Creating Markets Where There Should Be None
PPPs in Nigeria need to be upgraded
Privatisation has already shown its limits in Nigeria. The flagship experiment in the power sector transferred assets to private owners yet left households trapped in dark rooms and industries running diesel generators. A wave of fintech firms has since stepped in to patch daily inconveniences. They route payments that public rails should clear, they sell virtual dollar cards because banks cannot process a 21 dollar Netflix charge, and they pay double-digit returns on locked wallets because conventional savings accounts barely beat ledger fees. Each solution eases an immediate pain but also profits from the fact that the pain exists at all.
The cash-scarcity crisis of late 2024 made the dynamic visible on Lagos streets. Bloomberg reported that one in three ATMs on the island stood idle while market stalls equipped with point of sale terminals filled the gap. A month later local media published uniform fee tables that codified the new normal at zero point five per cent for withdrawals below twenty thousand naira and a flat one hundred naira above that threshold. A Central Bank circular then endorsed up to six hundred naira in charges for the same amount taken from an off-site machine. Access to one's own money had quietly become a retail product.
Foreign-exchange controls soon created a second bottleneck. In February 2022, United Bank for Africa cut international spending on naira cards to $20 a month, and other banks copied the cap. Start-ups such as Payday and Chipper began selling reloadable virtual dollar cards. Wise now lists the fees in a public comparison that shows creation charges, monthly levies and private conversion rates that often exceed the street price. The card exists because the official window does not.
Even the act of saving was outsourced. A Moneywise survey of bank products published in late 2024 found headline rates near five and a half per cent and still subtracted maintenance charges. PiggyVest automated the rotating savings club on a mobile phone and by January, 2025, had handled more than two trillion naira in payouts for over five million users. The company holds a unit microfinance licence that frees it from the heavier requirements on commercial banks while still letting it sweep customer balances into high-yield money-market paper. The spread would disappear if retail banks offered a comparable digital product and passed on Treasury-bill yields.
Cross-border investing reveals the same logic. Bamboo secured the country's first digital sub broker permit from the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2023 and later obtained a United States broker dealer licence, allowing Nigerians to buy fractional Apple shares from a phone screen. A domestic investor cannot simply open a Robinhood account because that platform requires a Social Security number and a legal United States address. The start-up's margin is the toll for bridging incompatible regulatory regimes.
Yet the state is not fated to watch from the sidelines. Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Company offers a template in which government holds a forty-nine per cent stake while global operators supply discipline and expertise. BusinessDay credits that arrangement with turning NLNG into one of the country's most profitable enterprises. A similar equity-split could steer hard-tech ventures that attack deeper problems: factory automation, energy storage or specialised agricultural machinery. State technology hubs already dot Edo, Lagos and Rivers; the question is whether they remain co-working showrooms for lightweight apps or pivot toward capital-intensive engineering.
The contrast with China underscores what is at stake. Beijing encouraged retail participation by allowing millions to trade through Snowball and East Money, apps that plug directly into the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges and integrate instant payments through Alipay. The state collects data, taxes and patriotic goodwill while citizens gain a stake in domestic enterprise. In Nigeria the comparable front door was left ajar until Chaka, Trove and Bamboo built their own portals. Each additional intermediary slices a fee off returns and distances households from the national capital market at a time when the treasury needs broader domestic funding.
Critics sometimes argue that any service beating the market rate is proof of private-sector genius. The evidence tells a different story. Empty ATMs, twenty-dollar card limits and paper-based stockbrokers are not acts of nature. They are policy choices or inertia. Venture capital has simply learned to turn the resulting friction into cash flow. Okra began by aggregating bank data because open banking standards lagged, then pivoted to web hosting when growth in its original niche slowed, a reminder that the underlying inefficiency defines the ceiling on genuine innovation.
Nigeria can channel that same technical talent into higher ambitions. A public minority stake would guarantee oversight and mission continuity. Minimum capital commitments and performance targets tied to research spending or domestic content would align with the International Monetary Fund model in which disbursements follow verifiable benchmarks. Failure to deliver would trigger renegotiation or termination, avoiding the stagnation that haunts parts of the power privatization.
Fintech has proved that Nigerians will adopt new tools overnight when those tools erase bureaucratic pain. The challenge now is to remove the pain at its source rather than celebrate each workaround. If policymakers read the profit margins of cash-out agents, virtual cards and savings apps as road signs pointing to infrastructure gaps, then the next decade could see public private vehicles financing machine tools, solar components and biotech labs. If they interpret the same profits as evidence that markets have already fixed the problem, citizens will keep paying a convenience surcharge for services their government was supposed to guarantee.
Is the black truly hair that disgusting that you need to hide it?
There’s a purity in culture that comes with being a truly sovereign country. America for example can provide credit access for people to live a decent life or afford certain things. If i see an American with a nice car the thought of it being financed crosses my mind in seconds, if its a nigerian, you never even think in that direction because credit access is widespread enough. If i see an American with blonde hair, i never think they are wearing a wig. Because most americans have existed in their true form for a long time. Now a market for cosmetic surgery is rising,one that should not exist. One who’s aim is to convince you that you can take from your household savings to look “better”. In Nigeria, self esteem is a very serious issue. The wig and cosmetic surgery economy has seen an uptick in patronage. I will address the wigs. America fought the British for their independence, one of the first things you do when you regain you freedom is to ensure that you remove all of the cultural practices of your colonizers that are basically a humiliation ritual for you. It’s been over 60 years since Nigeria gained independence albeit without fighting a war and their lawyers walk into courtrooms with blonde wigs on their black heads.
The Market for wigs has grown exponentially, imports of wigs has risen across the