By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD

Every generation of Nigerian politics likes to imagine that its quarrel is unprecedented, that its betrayals are original, that its intrigue is wearing a crown no earlier intrigue ever touched. But Nigerian politics is an old drummer. It changes songs, not rhythm. The names change. The costumes improve. The microphones get better. Yet the same questions keep returning like harmattan dust: What is opposition for? Is it a moral force, a strategic waiting room, or merely a branch office of the ruling instinct?

To ask that question seriously is to walk back into the haunted chamber of Awolowo and Akintola. What began as a struggle inside the Action Group was not just a disagreement between two brilliant men. It was a collision of political temperaments, ideological direction, ambition, and the larger architecture of power in Nigeria. Awolowo, who moved to the federal centre as opposition leader after 1959, was increasingly identified with a broader ideological project. Akintola, by contrast, came to embody a more conservative, region-focused and business-oriented current, and his openness to working with the Northern-dominated federal establishment deepened the rupture. By mid-1962, Awolowo’s camp had repudiated Akintola; the federal government declared a state of emergency in the Western Region and restored him in 1963. The bitterness of that split, and the wreckage that followed, helped poison the First Republic.

That is why the Awolowo-Akintola feud still matters. It was not gossip in an agbada. It was an early Nigerian lesson that opposition can die in two ways. It can be strangled from outside by a hostile ruling order. Or, more dangerously, it can decay from within, when conviction gives way to access, when strategy becomes personal survival, when party machinery becomes a theatre of ego. The Western crisis was, in that sense, not only about who should lead. It was about whether opposition should remain an instrument of principle or become a bargaining chip in the market of power.

Kano and Kaduna then enter the story like twin furnaces of northern political memory. Kano carries the old radical grammar of Aminu Kano, NEPU, Sawaba, talakawa politics, the language of emancipation rather than patronage. Oxford’s entry on Aminu Kano notes his struggle against corruption and oppression in the emirate order and his commitment to democratizing Northern Nigeria. The PRP’s own profile, lodged with INEC, explicitly roots itself in NEPU’s legacy and recalls that the PRP had two state governments in the Second Republic: Kaduna and Kano. In other words, both states are not accidental footnotes in the story of Nigerian opposition. They are ancestral terrain.

Then came 1999 and the Fourth Republic, with the PDP arriving not merely as a party but as a vast political weather system. Founded in 1998 and quickly becoming dominant, winning the presidency and legislative majorities in 1999 and retained national control for years. Opposition existed, yes, but it was fragmented, regional, underpowered, and often more symbolic than threatening. That era did not abolish opposition. It domesticated it.

The great interruption came in 2013, when the APC was formed through the merger of major opposition forces. That merger worked because it answered a Nigerian truth older than any campaign slogan: power rarely yields to scattered complaint. It yields to a disciplined coalition. The APC emerged from the merger of ACN, CPC, ANPP, and part of APGA, and in 2015, Buhari’s victory marked the first time an incumbent was defeated and the first inter-party transfer of power in Nigeria’s post-independence history. Reuters described it plainly as a historic democratic transfer. For a brief moment, opposition in Nigeria looked like more than lamentation. It looked like a ladder.

But even that victory carried a warning label. The problem with Nigerian opposition is that once it wins, it often stops being opposition in spirit and becomes merely the next landlord in the same building. An academic review of Nigeria’s democratic journey notes that the APC and PDP share many structural defects, and even cites the broader judgment that little distinguishes the two main parties because both are fluid elite networks with weak ideology. That diagnosis is painful because it explains so much. In Nigeria, opposition too often opposes only until the gates open. After that, the vocabulary changes, but the appetite stays the same.

This is where Kano and Kaduna become especially revealing from 1999 till now. Kano has repeatedly shown a willingness to defy neat national binaries, and in the 2023 election, it backed Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP in the presidential race while also electing Abba Kabir Yusuf of the NNPP as governor. Kaduna told a different but equally interesting story: it voted Atiku Abubakar of the PDP in the presidential contest, yet elected APC’s Uba Sani as governor. CDD West Africa described the 2023 election as unusually fragmented, noting that all four major presidential contenders won at least one state and that states like Kano, Lagos, and Rivers split among three different parties. So, Kano and Kaduna have not been passive spectators in the Nigerian democratic drama. They have been laboratories of resistance, fragmentation, coalition, and contradiction.

