurring conversation that comes up now and then on how Nigeria has very few transgenerational companies, largely due to poor succession planning, unsustainable business models and the declining economy. 

With very few companies making it past the five-year mark, there are a few outliers in Nigeria — mostly traditional companies. So I dug deep into the story of this 31-year-old company, to see if I had a few answers on what it takes to be a transgenerational tech company in Nigeria.

🥸Let’s dive in.

If you’re familiar with the Nigerian fintech space you’ve probably heard of SystemSpecs or its most popular product Remita — an electronic payment platform that processes trillions of Naira every month.

The software products of this quiet tech behemoth power the Nigerian federal government’s treasury and hundreds of organisations across Africa. 

How has it remained alive for over 3 decades? 

SystemSpecs’s origin story dates back back 50 years, to its CEO, John Obaro’s time as a secondary school student of Baptist College Ilorin. Born in Kogi state, he spent his formative years living between the cities of Kano and Ilorin in northern Nigeria.  

Obaro, like many of his classmates, wasn't interested in maths. The subject was so unpopular that a student once submitted an exam answer sheet that contained only an image of his traced palm – he didn’t attempt any questions. 

But a turning point came when a new maths teacher Raphael Awoseyin, who later went on to be the chief engineering and technology officer at Shell Nigeria, came with a different teaching style that sparked Obaro’s interest in the subject.

Obaro’s newfound love for maths led him to study Mathematics and Computer Science at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria, Kaduna and graduating in 1979. For a computer science graduate back then, most of the good job opportunities were situated in Lagos but Obaro wasn’t keen on moving to Lagos. His next move was to get an MBA.

“I decided that if I was going to stay in the North, I needed to empower myself to be able to take on a non-computer job. So naturally, doing an MBA came up. But then again, the best place to do an MBA at the time was the University of Lagos (Unilag).” Obaro said.

His parents, especially his mum, were apprehensive about him going to Lagos because they had heard that people got robbed and drowned in the sea. After much back and forth, both parties settled on Obaro going for his MBA in Lagos but with the promise that he’ll return to the North to get a job. 

After his MBA, Obaro remained in Lagos working briefly at the Leventis group, before working at two financial institutions for the next decade. He spent two years as a software developer at the United Bank for Africa (UBA) and then rose to the rank of the Head of IT Department at the now-defunct International Merchant Bank (IMB). 

Obaro knew it was time to move on to his next adventure after successfully implementing a major project at IMB – installing banking software across four major cities in Nigeria. He was considering going for further studies but some friends advised him to start a business instead.

One of them, Gbade Alabi, who supplied computer systems to IMB, told the rather uninterested Obaro that while he was a computer manager if he made the move to start a business, he’d be able to control computer managers across different organisations.

By this time Obaro was married with kids, so he had to be prudent. A year before he left his job, Obaro relocated from his expensive rented house in Victoria Island to his property in Agbara, Ogun state. This increased his work commute from 5 minutes to 3 hours but delivered the cost savings he required as he prepared to resign from one of the highest-paying organisations in Nigeria to venture into the land of the unknown.

“So many people thought I had lost my mind,” Obaro said in an Interview during its 30th anniversary. “But I guess I was too ignorant or maybe desperate to do something new, so I still left with limited funds and counted on God’s favour.” 

Image: SystemSpecs Logo at its office

How to Make a Million Naira in 1992

In January 1992, 33-year-old Obaro founded SystemSpecs, to provide financial software for companies. He saw an opportunity to provide software to industries that were manually operated. At that time, the banking and oil industries were the only industries run by software.

Rather than building one from scratch, SystemSpecs began by partnering with a UK-based business management software firm called Systems Union (acquired by Infor in 2007) to be their official sales representative in Nigeria. Over the next 25 years, SystemSpecs will go on to sell SunSystems’ suite of solutions — financial management solutions with purchasing, inventory and sales management capability — to many African companies. 

Even with this partnership in place, Obaro’s initial business plan needed a million Naira ($100,000)1 to cover the company’s running costs for a year. Raising a million Naira proved difficult as initial efforts to get a bank loan fell flat. A few friends had contributed some seed funding but it still wasn’t enough.

Amid the failed efforts to raise funds, a bright idea made it rain.

Obaro had earlier attended a training programme, at Cranfield University in the UK, so he partnered with the organisers to bring the training to Nigeria. For the training, they charged ₦50,000 ($5,000), an unusually high amount, considering that most professional courses in those days were typically priced at ₦3,500 ($350). Fortunately, 19 people were interested, helping them generate ₦950,000 ($95,000).

The team struck gold when those 19 people who found the training valuable requested that Obaro and his team repeat it. They referred another 16 who came in for the second batch. 

All this happened within the first three months of the new company’s existence. With SystemSpecs’ money issues sorted, it now had to prove that its business model worked, by doing what it set out to do: sell computer software.

Dealing with market ignorance

“Selling software in those days, especially in Nigeria was not something that happened instantly,” Obaro said in another interview. “The sales cycle, if you were lucky, was about 3 to 6 months. Otherwise, you would be looking at 1 to 2 years, revisiting the same potential clients to educate them on the benefits of computers.”

Obaro was trying to sell software at a time when people barely knew the difference between Hardware and Software. The depth of ignorance in the market can be best depicted by two absurd events.

In the late 90s, a SystemSpecs staff travelled by road for 6 hours from Lagos to Ilorin to deliver a software project, only for the client to refuse the small box that contained a CD and manual.

