I have spent my entire career building legitimate businesses, paying taxes, following rules, and yet I get treated like a suspect because of where I was born and the colour of my passport. The Nigerian passport means potential fraud risk. That is the global assumption. That is what yahoo yahoo has done to us.
For those who are not familiar with Nigerian slang. Yahoo yahoo is the colloquial term for internet fraud. 419 scams, romance scams, business email compromise, and every other form of cybercrime that has become associated with Nigeria.
The damage to Nigeria’s reputation has only gotten worse over the years despite repeated crackdowns on suspected cyber criminals. This is not an essay about the morality of cybercrime. Of course, it is wrong. Of course it is theft. That should go without saying.
What I want to talk about is something that gets less attention. The enormous ongoing economic cost that cybercrime has imposed on every single Nigerian, including the overwhelming majority who have never scammed anyone.
Yahoo yahoo has not just stolen money from foreign victims. It has stolen opportunity from every honest Nigerian trying to do business in the global economy.
The Brand Is Broken
Let me start with a concept from business: brand equity. A brand is not just a logo or a name. It is a set of associations that people carry in their minds. When you hear Swiss, you think precision, quality, reliability. When you hear Japanese, you think innovation, efficiency, discipline. When you hear Nigerian… you think scam.
This reputational damage did not happen overnight. It was built, email by email, scam by scam, over three decades. From the 419 letters of the 1990s to the sophisticated business email compromise schemes of the 2020s, Nigerian cybercriminals have systematically destroyed the country’s brand and the rest of us are paying the price.
I have heard young Nigerians argue that yahoo is a response to a failed system, that the government has failed them and they are just surviving. I understand the frustration. I understand the sapa. But let me be blunt: every naira a yahoo boy steals costs the rest of us a thousand naira in lost opportunity.
You are robbing your fellow Nigerians the ability to participate in the global economy without suspicion, without extra scrutiny, without being treated like criminals.
Visa Rejections and Travel Bans
The most visible cost of Nigeria’s fraud reputation is in visa processing. Nigerian passport holders face some of the most stringent visa requirements in the world. Most countries require Nigerians to go through lengthy, expensive, and humiliating visa application processes.
The refusal rate for Nigerian visa applications to many western countries is among the highest for any nationality. I know of doctors, engineers, professors, and business executives who have been denied visas despite having impeccable credentials, strong ties to Nigeria, and no reason whatsoever to overstay or commit fraud.
The denial letters are always vague but everyone knows the real reason. The Nigerian passport carries a stigma that no amount of documentation can fully overcome. There are numerous cases of accomplished Nigerians being denied visas for conferences, medical treatment, and business meetings.
The japa phenomenon has made this worse. As more Nigerians leave the country, immigration authorities in destination countries have become even more suspicious of Nigerian applicants. The logic, unfair as it is, goes like this: Nigerians are likely to overstay their visas, and some Nigerians are involved in fraud, therefore every Nigerian applicant deserves maximum scrutiny.
This creates a vicious cycle. Legitimate travellers are denied visas, which encourages people to use irregular channels, which further damages the reputation, which leads to more denials. The economic cost of visa restrictions is enormous.
Nigerian businesses that could be doing deals in Europe and America are instead confined to the African market because their executives cannot travel freely.
Conferences and trade fairs that could bring Nigerian innovations to the world stage are attended by smaller delegations because half the delegates were denied visas. Academic collaborations are disrupted. Medical treatment abroad becomes inaccessible. Family relationships are strained.
All these because a relatively small number of our countrymen decided that stealing was easier than working.
Bank Account Closures: The Financial Exile
If visa rejections are the visible wound, bank account closures are the silent killer. Over the past decade, international banks have been closing accounts held by Nigerians and Nigerian businesses.
This process, called de-risking, is driven by anti-money laundering regulations that make it expensive and risky for banks to maintain relationships with customers from high-risk jurisdictions.
These banks are making a rational calculation: the cost of monitoring Nigerian accounts for potential fraud exceeds the revenue those accounts generate. So they close them. And every time a Nigerian account is closed, it becomes slightly harder for the next Nigerian business to open one. The reputation spiral tightens.