And now we arrive at the present crossroads, where the phrase “one-party state” is no longer a tavern exaggeration but a live political argument. Reuters reported in May 2025 that the APC endorsed President Tinubu for a second term while the opposition was widely seen as too divided and weak to mount a serious challenge, with high-profile defections strengthening the ruling party. AP later reported Tinubu’s denial that Nigeria was being turned into a one-party state, even as several governors and federal lawmakers had left opposition parties for the APC. By February 2026, major opposition leaders, including Atiku, Peter Obi, and Amaechi, were jointly rejecting the new Electoral Act, calling it anti-democratic and warning that it could help install a one-party order. Tinubu, for his part, has continued to insist that democracy requires room for the minority to speak.

So, is Nigeria now a one-party state? Not formally. Not yet. There are still multiple parties, multiple ambitions, multiple resentments, and multiple routes to elite reassembly. But that is not the only question that matters. A country can avoid the legal shell of one-party rule and still drift into the political culture of one-party dominance. That drift happens when the ruling party becomes the default shelter for frightened politicians, when defections replace debate, when opposition parties become war zones of internal ego, and when citizens begin to see parties not as platforms of principle but as bus stops for the next powerful convoy. The danger is less a constitutional decree than a democratic evaporation.

This is why the ghosts of Awolowo and Akintola are still standing by the roadside, watching us. Their quarrel warned that opposition without internal discipline can collapse into treachery, and that power at the centre always knows how to exploit a divided house. Kano reminds us that opposition can spring from social memory, from the stubborn dignity of people who do not always vote as ordered. Kaduna reminds us that politics is rarely simple, that a state can host both establishment power and insurgent sentiment in the same electoral season. And the Fourth Republic reminds us that opposition in Nigeria only works when it is more than noise, more than wounded ambition, more than a coalition of temporarily unemployed strongmen.

The real Nigerian danger, then, is not that one party will conquer the entire country by brilliance alone. It is that the opposition will continue to fail by habit. If opposition is only a queue for access, then the ruling party will keep eating its rivals one defection at a time. If, however, opposition rediscovers ideology, internal democracy, regional credibility, and the courage to look different from what it condemns, then the old republic may still whisper a useful lesson into the new one.

Awolowo and Akintola were not just fighting over a party. They were fighting over the soul of the political alternative in Nigeria. That battle never ended—May Nigeria win!

By Vivian Imoh-Ita

Across African banking, the conversation is shifting from “inclusion as intent” to “inclusion as performance.” Margin pressure, recapitalisation conversations, digitisation, and tighter risk expectations are forcing a hard question: where will sustainable, low-volatility growth come from in the next cycle?   One answer is hiding in plain sight: women-led enterprises, underfunded, underserved, and consistently productive.

In Nigeria’s informal economy, where cash flow is real but documentation is uneven, the institutions that win will be the ones that price risk with better signals, distribute at scale, and convert trust into long-term financial relationships. Too often, women’s economic participation is framed as a social commitment rather than a commercial imperative.

That framing is expensive: when we fail to design capital, products, and distribution around the realities of women in business, we don’t just exclude customers, we misprice opportunity and leave growth on the table. Women in Nigeria are not waiting to be “empowered” before they build.

They are already trading, employing, and sustaining households at scale. The real constraint is not capability; it is the fit between how finance is structured and how women-owned businesses actually operate: cash-flow patterns, collateral realities, and the need for speed, trust, and advisory alongside capital.

Three practical frictions show up repeatedly: Collateral versus cash-flow: many viable women-run businesses are cash-generative but asset-light, so collateral-heavy underwriting excludes the very segment banks say they want. Information gaps: when transactions happen outside formal rails, banks see “thin files.”

But thin files are not the same as high risk; they are a data problem that better design and alternative signals can solve. Time-to-cash matters: entrepreneurs often need small, fast working-capital decisions, not slow processes built for corporate cycles.

Speed is a risk tool when it is paired with the right controls. Nigeria has roughly 23 million women entrepreneurs in the micro-business segment, one of the highest rates of female entrepreneurship globally.

Women account for 41% of  SME ownership, and SMEs contribute nearly half of the national GDP. Yet access to formal finance remains disproportionately low: women receive only about 10% of loans from financial service providers, and an estimated 98% of women entrepreneurs still lack access to formal credit.

An internal strategy analysis drawing on EFInA/Global Findex/SMEDAN data shows a structural gap: 41% of Nigerian women are financially excluded (vs 33% for men), and while 39% of women borrowed from multiple sources, only 4% accessed a bank loan.

Across Africa, the financing gap for women-led businesses is estimated at $42 billion. This is not a “nice-to-have” agenda. McKinsey Global Institute’s The Power of Parity estimates that advancing women’s equality could add up to $12 trillion to global GDP.