“The client said what they paid for was more than that. The staff had to return to Lagos with the box,” Obaro said. It took weeks of conversations to convince the client that what they got was what they ordered.

Image: John Obaro

Another incident took place in the early 2000s when a government agency was being investigated for fraud and the investigating agency found a ₦10 million ($88,495) payment made to SystemSpecs for Software. 

The large amount raised suspicions, so SystemSpecs was contacted to show the investigators where the software product earlier delivered was. Recurring explanations that software isn’t something that can be touched, fell on deaf ears.

“Initially, you’ll think this was a joke but the staff who was in charge of the project was locked up for three days because the investigating agency didn’t see the software,” Obaro said. 

Over time, the Nigerian market became more familiar with the importance of computer software as digital literacy increased. 

It's Time to Build

Three years into reselling foreign software, Obaro and his team decided it was time to build their software to solve problems for Nigerian organisations. 

A glaring opportunity arose in the payroll software space as most foreign payroll systems didn’t reflect the peculiarities of local employment, remuneration and taxation environment. So the team built SpecMan for human resource management, SpecPen for managing pensions and Spec Pay focused on Payments. These three products were later merged to form Human Manager, a comprehensive payroll solution in 2000. Human Manager went on to gain wide adoption processing payroll for more than 300 companies across Africa including KPMG, British Airways, and The Palladium Group. At its peak in the early 2000s, about 80% of the banks in Nigeria were running on it. 

SystemSpecs rose to further limelight in Nigeria through its implementation of a World Bank-backed project to implement an integrated payroll solution. 

On May 6, 2006, the Nigerian government announced a public service reform program that involved creating a reliable and comprehensive database for the public service to address ghost workers syndrome, facilitate human resource planning, and eliminate manual record and payroll fraud.

Out of fifteen companies from across the globe that bidded to carry out the pilot phase of the project that entailed 10 MDAs, SystemSpecs won. In October 2006, SystemSpecs successfully ran the IPPIS pilot, processing salaries for 50,000 employees of the federal government. The project saved Nigeria ₦‎450 million ($3.4 million) according to former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in his book My Presidential Legacy. 

After the successful pilot, there was some pushback from the other companies which bid for the project, citing the existence of foul play. How could a local Nigerian firm upstage well-known international brands? 

Petitions were sent to the World Bank, which responded by carrying out an investigation. Over two weeks, four investigators from Washington combed through a plethora of invoices, bank statements, and receipts at SystemSpecs’ office in Abuja. At the end of the investigation, SystemSpecs was cleared.

The success of the IPPIS pilot came with mixed results. While it validated the capabilities of Human Manager, it also woke competitors who intensified their efforts to ensure that when the full-scale rollout was done in 2011, a different vendor was used.

Human Manager has kept evolving over the years; moving to being a cloud-based service in 2012 and expanding to Ghana in 2018.

Laying the foundation for Remita

Sometime in 2004, the Human Manager team decided to add a feature that would enable users to disburse payments from the application. They initially looked around for an existing payment solution to integrate but they decided to build one in-house when none suitable was found.

In 2005, Remita was born as a solution to help pay salaries in organisations, deliver tax schedules across states, and pensions. The name Remita was a no-brainer considering that the purpose of the feature was to Remit payments. 

Later, it spawned as a stand-alone product that could be used by other companies for payments. Other features such as the ability to pay bills, view different bank accounts from one interface and manage multiple profiles were also added.

By 2007 an opportunity presented itself for Remita to be used by the government for the Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEF), a body tasked with ensuring the uniformity of petroleum products prices across the country by reimbursing oil marketers when they incur extra costs in transporting petroleum products from depots to their sales outlets.

The successful deployment of Remita meant that about 2,000 cheques signed daily to oil tanker drivers were replaced with electronic payments, cutting down the massive fraud going on.

Shortly after, Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua got wind of the success of the PEF and he directed that all FG payments must be made electronically. This sowed the seed for initiating the Treasury single account (TSA), a process and tool that consolidates all government accounts in a single unit for the effective management of its finances, bank and cash position.  

You don't lose anything by letting CBN know what you are doing

With the directive, the Ministry of Finance and CBN had to find the right payment solution to make electronic payments and the TSA work.

Initially, the CBN had planned to delay the implementation of the TSA project by two years to build a financial platform. But during one of the apex financial regulator’s routine visits to SystemSpecs’ office in 2011, they asked about Remita and upon further discussion found out that it could be used to facilitate the payment of government revenue from financial institutions to the TSA. A couple of solutions including the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), which is owned by the CBN and commercial banks were considered as an option but eventually, after competitive bids, Remita was selected.

In January 2012, the federal government started using Remita for payments of salaries and contractors. Three years later, following the directive of President Muhammadu Buhari in August 2015, over 20,000 bank accounts run by federal ministries and 600 government agencies were closed and merged into a single view for the government. 

Image: Senator Dino Melaye

On Tuesday, 10 November 2015, Dino Melaye, a Nigerian senator raised a motion that the operation of the treasury single account (TSA) be investigated for possible corruption. He claimed the constitution only recognised a banking institution to be the collector of government funds, and that Remita was not a bank. This outcry necessitated SystemSpecs to return ₦8.6 billion earned commission fees to the CBN pending the outcome of an investigation. At the end of the investigation, the claim was debunked as Remita was only a payment processing platform through which the payments were made to the banks.

