EVERY REASON YOU THINK A BUSINESS CAN’T WORK IN NIGERIA IS AN OPPORTUNITY.
There is something I have noticed about conversations around Nigeria, particularly whenever somebody puts forward an idea that sounds even remotely ambitious. Someone will talk about building a new industry, investing in manufacturing, developing tourism, improving agriculture, creating a technology company or putting more capital into a business that already works, and almost immediately the conversation moves away from the opportunity and towards everything that is wrong with the country. The roads are bad, electricity is unreliable, security is a problem, infrastructure is poor, the government has not fixed anything, and therefore the idea cannot work. I have seen this pattern so often that it has almost become a Nigerian reflex, where the existence of a problem is treated as evidence that nothing around that problem can become a viable business. The frustrating thing is that most of the problems being mentioned are real. Nigeria has serious infrastructure deficits, power remains unreliable, roads can make ordinary commerce unnecessarily difficult, insecurity is a genuine concern in parts of the country, and anyone who has actually tried to build a business here knows how much government, regulation and infrastructure can add to the cost and uncertainty of doing business. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. What interests me is what happens when these problems become the entire way we look at the country, because once that happens, we stop seeing the economic activity taking place around them and begin to treat the existence of the problem as proof that the opportunity cannot exist.
Just yesterday, I put out a reel on Instagram about Nigeria being a vehicle mechanics market, and the response was revealing because the conversation quickly became much bigger than mechanics. Nigeria has roughly 12 million vehicles, about 75 percent of the estimated vehicles in West Africa, and a large proportion of the cars on our roads are more than ten years old. When you think about what that means, you are looking at millions of vehicles requiring servicing, repairs, tyres, diagnostics, suspension work, air-conditioning, bodywork and paint throughout their lives. We used a properly run premium workshop as an illustration and showed that if such a business attended to 20 cars a day at an average labour charge of ₦80,000, the labour alone could amount to almost ₦500 million in annual revenue before a single part is sold. The point was not that every mechanic in Nigeria is making ₦500 million a year; it was to make people look at the underlying market differently.
What happened afterwards was perhaps more interesting than the numbers. A number of people who actually run these businesses reached out, including operators who have been in the industry for more than ten years, with trained teams, proper books, established clientele and businesses that have already survived the difficult part of proving that people will pay for what they do. Some are highly educated, ambitious and sophisticated operators who happen to work in an industry we have become accustomed to seeing as informal, and some are now looking for serious capital to expand. That changed the conversation because it is no longer about whether Nigerians need mechanics; it becomes a question of what happens when an existing business with customers, operating history and proven demand gets the land, equipment, systems, working capital and structure to become a much larger company.
This is where I think investors have to learn to look at Nigeria in a different way. Investors do not necessarily need a perfect country; they need businesses that can solve problems in the country that exists. Sometimes the imperfections we use to dismiss Nigeria are precisely what reveal where the businesses are. Unreliable electricity creates markets for alternative power and everything that supports it. Difficult logistics creates opportunities for better movement and distribution. Inefficient systems create room for companies that make those systems easier to navigate. Security challenges create demand for security, tracking, insurance and risk management. None of this means those problems should continue, and it certainly does not mean we should stop demanding better roads, reliable electricity, functioning institutions and safer communities. It means an investor has to be able to look at the same problem and ask not only how it should be fixed, but also what businesses are already being created because the problem exists.
Of course, not every problem creates a good business, and a difficult environment does not make every entrepreneur competent. But the presence of friction should not automatically become an argument against investment. If every system worked perfectly, there would be fewer gaps for entrepreneurs to fill and fewer inefficiencies to remove. The question is whether there is an operator who has figured out how to navigate the difficulty profitably, built a real market around the solution and can use additional capital to do more.
This is why I find the constant doom around Nigerian business so interesting. You can spend an entire conversation explaining the country’s infrastructure problems and still fail to explain what Nigerians are actually doing about them. You can point to the roads and miss the logistics company that has spent years figuring out how to move goods through them; you can talk about electricity and miss the businesses making money because companies and households still need power; you can talk about insecurity and miss the businesses being built around protection, tracking, insurance and risk. You can point out everything the government has failed to provide and still overlook the private businesses that have stepped into those gaps because people continue to need the services.
