Feature/OPED
Building a Sustainable Brand for People, Planet and Profit
By Ever Obi
It’s been half a year since the first signs of COVID-19 surfaced. It has taken away hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed the livelihood of millions, but we’re finally beginning to recover.
But as the pandemic slowly and painfully subsides, it is worth noting that we cannot return to business as usual.
Where it began
The black swan had flown into the economic and health waters in China, and with one giant splash, it had caused ripples that would disrupt lives and businesses all over the world. China had been struggling with this for months and it only needed time to spread all over the world, becoming a full-blown pandemic.
The domino effect took different times to get to different countries, sparking widespread panic and disorientation that crippled businesses all over the world, from East Asia, to the West, then to other regions including sub-Saharan Africa.
The devastation and the rising fatalities in the developed world left emerging markets embracing the conclusion that they were not immune. Nobody was; the world had become too open, too interconnected, that a virus that emanated from Asia could have all of us, from all corners of the planet, washing our hands.
The fight against COVID-19 was a World War, because it was everyone’s fight and the playbook was largely similar, all over the globe: close boarders and shut down airports, enforce compulsory lockdowns, let people stay home while health workers battle to carter to the sick, as the efforts to develop a vaccine continue; just shut down everything and reduce human-to-human contact as much as possible in order to contain the spread of the virus.
Compound nouns like ‘machine learning’ and ‘trade wars’ were quickly replaced by new ones such as ‘social distancing’ and ‘hand sanitizers’. It was a World War and we all needed to fight together.
COVID-19 in Nigeria
In Nigeria, the fear gradually trickled in as we registered our first cases of the virus. We adopted what seemed like it was the accepted approach worldwide: force people to stay in their homes, then shut down airports and businesses while the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and other essential workers attempt to contain the spread of the novel virus.
However, this was not enough the quench the air of pessimism amongst Nigerians. It was not enough because the circumstances had shone a blacklight over our failures as a Nation, causing our faults to glow with different colours before our faces.
First, our health sector, through years of neglect and underfunding, was not adequately armed to handle a pandemic of this magnitude. Then, with a shutdown of economies around the world, the demand of crude slumped significantly, leading to an oil glut around the world.
The resulting effect of this drop in demand, combined with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Plus disagreement and the consequent price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, was a sharp decline in oil prices.
Brent Crude Oil prices, at some point, traded at $16 per barrel while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) plunged into the negative. This kind of shock in the international oil market, as expected for Nigeria, would always be a nightmare for both our reserves and the real sector. It also meant that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) would no longer sustain the use of external buffers to support the value of the Naira.
In the face of declining oil prices, depleting reserves and seemingly inevitable Naira depreciation, Nigerians believed that the doomsday was closer than we had thought. Also, there was pressure on the Government to support the citizenry that it had ordered to stay indoors as a result of the pandemic. This support was expected to come in the form of security of lives, financial handouts or transparent and nationwide distribution of staples and items with intrinsic value to its poor masses.
Despite the Federal Government’s claims that the needed palliatives were being distributed to the ‘poorest of the poor’, a high percentage of the population still harboured a lot of misgivings as they had neither received any support directly from the Government nor had they come across someone who had.
With these unwavering challenges, well-meaning individuals and corporate bodies stepped in to make contributions to support the NCDC and the Federal Government in combating the virus and supporting Nigerians.
Our We Reacted to the Pandemic
For us at Zedcrest Group, it was a time for us to put our 2020 plans, all the business growth projections, all the technological plans, aside and focus on this important task: to be responsible to the communities we do business in. Yes, businesses were being affected, including ours.
Yes, our expectations for the year are being hindered. But it just appeared that the most important task at this moment was to support as many lives as possible, to contribute to this monumental fight against the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on lives and safety. It was a journey we needed to embark on, a call of duty we needed to answer; a responsibility we needed to be alive to.
This journey began on the streets of Lagos, with our Management Team, through our Employee Volunteer Scheme (EVS) initiative, taking the risk to reach out to as many people as possible in the slums of Lagos, donating over 10,000 food boxes to the less privileged, as well as some of our frontline medical personnel.
When it mattered the most, during the lockdown, leaders of the Zedcrest Capital Group led by example, armed with only facemasks and hand gloves, driving through Lagos, visiting inner-city slums, distributing essentials to the poor whose meagre income streams have been further strained by the national lockdown.