The ordeal revealed that a 1% commission was charged on the ₦2.5 trillion ($12.5 million) processed by SystemSpecs between April and September. This commission was shared between SystemSpecs, participating commercial banks and the Central Bank of Nigeria in the ratio of 50:40:10 respectively. The commission structure was afterwards reviewed from 1% to ₦150 for payments made through Internet Banking, Mobile Wallets, and Agents.

In July 2019, a representative of Nigeria’s Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF) shared that since its inception the government had collected over ₦10 trillion through the TSA from 1,674 MDAs and saved over ₦45 billion monthly in interest on borrowed loans from banks and the CBN.

Looking back at the past decade, Obaro has described the years of handling the TSA project with mixed feelings. The deal might have made Remita more popular but it has also been attention-sapping and has given the public a perception that it is a product owned by the government despite its diverse customer base.

“Sometimes we’re excited we got the [TSA] project, other times we believe it has distracted us from doing other things,” he said. “But through it all, we give glory to God.”

Reseller → Group of companies

SystemSpecs has come a long way from a reseller of foreign software to a holding company with over 300 staff. 

Although it’s a private company and its numbers are not disclosed, Emmanuel Ocholi, an early investor gave a glimpse of how well the company faired during the company’s 30th anniversary when he shared that within two years of investing in the company, he had made a ten-fold return.

At the same 30th anniversary event, the company announced it was morphing into a holding company structure with SystemSpecs being a holding company while Remita, Human Manager, Deelaa and SystemSpecs Technology Services Limited as subsidiaries. Deelaa, a ticketing platform, is the latest addition to the SystemSpecs group of products.

The evolution of SystemSpecs could not have been predicted when Obaro started, but by paying attention to the tenets of business2 — solving real-world problems, fostering a culture of innovation and building a sustainable business model — he has built a transgenerational company.

Thanks to Victor for editing!

What was it like building a fintech company before it became popular? And what do the numbers of a company say about its performance and DNA? That’s a question I’ve had for a while. So I turned to a company that I relied on to pay my school fees at University.

Now playing behind the scenes, eTranzact is one of Nigeria’s most important fintech companies which pioneered mobile banking, USSD, and cardless withdrawal. It provided interbank switch service before NIBSS became functional. A recent resurgence of its stock price has also made it the most valuable Nigerian publicly listed fintech company1 at a valuation of ₦77 billion ($77 million).

🤓Let’s dive in.

Ps: I’ll be in your inbox every 2 weeks, on Friday mornings. 🙏🏾

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The world was so much different back then. It was the dawn of the new millennium. 

With the memory of the 9/11 attack still fresh, it was the year the US invaded Iraq. Swiss tennis player Roger Federer won his first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the final instalment in the movie trilogy, surpassed Finding Nemo and Matrix Reloaded to clinch the top spot as the highest-grossing film that year. Get Rich or Die Tryin' by American rapper 50 Cent dominated the airwaves and ended up being the best-selling album globally with 12 million copies.

The world was still recovering from the early 2000s dot-com stock market crash but a string of recent failed tech companies wasn’t enough to stop American electric car company Tesla from being founded in July and social networking service Myspace in August of that year.

To bring things close to home, new elections were organised for the first time in 15 years in Nigeria by a civilian government. The incumbent government won by a landslide.

The year was 2003. The liberalisation of the Nigerian telecommunications sector introduced telephone connectivity and mobile phones to many Nigerians for the first time. In two years, the number of telephone connections added surpassed the 400,000 lines that served the whole country as of 2000. For context, connected lines grew at an average growth rate of one million lines per annum between 2001 and 2002, compared to an average growth of 10,000 new lines per annum in the four decades between Nigeria’s independence in 1960 and the end of 2000. Internet penetration was also inching forward, moving from 0.1% in 2000 to 0.3% in 2002. By the end of 2003, there were only about 750,000 internet users in a country of 133 million people. 

Paying for transactions with cash was the order of the day. Despite less than 7% of Nigeria’s population having a bank account, this translated to long queues at banks as people visited to sometimes know their account balance.

The rapid growth of telephone connectivity coupled with inefficiencies in the Nigerian financial service sector stirred up fire in the belly of 38-year-old Valentine Obi. “I was very concerned by the high circulation of cash. If you had to buy a house or car, you had to carry a load of cash to make payment,” Obi said in an interview.

So he decided to dip his toes into the uncharted waters of entrepreneurship by starting a new company, eTranzact, to facilitate financial transactions in a convenient, secure and cost-effective manner. Some of the earliest customers of the new venture were telecom giant Econet Wireless (now Airtel) and Lagos State Water Corporation.

Getting a few customers didn’t absolve the new company from facing many huddles as the idea of facilitating payment via mobile phone was a strange concept for Nigerian consumers and regulators.

“In 2003, it was a non-starter. People were still struggling to learn how to use their phones to make calls and send SMS. How do you layer payments on that?” Obi said. 

Sometime in 2003, Obi met with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) concerning his plans. After a lengthy enthusiastic explanation of his plans to make transactions cashless in the country, the director smiled and politely walked him out of his office asking him to share periodic updates on how things were going. It’ll take almost a decade, according to Obi, before the apex monetary regulator and the Nigerian banking sector will take the concept of mobile banking seriously.

Trust issues and wonky infrastructure 

Within the next decade, the bootstrapped company expanded its operations amid many struggles. The company started integrating with many banks and the major telcos in Nigeria. Its first product was mobile-based and reliant on SMS (text messaging) with airtime top-up being a popular use case. However, the success of the SMS-powered service was hampered by the effectiveness of the telcos which often experienced delays in delivering messages. During one of its product demonstrations with the CBN, a transaction was performed using SMS to the officials present but disappointingly no one got the SMS notification until the next day. 