This has real consequences for trade. Nigerian importers who cannot maintain foreign bank accounts must go through intermediaries, which adds cost. Nigerian exporters who cannot receive direct payments must use complex routing arrangements.
Nigerian students abroad struggle to receive funds from home. Nigerians in the diaspora face increasing difficulty sending remittances back. The financial system that connects Nigeria to the global economy is being slowly strangled by the reputational damage caused by cybercrime.
And here is the darkest irony: as formal banking channels are closed, money moves to informal channels. Hawala networks, cryptocurrency, cash carriers. These informal channels are less transparent, harder to regulate, and more vulnerable to exploitation by the very criminals whose activities caused the formal channels to close in the first place.
We are creating a self-reinforcing cycle of exclusion and opacity. It is absolute madness.
The Cost to Legitimate Tech
Nigeria has one of the most vibrant tech ecosystems in Africa. Lagos is home to hundreds of tech businesses at varying stages of growth. Nigerian developers are building world-class products.
Fintech companies born in Lagos are processing billions in transactions across Africa. This is a genuine success story, one of the few bright spots in the Nigerian economic landscape.
Yet, the tech ecosystem is constantly fighting against the reputational headwind of cybercrime. Nigerian tech companies face extra scrutiny when seeking international investment. Venture capitalists spend months doing enhanced due diligence. Payment processors like Stripe and PayPal have historically restricted or blocked Nigerian accounts.
International clients on freelancing platforms hesitate to hire Nigerian freelancers because of fraud concerns. The talent is there. The capability is there. The trust is not.
The talent drain is another hidden cost. Some of Nigeria’s best technical minds are involved in cybercrime because it pays more than legitimate work. A skilled developer who could be building the next great Nigerian startup is instead building phishing sites or writing fraud scripts.
This is a catastrophic misallocation of talent. These are intelligent, technically skilled people who could be creating value but are instead destroying it, not just for their victims but for their entire country.
The Social Normalisation of Fraud
Perhaps the most dangerous cost of yahoo yahoo is not economic but cultural. Cybercrime has been normalised in parts of Nigerian society to a degree that should terrify everyone.
There are songs glorifying yahoo boys. There is a fashion aesthetic associated with fraud money. There are neighbourhoods where the biggest houses belong to known fraudsters, and nobody bats an eye. Young men openly discuss hitting clients as if it were a legitimate profession.
I have had conversations with university students who told me, with straight faces, that yahoo was a rational response to unemployment. They see no moral distinction between a government official stealing from the treasury and a yahoo boy stealing from a foreigner. Both are theft, they argue, so why is one punished and the other celebrated?
This moral equivalence is deeply corrosive, and it has a certain twisted logic that makes it hard to counter without addressing the systemic corruption that gives it its power.
The Nollywood movies that glamorise wealth, the social media culture that celebrates conspicuous consumption, the churches and mosques that welcome wealthy members without asking the source of their wealth, the family members who collect gifts from sons and brothers they know are into illegitimate activities but do not ask questions.
All of these create an ecosystem that sustains cybercrime by removing the social sanctions that should deter it. When your community celebrates your stolen wealth, why would you stop stealing?
“When the reward for crime exceeds the punishment, and society stops punishing altogether, crime becomes rational. That is where we are.”
The cost of this normalisation goes beyond the immediate crimes. It creates a low-trust society where honesty is seen as naivety, where playing by the rules is seen as stupidity, where the hardworking professional who earns modestly is pitied while the flashy fraudster is admired.
This inverts every value that a functional society needs. It tells young people that shortcuts are better than effort, that deception is smarter than honesty, that extraction is more rewarding than creation.
What kind of society can you build on that foundation?
The International Response Is Punishing Us All
The international community response to Nigerian cybercrime has been broad-brush and punitive, and it punishes all Nigerians, not just criminals. International enforcement agencies run operations that are heavily focused on West African fraud networks.
International companies are also responding by simply avoiding Nigeria. Some multinational companies have decided not to enter the Nigerian market because of fraud risk which even the enormous size of the market would not offset.
Some countries have gone further imposing travel restrictions on Nigerians and tightening student visa requirements specifically for Nigerian applicants. In each case, the stated or unstated reason is the same: Nigerians are disproportionately involved in fraud and crime.