Our trip to Kano during the lockdown
During the lockdown, cases of COVID-19 infections and deaths continued to rise all over the world, especially in Italy and the United States. The pandemic had become the only news worth reporting for both domestic and foreign media.
For Nigerians, we became used to people posting daily NCDC updates on their WhatsApp statuses and social media platforms. One thing that was gradually becoming obvious from the updates was the alarming rate with which the Kano cases were rising.
Kano was gradually becoming a national hotspot for COVID-19. We, at Zedcrest Capital Group, found ourselves needing to do something about it. The journey had not ended, far from it.
We decided to reach out to the Kano State Government to understand what their most dire needs were. We ended up importing 10 ventilators and 1,500 face masks. But the big question remained: How do we get these items to Kano State? With the airports still closed, it was obvious to us that the only possible option at the time was to make the long road journey to Kano.
Therefore, we geared up to embark on this trip. I, in the company of Lukmon Oloyede, our Head of Marketing & Communications, and Ibrahim Ibitade, head of the Group’s global payments business left Lagos on Monday, May 18, 2020. We were being conveyed by an experienced driver simply known as Wiseman, in control of the steering wheel of a Jet Mover loaded with us and our COVID materials.
Now, apart from Wiseman, none of us could remember the last time we crossed geo-political zones by road. We were in for a difficult couple of days. The plan was to get to Abuja by Monday night and settle in for a virtual board meeting scheduled for the next day.
But even getting to Abuja was a problem; the number of checkpoints was overwhelming. If we had kept count, we must have gotten to hundred.
At every stop, we had to explain to policemen and soldiers where we were headed, what our mission was, brandishing a letter from the Kano State liaison office. We only reached our destination in Abuja after midnight, way past the FCT curfew (We had begun this journey by 9am).
After our board meeting the next day, we got news that the Kano State Governor was expecting us on Thursday, so we continued our journey the next day. The journey from Abuja to Kano was unexpectedly endless, with all the checkpoints and with the drive through Kaduna seeming like a circumnavigation of the earth. It eventually took us about 9 hours to go from Abuja to our destination in Kano.
The next day, we were received by the Kano State Governor to present our ventilators. It felt good, somewhat satisfying, to hear the Governor, the Kano State Commissioner for Health and the Chairman of the COVID-19 Task Force stress that we have helped to meet a pressing need. That was the point of the whole journey: to meet a pressing need.
The most difficult thing about long and strenuous journeys is when you have to do them all the way back. Having accomplished our mission, we needed to return to Lagos. That night, we made it back to Abuja, after midnight, against Wiseman’s warnings that it was not safe.
And the next morning, we motored back south, back to Lagos. This time around, we missed our way at some point, and had to pass through the inner village routes in Ondo. We are stopped numerous times by the police and vigilantes, spending time to explain ourselves over and over again. We even got to a checkpoint where we had to alight from the vehicle to have our body temperatures checked and our details recorded.
At the end of it all, we were spent and exasperated. But it had all been in the spirit of social responsibility, one of the values that drive us at the Zedcrest Group, a direct channel through which we give back to the society. As we strive to achieve the required growth in our business, we are also committed to improving the wellbeing of the individuals in the communities we do business in.
Preparing for the New Normal
As countries begin to open up and the lockdown restrictions get relaxed and lifted all over the world, we can only continue to move forward and attempt to cover lost grounds.
For that which we have no control over, we learn from. There are so many debates regarding how Nigeria has handled the crisis so far. While some believe that the Government and NCDC did a great job and took the right steps at the right time, others refute this and point to their handling of lockdown and not being able to test enough people.
A particular group, with the benefit of hindsight, believe that it was a mistake to even mandate a lockdown, disrupting economic activities within the country. This group believe that COVID-19, for some reasons, is not as deadly in Africa as it is the other continents. But we all need to move past these debates and ensure that we truly learn from 2020.
For the Federal Government, we should deliberately pass policies that would ensure we fund and prepare our health sector for events like this. Efforts to diversify our revenue and foreign exchange sources away from oil should be heightened.
Businesses should focus on building their strategies around more sustainable processes. It is a time to adjust and modify risk management frameworks, to make provisions that would address the kind of disruption COVID-19 came with.