“If you are making a payment to the average person out there, he wants to take that money or give you that money while he is looking you in the eye so there will be no stories," an executive of the company said. “For instance, if I did a transfer and told you I have done it, you can tell me you did not receive it or I tell you it’s done even though I didn’t do it.” 

Inefficiencies like this coupled with Nigerians' trust issues with digital payments only made it more difficult for mobile payment to gain mass adoption. 

Over time, seeing the rise in mobile phone and internet penetration, the engineering team at eTranzact suggested turning to mobile phone applications which rely on internet data as a better alternative. 

This proved to be a worthwhile endeavour as the company did the leg work of integrating into most banks in the country with a switching service for facilitating payments. Here’s how a switching service works: when you initiate a payment, the payment switch coordinates the movement of funds from your bank account to the recipient's account. It ensures that the right information is transmitted securely, authorises the transaction, and verifies that the funds are available. 

Back then there wasn’t a central inter-bank settlement service so eTranzact had to step in. Life was made easier in 2005 when the Nigerian banking sector experienced a shake-up which saw the number of banks pruned down from 89 to 25 through mergers and acquisitions. This enabled eTranzact’s services to be used for funds transfer, point of sale terminals, automated teller machines, and revenue collection for state governments and other organisations.

The rise in electronic payments led to fraudsters taking advantage of this new mode of payment. To protect users from fraud, the company launched Etranzact strong Authentication (ESA) to protect customers' pins, automated teller machine cards and banks' online transactions. ESA was simply a second-factor authentication service separate from card PIN that provided a one-time passcode for transactions.

Another product introduced to mitigate against fraud was the ATM CardlexCash solution, which the company patented. Here’s how it worked as explained by Obi in 2010: 

“I key in the amount I want to send to the recipient on my mobile phone and an access code which he will use to withdraw the fund. Then, I inform the recipient of the access code via other means. The recipient will cash out the exact funds at the ATM using the access code.

This innovation proposes a secure, faster and more convenient process of sending money and cash withdrawals at the ATM. With this solution, the recipient does not need to have a bank account to receive funds and does not need to go to a bank branch to collect funds, which can only be done during working hours. It also eliminates the need to use an ATM card to withdraw money.”

This solution introduced cardless withdrawals in Nigeria. 

Going public 

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, eTranzact took its next big step by going public. The company was listed on the Nigerian stock exchange at ₦4.80, selling about 720,000 shares out of the 4.2 billion shares listed. The market’s positive response caused the share price to surge, closing at ₦5.04 and bringing its market cap to ₦21.16 billion ($14.39 million)2 on the first day. 

At the listing ceremony, Obi preached the same message he did in 2003.  

“Nigeria presently has over 60 million mobile telephone users and less than 20 million of the populace with bank accounts…”, he said. “The market potential is huge and we hope to reduce the risk involved when people conduct transactions with cash. With the current trend and manner in which fraudsters are perpetrating their acts, it has become a necessity to discourage cash transactions." 

The company shared that it was in talks with the Nigerian stock exchange to enable Nigerians to buy and sell shares digitally, through an electronic offering service. It’s not clear whether this idea moved beyond the talking and testing stage. 

Getting listed offered eTranzact the lifeline it needed to stay alive as the company struggled to be profitable in the following two years, making combined losses of over ₦300 million ($2 million)  – ₦174.69 million ($1.16m) in 2009 and  ₦134.69 million ($874,600) 2010.

Fortunes turned around in the third year (2011) when the company made a profit of ₦81.29 million ($53,480). This was largely driven by a 145% increase in revenue from ₦917 million ($6.03 million) in 2010 to ₦2.24 billion ($14.7 million). As most banks caught on to the importance of mobile apps, eTranzact was their go-to partner for the creation and maintenance of their apps.

Coincidentally, 2011 was also the year investment banker and chartered accountant Niyi Toluwalope joined the company as its group CFO. The road to profitability was paved by shutting down products that weren’t selling and doubling down on the ones which were.

“Joining E-Tranzact in the early stages, we struggled a bit with profitability. This was largely because we were doing so many products, being a very innovative business. I felt that we were not optimising our ability to sell them properly and dominate the market,” Toluwalope said in an interview. “One of the things we did quickly was to streamline our products and look at what was profitable and what wasn’t. We focused on that and things started to change. Our remittance business, mobile banking business, corporate banking business everything transformed into profitability over the last couple of years.”

The CBN’s aggressive pursuit of a cashless economy propelled it to grant eTranzact its final approval to operate a mobile money business. Pocket Moni, the company’s mobile money app, was launched to reach one million users within the next year.

Around 2012, the company also laid the foundation for the popular Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) service used in Nigeria. Taking inspiration from Steve Jobs who created the iPod as a minimalistic and improved version of the Walkman, the team asked themselves why they couldn’t make payments happen with a few clicks on the phone.

Once eTranzact became profitable there was no turning back, its revenue, largely driven by transaction pin sales/virtual airtime, grew by leaps and bounds every year for the next decade. For ease of understanding, eTransact makes money by taking a commission from facilitating transactions.

Back then it was also a regular practice for merchants who wanted to use its payment solution to be charged a ₦150,000 ($77) implementation fee. Newer fintech startups like Paystack and Flutterwave differentiated themselves by offering free merchant onboarding and easy integration. 