Whether this is statistically true or driven by stereotype, the result is the same: collective punishment for collective reputation failure.
What Must Change
Fixing Nigeria’s reputation will take a generation, but it starts now. We cannot just take the situation as a fact of life. Here is what needs to happen:
- The EFCC must be properly funded and truly independent: EFCC currently operates as a political weapon rather than a genuine anti-fraud agency. Convictions of high-profile cybercriminals send a signal. Currently, the conviction rate is embarrassingly low. The agency needs to step up to its true role of fighting financial crimes.
- Cyber-crime legislation must be enforced, not just written: The Cybercrimes Act exists. Enforcement is the problem. Police officers who cannot operate a computer are not going to investigate cybercrime.
- Social sanctions must be restored: Communities, families, religious institutions, and traditional rulers must stop accepting stolen money. When a 22-year-old drives a G-Wagon and has no visible means of income, that is not success. That is a crime scene.
- The narrative must change: Nigerian media, entertainment, and influencers must stop glamorising fraud. Every song that celebrates yahoo boys, every movie that makes them heroes, every Instagram page that flaunts fraud money is a nail in Nigeria’s reputational coffin.
- Alternative pathways must be created: Young Nigerians turn to fraud partly because legitimate opportunities are scarce and financially unrewarding. Job creation, skills training, and entrepreneurship support are not just economic policies; they are anti-crime policies.
- International engagement must be strategic: The Nigerian government should be actively working with international partners to distinguish between criminal Nigerians and legitimate ones, rather than allowing broad-brush measures that punish everyone.
- Technology training must be redirected: The same technical skills that enable cybercrime can enable legitimate tech careers. Programs that recruit from fraud-prone demographics and channel talent into legitimate work can make a real difference.
Final Thoughts
Nigeria’s brand is broken but brands can be rebuilt. It requires that we stop the bleeding first, and that means every Nigerian deciding that our collective reputation matters more than any individual scam.
July 27, 2026
7 minute
Isreal Oyarinde
The Reputational Cost of Yahoo Yahoo: How Cybercrime Destroyed Nigeria’s Brand
Table of Contents
I have spent my entire career building legitimate businesses, paying taxes, following rules, and yet I get treated like a suspect because of where I was born and the colour of my passport. The Nigerian passport means potential fraud risk. That is the global assumption. That is what yahoo yahoo has done to us.
For those who are not familiar with Nigerian slang. Yahoo yahoo is the colloquial term for internet fraud. 419 scams, romance scams, business email compromise, and every other form of cybercrime that has become associated with Nigeria.
The damage to Nigeria’s reputation has only gotten worse over the years despite repeated crackdowns on suspected cyber criminals. This is not an essay about the morality of cybercrime. Of course, it is wrong. Of course it is theft. That should go without saying.
What I want to talk about is something that gets less attention. The enormous ongoing economic cost that cybercrime has imposed on every single Nigerian, including the overwhelming majority who have never scammed anyone.
Yahoo yahoo has not just stolen money from foreign victims. It has stolen opportunity from every honest Nigerian trying to do business in the global economy.
The Brand Is Broken
Let me start with a concept from business: brand equity. A brand is not just a logo or a name. It is a set of associations that people carry in their minds. When you hear Swiss, you think precision, quality, reliability. When you hear Japanese, you think innovation, efficiency, discipline. When you hear Nigerian… you think scam.
This reputational damage did not happen overnight. It was built, email by email, scam by scam, over three decades. From the 419 letters of the 1990s to the sophisticated business email compromise schemes of the 2020s, Nigerian cybercriminals have systematically destroyed the country’s brand and the rest of us are paying the price.
I have heard young Nigerians argue that yahoo is a response to a failed system, that the government has failed them and they are just surviving. I understand the frustration. I understand the sapa. But let me be blunt: every naira a yahoo boy steals costs the rest of us a thousand naira in lost opportunity.
You are robbing your fellow Nigerians the ability to participate in the global economy without suspicion, without extra scrutiny, without being treated like criminals.
Visa Rejections and Travel Bans
The most visible cost of Nigeria’s fraud reputation is in visa processing. Nigerian passport holders face some of the most stringent visa requirements in the world. Most countries require Nigerians to go through lengthy, expensive, and humiliating visa application processes.