For us at the Zedcrest Capital Group, it is time for us to go back to our plans for 2020, providing customer-centric financial solutions in the most convenient and efficient ways possible. Our ambitions are still fat and we would still strive to grow significantly, ahead of our 2019 performances. And whenever our communities need us, we will be there; together we shall all “execute brilliantly, and win decisively”.
Ever Obi is the Acting Managing Director of Zedvance Finance Limited
Nigeria’s financial services industry stands at a decisive crossroads as technology leaders prepare for the January 1, 2027, data residency deadline set by the Central Bank of Nigeria. The regulatory mandate requiring all payment transaction records, customer personally identifiable information (PII), and account ledgers to reside within domestic data centres is forcing a structural re-evaluation of banking IT architectures. For executive teams across the country, navigating this transition without interrupting daily banking operations is becoming the ultimate test of leadership.
For years, the industry’s reliance on foreign hyperscale providers delivered quick elasticity and global tools. However, transferring entire production stacks – encompassing real-time transaction processing, API gateways, and fraud scoring engines – back to local infrastructure requires significant engineering effort. With the country handling billions of electronic transactions annually, CIOs are seeking to preserve system uptime while severing deep operational dependencies on foreign data centres.
Experts have opined that the core challenge confronting financial technology teams is the lack of empirical, vendor-neutral benchmarks for domestic cloud platforms. Evaluating whether local data centres can sustain mission-critical financial traffic requires rigorous stress testing rather than relying on theoretical SLAs. The risk of potential downtime during a live migration makes vendor vetting the most crucial phase of the compliance roadmap.
To mitigate these operational risks, infrastructure partners like MTN are mobilising domestic capacity and technical insights tailored for the financial sector. By offering sovereign cloud solutions and collaborative engineering frameworks, MTN is helping CIOs and startups navigate the migration path with minimal disruption. Their localised infrastructure serves as an operational bridge, providing the uptime and data sovereignty assurances that both institutions and regulators require.
Lynda Saint-Nwafor, the Chief Enterprise Business Officer for MTN Nigeria, put it succinctly when she explained the upside of hosting data locally: “Hosting locally means lower latency, faster response times, and compliance with Nigeria’s data regulations. More importantly, it gives Nigerian businesses control, keeping sensitive financial, health, and government data within national borders.”
As the January 2027 benchmark approaches, the metric for success will depend on technical execution and operational discipline across companies.
By Osasikemwen Ighile
For many Nigerian families, the summer holiday is a season of fun, relaxation, and spending quality time together. But with the kids at home, more outings, higher electricity consumption, and extra entertainment costs, it’s also a period when expenses can quietly pile up.
The good news? You don’t have to choose between making memories and managing your finances. With a few smart habits, you can enjoy the holidays while keeping your savings goals on track.
Here are five practical ways to save smarter this summer.
1. Ditch Cash and Spend Smarter
Ever noticed how cash disappears faster than you expected? Whether it’s buying snacks for the kids, paying for transport, or making quick market runs, spending cash can make it difficult to track where your money goes.
Using a debit card can make it easier to track transactions and monitor spending. FairMoney customers can use their debit card for eligible transactions, subject to applicable terms and conditions. You can make payments conveniently at stores, shop online, and easily monitor your transactions. Instead of carrying cash everywhere, you get a clearer picture of your expenses and can avoid unnecessary impulse purchases.
Small changes like this can make a big difference over the course of the holiday.
2. The Kids Are Home—Stay Ahead of Your Utility Bills
School holidays often mean one thing: the TV is almost always on. From cartoons in the morning to football matches in the evening, your cable subscription becomes more important than ever. Add fans, air conditioners, gaming consoles, and other appliances, and it’s easy to see why electricity bills tend to increase during this period.
Rather than waiting until services are disconnected, planning and paying bills on time help households avoid unnecessary late-payment or reconnection charges. FairMoney customers can pay eligible bills and services through the platform, subject to applicable terms and service availability. You can conveniently pay for Cable TV subscriptions, Electricity bills, Internet subscriptions, Airtime and data for the entire family.
Paying bills on time can help reduce the risk of late payment consequences or applicable reconnection charges. Summer is filled with birthdays, outings, family visits, and spontaneous spending. While these moments are worth enjoying, your savings shouldn’t take a holiday.