Share Quest

Regulatory Sanctions and a Massive Fraud Case

2016 was the first time eTranzact revealed its income from remittance; it made ₦1.12 billion ($5.71M) the previous year and ₦1.23 billion ($3.90M) in 2016. A 20% increase in revenue from ₦8.7 billion ($44.38M) to ₦10.4 billion ($33.01M), courtesy of a 190% increase in revenue from software development and maintenance, wasn’t enough to stop the company from experiencing a decline in profit. 

Why? A ₦450 million ($1.42M) fine by the CBN for “infractions on International money transfer and anti-money laundering guidelines in 2014 and 2015.” This first-time sanction for the 13-year-old fintech giant, one largely suspected to be linked with its remittance business, came as a huge blow that made it cautious. The fall in profitability continued the next year, primarily due a to drastic drop in remittance income from ₦1.23 billion ($3.90M) in 2016 to ₦91.8 million ($25,714) in 2017. 

2018 was meant to be the year that eTranzact returned to its regular trend of increasing profitability based on its 37% increase in revenue, which was largely driven by a 72% increase in mobile transactions. Yet the company experienced a loss of ₦3.4 billion ($9.34M) – its biggest loss in its history and its first loss since 2010 – against a ₦208 million ($57,142) profit in 2017. 

What happened? A ₦11.49 billion ($31.5M) fraud case reported by First Bank in March 2018, involving Micro Systems Limited, a merchant on-boarded to the eTranzact Fundgate platform. 

The fraud scheme was orchestrated by Smart Micro Systems Limited (SMSL). This merchant onboarded microfinance banks on eTranzact's Fundgate platform, a payment gateway used by financial institutions to process interbank transactions. SMSL allegedly exploited vulnerabilities in the Fundgate platform to initiate unauthorized transfers of funds from various banks. SMSL MD, Michael Obasuyi Osasogie pleaded guilty to defrauding the First Bank and eTranzact.

About half of the funds stolen were recovered but ultimately, eTranzact and First Bank were instructed by CBN to share the remaining liability of ₦5.75 ($15.79M) equally, meaning eTranzact had to cough up about ₦2.8 billion ($7.69M) to repay the money stolen.

In response to the fraud and the CBN's findings that eTranzact hadn’t implemented adequate security measures to prevent fraudulent activities, eTranzact's board of directors took several measures to address the situation. Several senior executives, including founder and CEO Obi, resigned. The company implemented stricter security measures to enhance its defences against future fraud attempts. Since this incident, there’s been no fraud incident at eTranzact.

Change of Guard and returning to profitability

Group CFO Niyi Toluwalope took over as CEO and began the turnaround process of the fintech company which was written off by many. In 2019, the company returned to being profitable with a profit of ₦147 million ($397,300). 

2020 was a year for the books, for many companies across the globe and eTranzact wasn’t exempted. Due to the pandemic, its major revenue stream mobile sales (proceeds from virtual airtime and airpin sales) dropped for the first time ever and every other revenue stream followed suit. The company made a loss of ₦1.8 billion ($3.87M) primarily due to a ₦1.048 ($2.25M) billion provision related to assets recovered from the 2018 fraud case. 

In 2021, the company was back to experiencing revenue growth, despite mobile sales continuing to fall. It also returned to being profitable with a massive ₦455.75 million ($799,500).

Earlier in the year eTranzact clinched major business contracts with the government. It was appointed to deploy its automated and electronic collection platform for the Federal Government’s Treasury Single Account (TSA) and payment gateway for the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA). Under the TSA scheme, eTranzact processes all revenues and other monies payable to Federal Government public sector entities including Ministries, Departments, Agencies, Parastatals and Institutions.

Curiously, there was no remittance income recognised compared to ₦348 million ($748,387) generated in 2020. Also, for the first time, the company broke down its revenue according to the licences it had. Switching licences was recognised as its biggest revenue driver. 

Nigeria’s largest retail bank, Access Bank, which had been a dormant shareholder for over a decade since it acquired eTranzact shares via its purchase of Intercontinental Bank, increased its shareholding to 23.80%, becoming the second largest shareholder. The bank further increased its shareholding to 37.54% in 2022 becoming the largest shareholder. 

2022 was the eTranzact’s best year yet, it processed over ₦50 trillion ($6.25 billion) and generated a profit of ₦1.17 billion ($1.46M) – almost tripling its 2021 profit. It also raised ₦5.7 billion through a right issue of shares. This year, 2023, already looks better than last as the company has generated 77% of 2022’s total revenue by mid-year.

Different sides of the same coin

There are different ways to look at this 20-year-old fintech giant. It's impressive that it pioneered mobile payments in Nigeria and is still thriving. eTranzact alongside the likes of Interswitch, Unified Payments and others spent their first decade building out the supporting infrastructure for Nigerian financial services and lobbying to get regulation to come along.

It had a first-mover advantage, which definitely provided advantages in many cases. But as American psychologist Adam Grant is credited with saying, “While it’s true that the early bird gets the worm, the early worm also gets caught.” For eTranzact, was it a case of the early bird or worm? I’ll say that surviving 20 years makes it the early bird.

Battling to stay alive, being regulated as a publicly listed company and facing sanctions have shaped the DNA of the eTranzact. It has had to prioritise being financially responsible (as evident in its low debt profile) and cautious with its business dealings — staying far away from the crypto wave. 

On the other side, eTranzact also represents the old guard and with the current wave of highly valued startups, its ₦77 billion ($77 million) market cap might not come off as being impressive – even though it’s debatable what’s the true valuation of the current wave of fintech startups. Also, the ₦77 billion looks small when converted to USD largely due to the appalling devaluation of the Naira over the years – in 2009, $1/₦147; today $1/₦1,000.