The refusal rate for Nigerian visa applications to many western countries is among the highest for any nationality. I know of doctors, engineers, professors, and business executives who have been denied visas despite having impeccable credentials, strong ties to Nigeria, and no reason whatsoever to overstay or commit fraud.
The denial letters are always vague but everyone knows the real reason. The Nigerian passport carries a stigma that no amount of documentation can fully overcome. There are numerous cases of accomplished Nigerians being denied visas for conferences, medical treatment, and business meetings.
The japa phenomenon has made this worse. As more Nigerians leave the country, immigration authorities in destination countries have become even more suspicious of Nigerian applicants. The logic, unfair as it is, goes like this: Nigerians are likely to overstay their visas, and some Nigerians are involved in fraud, therefore every Nigerian applicant deserves maximum scrutiny.
This creates a vicious cycle. Legitimate travellers are denied visas, which encourages people to use irregular channels, which further damages the reputation, which leads to more denials. The economic cost of visa restrictions is enormous.
Nigerian businesses that could be doing deals in Europe and America are instead confined to the African market because their executives cannot travel freely.
Conferences and trade fairs that could bring Nigerian innovations to the world stage are attended by smaller delegations because half the delegates were denied visas. Academic collaborations are disrupted. Medical treatment abroad becomes inaccessible. Family relationships are strained.
All these because a relatively small number of our countrymen decided that stealing was easier than working.
Bank Account Closures: The Financial Exile
If visa rejections are the visible wound, bank account closures are the silent killer. Over the past decade, international banks have been closing accounts held by Nigerians and Nigerian businesses.
This process, called de-risking, is driven by anti-money laundering regulations that make it expensive and risky for banks to maintain relationships with customers from high-risk jurisdictions.
These banks are making a rational calculation: the cost of monitoring Nigerian accounts for potential fraud exceeds the revenue those accounts generate. So they close them. And every time a Nigerian account is closed, it becomes slightly harder for the next Nigerian business to open one. The reputation spiral tightens.
This has real consequences for trade. Nigerian importers who cannot maintain foreign bank accounts must go through intermediaries, which adds cost. Nigerian exporters who cannot receive direct payments must use complex routing arrangements.
Nigerian students abroad struggle to receive funds from home. Nigerians in the diaspora face increasing difficulty sending remittances back. The financial system that connects Nigeria to the global economy is being slowly strangled by the reputational damage caused by cybercrime.
And here is the darkest irony: as formal banking channels are closed, money moves to informal channels. Hawala networks, cryptocurrency, cash carriers. These informal channels are less transparent, harder to regulate, and more vulnerable to exploitation by the very criminals whose activities caused the formal channels to close in the first place.
We are creating a self-reinforcing cycle of exclusion and opacity. It is absolute madness.
The Cost to Legitimate Tech
Nigeria has one of the most vibrant tech ecosystems in Africa. Lagos is home to hundreds of tech businesses at varying stages of growth. Nigerian developers are building world-class products.
Fintech companies born in Lagos are processing billions in transactions across Africa. This is a genuine success story, one of the few bright spots in the Nigerian economic landscape.
Yet, the tech ecosystem is constantly fighting against the reputational headwind of cybercrime. Nigerian tech companies face extra scrutiny when seeking international investment. Venture capitalists spend months doing enhanced due diligence. Payment processors like Stripe and PayPal have historically restricted or blocked Nigerian accounts.
International clients on freelancing platforms hesitate to hire Nigerian freelancers because of fraud concerns. The talent is there. The capability is there. The trust is not.
The talent drain is another hidden cost. Some of Nigeria’s best technical minds are involved in cybercrime because it pays more than legitimate work. A skilled developer who could be building the next great Nigerian startup is instead building phishing sites or writing fraud scripts.
This is a catastrophic misallocation of talent. These are intelligent, technically skilled people who could be creating value but are instead destroying it, not just for their victims but for their entire country.
The Social Normalisation of Fraud
Perhaps the most dangerous cost of yahoo yahoo is not economic but cultural. Cybercrime has been normalised in parts of Nigerian society to a degree that should terrify everyone.