3. Enjoy the Holidays—but Don’t Pause Your Savings
A simple strategy is to save first before spending. FairMoney customers can also use eligible savings products, such as FairSave and FairTarget, to set aside money towards specific financial goals, subject to the applicable product terms, conditions and eligibility requirements, even if it’s in small amounts. Already planning for the next school term? FairMoney customers can also use eligible savings products, such as FairSave and FairTarget, to set aside money towards specific financial goals, subject to the applicable product terms, conditions and eligibility requirements. Already planning for the next school term? Consider setting aside money regularly towards your school-fee goal. FairTarget can be used to help you organise savings around specific financial goals, subject to the applicable product terms, conditions and eligibility requirements. By starting early and saving consistently, you can better prepare for school-related expenses when the new term begins.
4. Plan Weekly Family Activities Instead of Daily Spending
The holidays don’t have to be expensive to be memorable. Instead of spending money every day on outings, cinemas, or restaurants, create a simple weekly activity plan. One weekend could be a family movie night at home. Another could be a picnic in a nearby park, a cooking competition, indoor games, or a visit to relatives.
Planning activities ahead helps you control spending while still giving everyone something to look forward to. Sometimes, the best memories cost very little.
5. Buy Household Essentials in Bulk
With everyone at home, groceries seem to disappear twice as fast. Instead of making frequent trips to the store, which often lead to impulse purchases, consider buying regularly used items in bulk.
Depending on the retailer and quantity purchased, some household essentials may offer better value when purchased in bulk.. You’ll spend less on transportation, reduce unplanned shopping, and avoid running out of important items.
Summer should be about creating happy memories not financial headaches. By spending more intentionally, paying your bills on time, planning ahead, and staying committed to your savings goals, you can enjoy everything the season has to offer without putting unnecessary pressure on your finances.
A few smart habits today can make the months ahead much easier. And that’s a win for every household.
Osasikemwen Ighile is the Brand Manager for FairMoney Microfinance Bank
Feature/OPED
Beyond the Screen: How Sports and Entertainment Keep Nigeria’s Economy Moving
When we talk about Nigeria’s economy, the conversation usually centres on oil and gas, banking, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. But there is another industry quietly creating jobs and driving economic activity: entertainment and sports. Most times, we only see the finished product. We watch the show, cheer during the match and move on to the […]
When we talk about Nigeria’s economy, the conversation usually centres on oil and gas, banking, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. But there is another industry quietly creating jobs and driving economic activity: entertainment and sports. Most times, we only see the finished product. We watch the show, cheer during the match and move on to the next thing. What we do not always see is the amount of work that happens before those moments reach our screens.
Take Big Brother Naija
When viewers tune in and see the housemates moving around the Big Brother house, it is easy to forget that the house itself is a product of many people’s work. From the interior designers and set builders who create the spaces to the electricians, carpenters, painters and technicians who bring them to life, an entire team works behind the scenes before the first episode even begins.
Once the cameras start rolling, the list gets even longer. Producers, directors, camera operators, sound engineers, editors, stylists, makeup artists, caterers, production assistants and security personnel all have a role to play. Then there is everything that happens outside the house. Publicists, photographers, videographers, digital teams, content creators and media platforms all contribute to keeping the conversation going. The housemates may be the faces audiences remember, but they are only one part of a much bigger entertainment ecosystem.
Sports have a similar impact
When the Super Falcons play a major game, the focus is naturally on the players and what happens on the pitch. But outside the stadium, the game can mean business for viewing centres, food vendors, restaurants and bars. Sports analysts and commentators have more to cover, content creators have something new to create around and businesses selling jerseys and football merchandise get an opportunity to make sales.
A major sporting event can turn an ordinary evening into a busy one for businesses that have little to do with what happens on the pitch. That is the part of sports and entertainment that is easy to overlook. The value is not only in the stars we see or the content we consume. It is also in the network of people whose skills and businesses keep these industries moving.
And this is where DStv and GOtv become an important part of the picture. They do more than give audiences access to the shows, matches and moments they care about. They connect the people producing this content with millions of viewers who keep the industry going.
Every time someone tunes in to Big Brother Naija, follows the Super Falcons or settles in for a major sporting event, they are engaging with an industry that supports producers, creatives, technicians, businesses and other professionals.
The impact of sports and entertainment, therefore, goes beyond what happens on the screen. By bringing some of the biggest entertainment and sporting moments to Nigerian audiences, DStv and GOtv help keep this ecosystem active, visible and working. Because sometimes, when we sit down to watch, we are not just consuming entertainment. We are also supporting an industry that provides jobs.