Some finance industry insiders I interviewed for this article questioned the relevance of eTranzact’s business offerings, raising questions such as “Who will the banks switch to when there are issues?” (Interswitch appears to be more popular) and “Do the new fintech startups do business with eTranzact?” eTranzact’s primary clients are banks and the government for now, not fintech startups.

eTranzact’s moat comprises of its licences (switching especially), deep integration with the banks and multiple product lines – too many initially – that help diversify its revenue streams. Its product lines include:

• Payoutlet:  a solution designed to allow Merchants to collect payments from customers through the branches of eTranzact member bank. Individuals can also use it to pay bills, send money and top-up mobile phones.

• SwitchIt: A payment switch. 

• WebConnect: A payment gateway.

• CorporatePay: A platform for bulk enterprise payments.

• Bankit: Launched in 2016, it's a secured omnichannel direct-to-bank payment gateway enabling consumers to complete payments from their bank account.  

With more players getting these licences and building out their interbank integration systems3, it’s only a matter of time before its clients become competitors. Notably, in terms of debit card schemes eTranzact isn’t a principal partner to Visa or Mastercard like Interswitch and Unified Payments. The highly prized position allows them to offer a range of payment products and services, including credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid cards — cards that are widely accepted both nationally and internationally. 

It’s common knowledge that in Nigeria one change in government regulation can wipe out a revenue stream or even an entire business. Fortunately, eTranzact has been able to navigate through that despite its not-so-pronounced international expansion. From the get-go eTranzact set out to serve more countries beyond Nigeria but in terms of international operations, Ghana is the only visible foreign market that the company has a presence in. 

It was a smart move to capture the market early but it’s plausible to imagine that eTranzact faced similar or worse huddles in those markets and retreated. Interswitch appears to have performed better in that regard. Is it time to reconsider an international play?

eTranzact has maintained its focus on facilitating digital payments and still has a long way to go. Coming from a different era and making it this far is laudable. But what’s next? A social commerce product in beta phase and the relaunch of Pocketmoni app in view, make me wonder if these are hints of its next evolution. 

The world is so much different now but there are still queues at the bank and cash is still king despite many players in the fintech space. There’s still work to be done and as one company insider repeatedly told me as I questioned eTranzact’s position in the market, “One player cannot serve the entire market.”

This article was spurred by a recurring question I’ve had for a long time: what does it take to start and run a successful football club in Africa’s most populous country?

Brace up for a delightful read ahead.

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On any given Wednesday afternoon, 22-year-old Destiny Mercy can be found at work in Suru Alaba, a commercial district in Lagos near Alaba International Market, the largest electronics market in Nigeria. But on this particular Wednesday by 12:15 PM she closed for the day under the pretense of not feeling well and dashed off to the Mobolaji Johnson Arena (formerly Onikan stadium) which was 30 minutes away. 

As her Uber ride got to the stadium she, expecting to be the first fan at the stadium, found out that she wasn’t the only one who showed up that early for a 2 PM match. About a hundred people were already at the stadium that afternoon, with some in their corporate attire.  

Mercy was among the hundreds of fans who showed up at Nigeria’s oldest stadium on June 14, 2023, to watch the final game of the season.  Most of the fans came to cheer the home team Sporting Lagos, which was playing for the opportunity to qualify for the playoffs in order to be promoted to Nigeria’s premier football league. Sporting Lagos was founded in February 2022 by one of Nigeria’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, Shola Akinlade. The Y Combinator-backed startup, Paystack, which he co-founded in 2015 was acquired in 2020 by American fintech giant Stripe for over $200 million. 

To the delight of the home fans Sporting Lagos won the match against Smart City FC by a wide margin (4 - 0) but there appeared to be confusion in the stadium at the sound of the final whistle. The players and fans weren’t sure whether to celebrate yet. 

“It felt like I had incomplete joy. I couldn’t return to my office immediately. I had to stay around the stadium, checking social media and asking around to know whether Sporting Lagos qualified,” says Mercy.

Sporting Lagos was tied on points at the top of the table but separated on goal difference with another team, Ijebu United, which was also still playing its final game at a different stadium. Only the team at the top of the table would proceed to the playoffs.  If Ijebu United managed to score more goals they could edge out Sporting Lagos on goal difference. The fans and the players at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena wondered why the other match which was ongoing past the 100th minute mark hadn't ended. Complaints about the irregularities that beleaguered the Nigerian football league flew around. 

The tension increased when the Ijebu United match was paused, an unusual occurrence in modern football matches, causing many emotionally drained fans to start heading home. About thirty minutes after the end of the Sporting Lagos match, word spread in the stadium that the Ijebu United match had finally ended 3 - 1 in favour of Ijebu United and Sporting Lagos had qualified for the playoffs. The few remaining fans in and around the Mobolaji Johnson Arena celebrated.

Akinlade who was still at the stadium was dressed casually in a black T-shirt and trousers with sneakers. His sweaty and beaming face said it all as congratulatory messages were exchanged. 

Three weeks later, Sporting Lagos secured its promotion during the playoffs. This was a significant feat for a year-old club which struggled with relegation in its first season. The promotion was a form of validation that 38-year-old Akinlade who had embarked on a new adventure – outside of tech — to solve football’s problems in Nigeria was on the right path. 