There are songs glorifying yahoo boys. There is a fashion aesthetic associated with fraud money. There are neighbourhoods where the biggest houses belong to known fraudsters, and nobody bats an eye. Young men openly discuss hitting clients as if it were a legitimate profession.
I have had conversations with university students who told me, with straight faces, that yahoo was a rational response to unemployment. They see no moral distinction between a government official stealing from the treasury and a yahoo boy stealing from a foreigner. Both are theft, they argue, so why is one punished and the other celebrated?
This moral equivalence is deeply corrosive, and it has a certain twisted logic that makes it hard to counter without addressing the systemic corruption that gives it its power.
The Nollywood movies that glamorise wealth, the social media culture that celebrates conspicuous consumption, the churches and mosques that welcome wealthy members without asking the source of their wealth, the family members who collect gifts from sons and brothers they know are into illegitimate activities but do not ask questions.
All of these create an ecosystem that sustains cybercrime by removing the social sanctions that should deter it. When your community celebrates your stolen wealth, why would you stop stealing?
“When the reward for crime exceeds the punishment, and society stops punishing altogether, crime becomes rational. That is where we are.”
The cost of this normalisation goes beyond the immediate crimes. It creates a low-trust society where honesty is seen as naivety, where playing by the rules is seen as stupidity, where the hardworking professional who earns modestly is pitied while the flashy fraudster is admired.
This inverts every value that a functional society needs. It tells young people that shortcuts are better than effort, that deception is smarter than honesty, that extraction is more rewarding than creation.
What kind of society can you build on that foundation?
The International Response Is Punishing Us All
The international community response to Nigerian cybercrime has been broad-brush and punitive, and it punishes all Nigerians, not just criminals. International enforcement agencies run operations that are heavily focused on West African fraud networks.
International companies are also responding by simply avoiding Nigeria. Some multinational companies have decided not to enter the Nigerian market because of fraud risk which even the enormous size of the market would not offset.
Some countries have gone further imposing travel restrictions on Nigerians and tightening student visa requirements specifically for Nigerian applicants. In each case, the stated or unstated reason is the same: Nigerians are disproportionately involved in fraud and crime.
Whether this is statistically true or driven by stereotype, the result is the same: collective punishment for collective reputation failure.
What Must Change
Fixing Nigeria’s reputation will take a generation, but it starts now. We cannot just take the situation as a fact of life. Here is what needs to happen:
Final Thoughts
Nigeria’s brand is broken but brands can be rebuilt. It requires that we stop the bleeding first, and that means every Nigerian deciding that our collective reputation matters more than any individual scam.
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July 27, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
The Reputational Cost of Yahoo Yahoo: How Cybercrime Destroyed Nigeria’s Brand
I have spent my entire career building legitimate businesses, paying taxes, following rules, and yet I get treated like a suspect because of where I was born and the colour of my passport. The Nigerian passport means potential fraud risk. That is the global assumption. That is what yahoo yahoo has done to us. For those who are not familiar with Nigerian slang. Yahoo yahoo is the colloquial term for internet fraud. 419 scams, romance scams, business email compromise, and every other form of cybercrime that has become associated with Nigeria. The damage to Nigeria’s reputation has only gotten worse over the years despite repeated crackdowns on suspected cyber criminals. This is not an essay about the morality of cybercrime. Of course, it is wrong. Of course it is theft. That should go without saying. What I want to talk about is something that gets less attention. The enormous ongoing economic cost that cybercrime has imposed on every single Nigerian, including the overwhelming majority who have never scammed anyone. Yahoo yahoo has not just stolen money from foreign victims. It has stolen opportunity from every honest Nigerian trying to do business in the global economy. The Brand Is Broken Let me start with a concept from business: brand equity. A brand is not just a logo or a name. It is a set of associations that people carry in their minds. When you hear Swiss, you think precision, quality, reliability. When you hear Japanese, you think innovation, efficiency, discipline. When you hear Nigerian… you think scam. This reputational damage did not happen overnight. It was built, email by email, scam by scam, over three decades. From the 419 letters of the 1990s to the sophisticated business email compromise schemes of the 2020s, Nigerian cybercriminals have systematically destroyed the country’s brand and the rest of us are paying the price. I have heard young Nigerians argue that yahoo is a response to a failed system, that the