I think there is also something psychological happening here. At some point, the description of the problem becomes so familiar that it starts functioning as a conclusion. You no longer investigate whether a business works because you have already decided that the environment cannot support it, and once you begin thinking that way, almost every opportunity can be dismissed before you look at the people, the customers, the economics or the operating model behind it. Yet millions of people are already doing business in this country every day, employing people, serving customers, building assets and making money. They are not waiting for a perfect Nigeria before they start; they are building inside the Nigeria that exists.
The entrepreneur does not experience Nigeria as a thesis. The entrepreneur experiences it as a Monday afternoon. There is a customer waiting for a car, a member of staff who needs to be paid, a supplier calling, a machine that needs repairing, a delivery that has to leave and another problem that has appeared before the previous one has been completely solved. The business owner has to figure out what to do because the business has to continue, and over time some of these people become exceptionally good at navigating the environment in which they operate. They learn where to buy, who to trust, how to price, how to manage their staff, how to deal with unreliable infrastructure and how to keep customers coming back. That accumulated knowledge is itself an asset, even though we rarely value it properly when we look at small and medium-sized Nigerian businesses.
So the question I would rather ask is not whether Nigeria has enough infrastructure for a business to work, but who is already making that business work despite the infrastructure that exists. Who has customers? Who has survived? Who has built a team? Who has proper records? Who understands the economics? Who has figured out a model that works and is now constrained by capital, land, equipment or systems? Those questions tell you much more about an investment opportunity than a general statement about whether Nigeria is a difficult place to do business.
The mechanic is a good example because the business is so familiar that we hardly see it anymore. We see a workshop, a car on a jack, somebody underneath an engine and a collection of tools, but underneath that is a recurring service market created by millions of vehicles that have to be maintained. There are already operators who have spent years learning the market, building customer relationships, training technicians and understanding the economics of keeping vehicles on the road. What many of them have not had is the combination of capital, land, structure and systems that can turn a successful workshop into a much larger company. The opportunity is not necessarily to find somebody with a spanner and give him money to open a bigger workshop; it is to identify the people who have already built something that works and give them the opportunity to build it properly and at scale.
That is what I mean when I talk about industrializing everyday business. Industrialization does not always have to begin with a factory, a huge production line or a completely new industry. Sometimes it begins by taking an economic activity that has been happening informally for years and giving it the land, equipment, systems, governance and capital to operate at a completely different scale. The mechanic does not necessarily need to become something else; the business around the mechanic needs to become bigger, more organized and more investable.
And perhaps this is where we need to become more careful about the stories we tell ourselves about Nigeria. You can be completely right about the roads, power, infrastructure, security and failures of government, and still be completely wrong about the economic possibilities sitting in front of you. Nigeria can have serious problems that need to be fixed while businesses are simultaneously creating enormous value because people need solutions to those problems. The two realities do not cancel each other out.
Perhaps that is the shift investors need to make. Instead of looking at Nigeria and asking when the country will finally become good enough for investment, perhaps we should look at the businesses already operating here and ask which of them have demonstrated that they can survive, adapt and produce value in the environment we actually have. That does not mean ignoring risk or throwing money at every business simply because there is a large market. It means understanding that the country’s imperfections are part of the operating environment, and that the businesses worth backing may be the ones that have learned how to navigate those imperfections better than everyone else.
So when someone tells you that an idea cannot work in Nigeria because the infrastructure is not good enough, the question should not simply be whether they are right about the infrastructure. They probably are. The more interesting question is whether they have allowed the infrastructure problem to become so dominant in their thinking that they have stopped looking for the people and businesses already solving it. Because the opportunity is often sitting there, not in the absence of the problem, but in the market that the problem has created.
Maybe the question is whether the business has figured out how to solve the problem that the missing infrastructure creates, whether there is a real market paying for that solution, and whether the people running it have demonstrated that they know how to build within the Nigeria that actually exists. Because if you only look at what is broken, you may spend your entire life waiting for Nigeria to become investable while someone else is already building the company you could have invested in.