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A cause worth pursuing

“Being a software engineer is about problem-solving. In football, there are multiple problems we’re trying to solve here,” Akinlade said before the start of the club’s first season in 2022. “It sounds simple but there are big questions such as ‘How do we start a football club from scratch, what does long-term talent development mean and what does it take for Nigeria to win the World Cup?’” 

Akinlade grew up playing football just like many Nigerian kids, but a small stature and other interests meant that as he grew older playing football took a back seat. The idea to start a football club started brewing after Akinlade lost his dad in 2021. This was his way of giving back to the community and leaving a legacy. To decide on whether it was a cause worth pursuing, he started asking around.

“For a quiet and reserved person, talking to people is one of the ways Shola makes decisions,” says Ekene Agu, a member of Sporting Lagos governing council. Akinlade spoke to many people including other club owners in Nigeria such as Lekki United founder Akin Alabi and Remo Stars founder Kunle Soname, who’s also the first Nigerian to acquire a European club. Some people tried to dissuade him but ultimately the conversations bolstered his resolve to take the leap of faith.

Seven years ago, he had done the same thing when founding Paystack. Then, the idea for the payment processing company came up while Akinlade, a consultant to banks, was showing friends that they could directly charge their cards without going through the hurdle of existing financial intermediaries. Akinlade showed it to many friends until one, Osita Nwoye, told him that his idea was actually what a US company, Stripe, did. All he had to do was build the Stripe of Africa – which he did.

This time he was starting a football club in a country where football is seen as a hobby and investing in a club as a tech founder means turning a blind eye to starting or investing in more tech startups as an investor. 

But it’s not difficult to see why Akinlade ventured into the football business beyond passion. It’s the most popular sport in the world, with over 300,000 clubs, 240 million players and five billion fans across every continent. Globally football generates an annual revenue of $47 billion, accounting for 28 percent of the turnover generated by sports worldwide. 

“There’s some sentimental aspect to him [Akinlade] doing this but generally it's a good investment. It’s a form of diversification of investment,” Jing Jing Liu, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MacEwan University says. “Think of Actor Ryan Reynolds buying Wrexham FC or Snoop Dogg’s recent announcement to buy a Canadian hockey team.”

The club hasn’t downplayed its intention to make money, because in order to build a transgenerational football club, it has to be a commercially viable one. This a rarity in Nigeria where many football clubs aren’t run as a business but instead as philanthropy or for political virtue signalling. Out of the 20 clubs in the Nigerian Premier League, only three are privately owned with the remaining owned by state governments.

“The Nigerian league is one of the only leagues in the world where the funding allocation to teams depends on how interested the governor of the state is in football,” says Wiebe Boer, the author of a book on the history of soccer in Nigeria and President of Calvin University. “And that’s a very bad way to run a football club because football coaches and players aren’t civil servants or political tools.” 

Obsessing over user experience, embracing scrappiness

Early on, Akinlade made it clear that his priority was leading Paystack and not running a football club, so he rallied around an initial group of close friends and hired a pair of experienced hands to run the technical aspect of running a club. 

Together, they approached running a football club with a startup mindset: obsessing over user experience, embracing scrappiness and flexibility while defying conventional wisdom.

“Before the club’s first game, about seven of us spent hours every day for two weeks thinking about what type of environment we need to create for people to want to watch live sports,” Agu says. “In lean startup methodology, they say you should build for your best first customer. For us that’s our community, we know people love quality and excellence.” 

The team initially consulted some sports experts in Nigeria on how to build a vibrant fanbase but the advice they got wasn’t what they expected. The experts advised them to pay agencies to get people from the streets to fill the stadium. Afterwards, they could get sponsors on board by showing them the club had a large fanbase. When the team rejected the idea, the experts scoffed at their naivety. 

Left to their naivety and desire to make this work, the team turned to the results from initial user research for inspiration. It revealed that the club needed to first tackle two major issues: safety and stadium ambience. Many people they spoke to complained about not feeling safe at the stadium, so they invested in security. For every home game, the club hires on average 30 bouncers in the stadium, 15 police officers with trucks and a command centre with security consultants. 

To improve the stadium ambience, they paid to clean the stadium and adorned the entrance of the stadium with carpets and colourful Sporting Lagos banners – an arduous task considering the deplorable state of the stadium. The first time they cleaned the Teslim Balogun Stadium, 50 people spent two days on the job, which included digging up the gutters. 

For a smooth matchday experience, fans were directed to buy tickets online, a superficially simple introduction but a radical one, considering that match tickets are popularly only sold over the counter in exchange for cash in Nigeria. Working closely with Tix, a ticketing platform, also meant that the club could make custom requests to suit their peculiar use cases. Fans who couldn’t make it to the stadium have the option of watching live games on YouTube.

“We took an agile approach to starting the club. We weren’t wasting time doing long unnecessary paperwork and research,” says Femi Siji-Keneth, one of the seven friends who helped bring Sporting Lagos to life. “For us, the mindset was let’s just move; if we fail then at least we know we tried.” 

This approach was evident in how the club was announced to the public. The announcement of the new club was done via a tweet by Akinlade in February 2022, as opposed to a more elaborate unveiling ceremony. Sporting Lagos’ first website was a notion page created by Akinlade. 

By the end of the first season, the new club was a breath of fresh air to the Nigerian football league but the team’s lacklustre performance was a reminder that the new cool kid on the block also needed to win matches to stay alive. 

Passing up on the opportunity to do the regular thing

If the first season produced the minimum viable product version of the club, the second season which started in February 2023, introduced a minimum marketable product. It was time to double down on being more successful on the field, building a massive fanbase and making more money.