government has failed them and they are just surviving. I understand the frustration. I understand the sapa. But let me be blunt: every naira a yahoo boy steals costs the rest of us a thousand naira in lost opportunity. You are robbing your fellow Nigerians the ability to participate in the global economy without suspicion, without extra scrutiny, without being treated like criminals. Visa Rejections and Travel Bans The most visible cost of Nigeria’s fraud reputation is in visa processing. Nigerian passport holders face some of the most stringent visa requirements in the world. Most countries require Nigerians to go through lengthy, expensive, and humiliating visa application processes. The refusal rate for Nigerian visa applications to many western countries is among the highest for any nationality. I know of doctors, engineers, professors, and business executives who have been denied visas despite having impeccable credentials, strong ties to Nigeria, and no reason whatsoever to overstay or commit fraud. The denial letters are always vague but everyone knows the real reason. The Nigerian passport carries a stigma that no amount of documentation can fully overcome. There are numerous cases of accomplished Nigerians being denied visas for conferences, medical treatment, and business meetings. The japa phenomenon has made this worse. As more Nigerians leave the country, immigration authorities in destination countries have become even more suspicious of Nigerian applicants. The logic, unfair as it is, goes like this: Nigerians are likely to overstay their visas, and some Nigerians are involved in fraud, therefore every Nigerian applicant deserves maximum scrutiny. This creates a vicious cycle. Legitimate travellers are denied visas, which encourages people to use irregular channels, which further damages the reputation, which leads to more denials. The economic cost of visa restrictions is enormous. Nigerian businesses that could be doing deals in Europe and America are instead confined to the African market because their executives cannot travel freely. Conferences and trade fairs that could bring Nigerian innovations to the world stage are attended by smaller delegations because half the delegates were denied visas. Academic collaborations are disrupted. Medical treatment abroad becomes inaccessible. Family relationships are strained. All these because a relatively small number of our countrymen decided that stealing was easier than working. Bank Account Closures: The Financial Exile If visa rejections are the visible wound, bank account closures are the silent killer. Over the past decade, international banks have been closing accounts held by Nigerians and Nigerian businesses. This process, called de-risking, is driven by anti-money laundering regulations that make it expensive and risky for banks to maintain relationships with customers from high-risk jurisdictions. These banks are making a rational calculation: the cost of monitoring Nigerian accounts for potential fraud exceeds the revenue those accounts generate. So they close them. And every time a Nigerian account is closed, it becomes slightly harder for the next Nigerian business to open one. The reputation spiral tightens. This has real consequences for trade. Nigerian importers who cannot maintain foreign bank accounts must go through intermediaries, which adds cost. Nigerian exporters who cannot receive direct payments must use complex routing arrangements. Nigerian students abroad struggle to receive funds from home. Nigerians in the diaspora face increasing difficulty sending remittances back. The financial system that connects Nigeria to the global economy is being slowly strangled by the reputational damage caused by cybercrime. And here is the darkest irony: as formal banking channels are closed, money moves to informal channels. Hawala networks, cryptocurrency, cash carriers. These informal channels are less transparent, harder to regulate, and more vulnerable to exploitation by the very criminals whose activities caused the formal channels to close in the first place. We are creating a self-reinforcing cycle of exclusion and opacity. It is absolute madness. The Cost to Legitimate Tech Nigeria has one of the most vibrant tech ecosystems in Africa. Lagos is home to hundreds of tech businesses at varying stages of growth. Nigerian developers are building world-class products. Fintech companies born in Lagos are processing billions in transactions across Africa. This is a genuine success
June 16, 2026
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The Nigerian Data Problem: We Don’t Know How Many We Are, Where We Live, or What We Earn
In God we trust, all others bring data. – W. Edwards Deming In 2023, I was working on a business plan for a client who wanted to launch a logistics company in Kano State. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t. We needed basic data. The population of Kano metropolitan area, number of registered businesses, average household income, road network coverage, number of delivery addresses and that is where it became a nightmare. You would think this information would be readily available for the most populous state in Nigeria. You would be wrong. The population figure we found ranged from 9 million to 16 million depending on which source you used. The Natonal Bureau of Statistics had one number, the state government had another. The UN population estimates had a third. The World Bank used yet another figure. And the last actual census was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, when the Kano population was counted at about 9.4 million. In a state growing at maybe 3 percent annually, the current population could be anything. We were literally guessing and our guesses were not even informed by any reliable data. The number of registered businesses? No comprehensive database exists. Average household income? The NBS does household surveys, but the sample sizes are small, the methodology is questionable, and the data is years out of date by the time it is published. Road network coverage? I called three different agencies and got three completely different answers. Number of delivery addresses? Nigeria does not have a functional address system. Most streets in Kano do not have names. Most houses do not have numbers. How do you run a delivery company in a country where you cannot describe where people live? That experience crystallized something I had been thinking about for years. Nigeria does not have a data problem, Nigeria has a data crisis. We are running a country of over 200 million people essentially blind. We do not know how many we are. We do not know where we live. We do not know what we earn. We do not know what we produce. We do not know what we consume. And because we do not know any of this, every policy decision is a guess, every budget is fiction, and every business projection is built on vibes and In Sha Allah. This is not a minor administrative inconvenience. This is a fundamental governance failure that affects every aspect of Nigerian life, from healthcare to education to infrastructure to security. You cannot solve problems you cannot measure. You cannot allocate resources to populations you cannot count. You cannot plan for a future you cannot model. And yet here we are, the giant of Africa, stumbling around in the dark because we refuse to turn on the light. The Census Catastrophe Let us start with the most basic data point of all. How many Nigerians are there? The honest answer is nobody knows. Nigeria’s last census was in 2006. It counted 140 million people, a number that was immediately controversial. Northern states claimed they were undercounted. Southern states claimed the north was overcounted. Ethnic groups accused each other of inflating numbers for political advantage. The census became not a statistical exercise but a political weapon, because in Nigeria, population determines revenue allocation, political representation, and power. The 2006 census itself was riddled with problems. Enumerators were poorly trained. Some areas were inaccessible due to security concerns. The technology was outdated. There were widespread allegations of manipulation. The results were challenged in court by several states. And yet, nearly twenty years later, this deeply flawed count remains the official basis for planning in Africa largest economy. The World Bank and the UN use projections based on this flawed baseline, which means their estimates are also unreliable. A new census has been planned, postponed, replanned, and re-postponed multiple times. The National Population Commission has been promising a new census for over a decade. Each time, the exercise is derailed by political disagreements, funding shortfalls, or security concerns. Meanwhile, the gap between our population estimates and reality grows wider every year. Are we 210 million? 220 million? 230 million? Nobody can say with confidence, and the margin of error is not a few percentage points but potentially tens of millions of people. The political dimension of the census cannot be overstated. In Nigeria, population is money and power. Federal revenue allocation is partly based on population. States with larger populations get more money. The number of House of Representatives seats is based on population. So every census becomes a high-stakes political battle. Until we can decouple the census from resource allocation, or find some way to make the count politically neutral, we will continue to fight over numbers instead of collecting them. NBS and the Methodology Problem The National Bureau of Statistics is supposed to be the authoritative source of data on the Nigerian economy and society. In fairness, the NBS does important work with limited resources. But the limitations are severe, and they undermine the reliability of virtually everything the NBS publishes. Take the unemployment figure for example. For years, the NBS reported Nigeria’s unemployment rate as being in the low single digits, which was laughable to anyone who had walked through any Nigerian city and seen the armies of young people with nothing to do. The problem was methodological. The NBS was using the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment, which counted anyone who had done even one hour of work in the past week as employed. A man who washed one car for two hundred naira on a Saturday was classified as employed. A woman who sold three sachets of pure water on a Monday was employed. The definition bore no relationship to the reality of Nigerian labour markets. Eventually, the NBS adopted a broader measure that better captured underemployment and disguised unemployment, and suddenly the combined unemployment and underemployment rate jumped to over 33 percent. The economy had not changed. The measurement
May 25, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
Can and Should the Government Solve All Issues?