To improve success on the field, the club changed coaches, brought in new players and adopted tech tools to improve its player performance.

“What’s different about Sporting Lagos is that everyone supports you to win,” Paul Offor, Sporting Lagos Coach says. “This is the first time in my career that I’m given a free hand to make decisions concerning players and other tactics.” 

Because it’s difficult to improve players' gameplay if vital statistics can’t be measured, an automatic tracking camera that uses AI to follow ball movements was deployed to record all games. Match video footage is fed into Manaja, a platform that uses AI to generate post-game match statistics. The players also occasionally wear a tracking device to measure performance statistics during training and matches. 

A cynical eye might wonder whether the use of these tech products changed anything. It did. Offor shared that using tools like Manaja has “helped the players see how they’re performing and aspire to improve on making successful passes, interceptions or contributing to scoring a goal.”

In a league where many clubs barely pay attention to social media, it has played a big role in building Sporting Lagos’ vibrant fanbase of over 50,000 followers across all social media platforms. The club uses appealing designs and memes to connect with its youthful fanbase. A 400% Twitter followership growth in June and 3,000 new followers gained from a viral meme tweet, according to Agu, is proof that the social media strategy is working. 

Globally, the major revenue streams of football clubs are commercial revenue, match day revenue, broadcasting rights fees, player transfer fees and merchandising. Being commercially viable requires tapping into all these streams.

From the onset, the club struck partnership deals with a number of local tech startups such as Piggyvest, Chowdeck, Cassava and Klasha. Revenue from match ticket prices which vary from ₦‎1,000 ($1.2) to ₦‎10,000 ($10.2) is still low due to poor attendance. The club has created a fan activation team to increase attendance numbers, shared cash prizes during half-time games and provided buses to transport students from higher institutions to the stadium.

“We came up with the idea of the Happy Corner [fan club], free refreshments for people who pay to attend games and after-game parties when we win matches,” says Ohis Oyakhire, a member of the fans activation team. “All these are to engage with the fans better.” 

One fan shared that before Sporting Lagos games the only activities she looked forward to doing on the weekends were going to the club and church. 

Revenue from broadcasting rights is currently non-existent due to a decade-long dispute among the league authorities on how best to go about this. Sporting Lagos and other clubs have taken matters into their own hands by simply streaming their matches on YouTube.

In March 2023, the club launched its own Academy to groom local talents and Akinlade doubled down on his new adventure by acquiring a majority stake in 76-year-old Danish club Aarhus Fremad, joining a handful of African entrepreneurs who have a foothold in the ownership stakes of European football. With these in place, there’s a clearer path for top talents within Akinlade’s football empire: they can easily move between Nigeria and Europe.  

Traditionally, many Nigerian clubs don’t sell jerseys, bucket hats or T-shirts but Sporting Lagos is banking on unlocking this revenue stream. The club already ships its jerseys to fans in countries such as London, the US, and Ghana. 

Unlocking these different revenue streams in an uncharted territory sounds like a stretch but the club is banking on its access to data that many other clubs overlook.

“Leveraging tech means I have data,” Agu says. “When I go talk to potential sponsors I can tell them how many followers we have, how many people tune into my stream, how many people bought my jersey and visited my website.”

It’s still early to decide on whether all these efforts will pan out in making Sporting Lagos commercially viable but Siji-Kenneth has seen enough to trust in the power of disruption. 

“We had the opportunity to do the regular thing many other clubs are doing. But Shola was dogged that we had to do it differently,” Siji-Kenneth says. “This experience has made me wonder that maybe starting and running a successful football club is not as difficult as we think. Maybe all it takes is the dedication to not cutting corners and giving people an experience that we want to have.”

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The start of a new season

At 6 PM on July 27 at the Sporting Lagos camp in Surulere, a residential area in Lagos, the mood is relaxed and jovial. At the coaches’ lounge Coach Paul Offor is attending an online training session for his UEFA coaching licence on his iPad. Many players who’ve arrived at the camp, which is a couple of apartments in the same compound, are in their hostel-like rooms gisting or on their phones. The club’s first training session for the 2023/2024 Nigeria professional football league season took place that morning. 

Assistant coach, Micah Bello who’s at the players' lounge welcomes 20-year-old winger Jonathan Alukwu, who strolls in with his box and a different hair colour. Last season his pink-dyed hair earned him the nickname Barbie. 

Bello talks about the uncertainties around the format of the Nigerian Premier Football League and when the new season will start. There were debates over choosing between an abridged league system to save costs due to the economic condition of the country and a regular 38-match league system that’s used in top European leagues. The abridged system is economically appealing as it involves fewer matches, less travelling and expenses but it also means fewer match bonuses and travel allowances. Later that month, the Nigerian Football Federation settled on a regular 38-match league system. 

The new season which was supposed to start on August 28, was postponed by a month. Thousands of Sporting Lagos fans like Manolo Etuk, a content strategist, are eagerly waiting for the start of the new season. Sporting Lagos’s first match in the new league is slated for Monday, October 2.

When Etuk looks back at the club’s journey, one of his fondest memories is the club’s first game in March 2022. Amid the excitement in the stadium, while the match went on, there were three old men sitting behind him who kept on making negative comments about the chances of the new club surviving six months in the league.

“I was trying to explain to them that what we’re bringing is new and different,” says Etuk. “They didn’t believe it then but I hope they do now.”

For now, you can expect one email a month: one longer-form article. Along the way, I’ll experiment with other formats, so expect more.

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