Every four years, Nigerians go to the polls looking for a messiah. Not a president, not a governor, not a local government chairman —a messiah. Someone who will fix the roads, bring light, lower prices, create jobs, cure corruption, and somehow make garri affordable again. All at once. Preferably within the first 100 days. And every four years, we are disappointed. Shocked, even. As if the last ten electoral cycles did not teach us anything. I am not saying the government does not matter. It matters enormously. But there is a dangerous gap between what the government should do, what the government can do, and what Nigerians expect the government to do. And that gap is where our collective frustration lives. So let us have an honest conversation: can the government solve all our issues? Should it even try? The Nigerian Messiah Complex We have a peculiar relationship with government in Nigeria. We simultaneously despise it and depend on it completely. We curse the governor on Twitter and then write him a letter begging for school fees. We call politicians thieves, then queue up at their houses for “stomach infrastructure” during elections. This is the Messiah Complex at work. The belief that somewhere out there, there is a leader who, if only they could get into power, would transform Nigeria overnight. Tinubu will do it. Obi will do it. Atiku will do it. Insert-name-here will do it. Nobody is doing it. Not because they are all individually terrible (though some are), but because the expectation itself is impossible. No single human, no single administration, can fix a country with 200 million people, 36 states, 774 local governments, hundreds of ethnic groups, decades of infrastructure neglect, institutional decay, and a culture that treats public office as a personal ATM. The Messiah Complex is not just naive. It is actively harmful. It encourages passivity. If the government is supposed to fix everything, then your role as a citizen is simply to wait, complain, and vote every four years. You do not organize your community. You do not maintain your street. You do not build parallel systems. You just wait for the saviour who never comes. Our streets have failed, created wealth through corruption, and took a lot from the society we have. Where we differ is there is no real debate about whether the government should do more. The overwhelming demand, the overconsumption of government promises, and the lack of proper systems and due process all combine to create the illusion that more government is always the answer. What Government Should Do (And Cannot Escape) Let me be clear. There are things that only the government can and should do. As an entrepreneur, I am all too aware of the costs of government failures in my business. These crucial services are non-negotiable, and no amount of “self-reliance” rhetoric changes this. These are the government’s core functions. The problem in Nigeria is not that the government tries to do these things. The problem is that it fails spectacularly at them while simultaneously trying to do a hundred other things it has no business doing. What Government Should Not Do (But Tries Anyway) Here is where it gets controversial. The Nigerian government has a long history of inserting itself into areas where it has no comparative advantage, usually with disastrous results. The fuel subsidy, which cost Nigeria over N4 trillion in 2022 alone, is the mother of all price control disasters. Instead of letting the market price signal direct investment into refining capacity, we spent decades subsidizing consumption of imported fuel, enriching a cartel of importers, and starving the economy of resources for health, education, and infrastructure. The government is terrible at targeting, terrible at distribution, and terrible at verification. The common thread in all these failures is that the government tried to be a market actor instead of a market enabler. The government should create the conditions for economic activity —stable rules, fair enforcement, sound infrastructure not try to be the economy itself. The Private Sector Gap Now, some of you are thinking: “If the government steps back, the private sector will fill the gap.” And in many areas, that is true. Nigerian entrepreneurs are among the most resilient and creative in the world. We build fintech platforms that bypass broken banking infrastructure. We create logistics networks that work despite terrible roads. We generate our own electricity. We dig our own boreholes. We are, in many ways, already running a parallel economy. But the private sector has its own limits, especially in Nigeria. This is the fundamental tension: the government is terrible at delivering services, but the private sector will not deliver them to everyone. There are market failures that only the government can address, and there are government failures that only markets can correct. The answer is not more government or less government. It is better government in its lane, and more space for private enterprise in theirs. Self-Reliance in a Failed State Let me tell you a story. In my estate in Lagos, we got tired of waiting for the government to fix our road. It had been bad for three years. We wrote letters. We called the local government. We tagged the governor on Twitter. Nothing happened. So we taxed ourselves. Every household contributed. We hired a contractor. We fixed the road. Cost us about ₦15 million collectively. It has lasted longer than most government roads, probably because we supervised the contractor ourselves instead of letting someone’s cousin do it with substandard materials. This is self-reliance in a failing state. And it is happening all over Nigeria. This is not ideal. It creates a two-tier society where the wealthy can buy their way out of government failure while the poor suffer. But it is the pragmatic response to a government that collects taxes and delivers almost nothing in return. If you treat the government like a service provider, you have purchasing power to ask: why am I paying this