The IMF has estimated that equal participation by women could lift GDP by as much as 40% in some countries. For Nigeria, an analysis cited by the Council on Foreign Relations, drawing on McKinsey’s data, projects that closing the gender gap in economic participation could increase GDP by 23%.

For banks, the implication is straight-forward: women-led enterprises are not a niche; they are a mass-market growth opportunity. Unlocking it requires moving from “product availability” to “product usability”: cash-flow-based lending, simpler onboarding, distribution through digital and agent rails, and trust-by-design (clear pricing, consumer protection, and strong data privacy). Usage is what creates the data to lend responsibly at scale.

There is also a practical reason the returns are outsized: women tend to reinvest more of what they earn into their families and communities, often cited as up to 90%, driving a multiplier effect that shows up in education, health outcomes, and local employment.

For financial institutions, that multiplier is not just a story; it is a durable pathway to deposit growth, transaction volume, credit performance, and long-term customer value. I have seen this play out across Nigeria, in every state and market. The woman selling clothes in Balogun Market employs three other women and sends five children to school.

The general merchandise trader in Onitsha Market is the economic anchor of her extended family. Each of these women is a multiplier, and each of them started with someone, somewhere, giving her a loan, a skill, an opportunity, a chance. That is the “Give to Gain” principle made real. Giving is not a subtraction. It is, as this year’s IWD campaign puts it, intentional multiplication.

At Union Bank, we treat women’s financial inclusion as a core product strategy, not CSR, because the commercial logic is clear. When a woman builds financial capability, she doesn’t just open an account. She saves,  transacts, borrows responsibly, expands her business footprint, and brings others with her.

We also understand that distribution is a strategy. Union Bank’s UnionDirect agency banking network operates over 58,000 agents across rural and underserved communities, extending access to deposits, withdrawals, and micro-lending where branches cannot cover the economics.

We have also disbursed over  N50 billion in micro-lending to smallholder farmers, market women, and informal entrepreneurs, because inclusion only becomes real when it is usable, frequent, and local.

In a market where a large share of working women operates in the informal sector, bringing women into the formal financial system through savings, digital banking, micro-lending, and insurance is a material growth frontier. Multiple studies across emerging markets also show women often have lower default rates than men, reinforcing what many banks observe in practice: disciplined cash management and strong repayment culture when products are designed around real operating conditions.

That is why we created alpher, Union Bank’s women’s banking proposition launched in 2020 and aligned with SDG5 on Gender Equality. Alpher is designed for the Nigerian woman, whether she is an entrepreneur, a working professional, or managing household finances. For women in business, alpher combines tailored loans and savings plans with capacity-building, mentorship, and practical masterclasses, because capital without capability yields fragile outcomes. alpher is built around a simple promise: practical financial solutions, support systems, savings and investment options,   discounted loans,   personal and professional development,  mentorship/coaching/networking, discounted healthcare plans,  and lifestyle/business discounts.

Operationally, we segment customers into individuals (professionals and entrepreneurs), women-led organisations, and organisations that support women in their workforce and supply chains. Hence, the service is relevant, not generic.

Practically, that has meant designing access to credit with reduced collateral requirements, recognising that traditional collateral models were not built around women’s asset ownership patterns.

It has also meant investing deliberately in skills, entrepreneurship, bookkeeping, pricing, digital commerce, and personal finance, so that funding translates into resilience, not just activity.

One initiative I am particularly proud of is the alpher Fair. In this marketplace concept, we open our premises (and those of partners) to women entrepreneurs to sell directly to customers, employees, and partner networks.

It creates immediate market access, strengthens visibility, and proves a simple point: scaling women-owned businesses is often about building pipelines of customers, information, and trust, not just issuing loans. Beyond our own programmes, we partner to scale outcomes.

In May 2025, through alpher, Union Bank sponsored the Nigerian British Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) Women and Youth Entrepreneurship Development Centre (WYEDC) Cohort 2 Programme, which graduated 125 entrepreneurs who benefited from entrepreneurship training and business grants.  At the graduation, we hosted a pitch segment that awarded funding to standout entrepreneurs. This is the point: capability building is not “soft.”

It is pipeline development for stronger businesses and better credit outcomes. Importantly, alpher sits within Union Bank’s broader retail and SME ecosystem, loan products, business advisory, digital payment infrastructure, and growth workshops, so customers can access funding, learn how to deploy it, connect to mentors and peers, and gain visibility for their businesses.

The objective is straightforward: build businesses that last. The next phase of banking growth in Nigeria will favour institutions that translate insight into design products that reflect customer reality, distribution that meets customers where they are, and risk models that recognise performance beyond legacy collateral. Backing women-led enterprise is not a campaign; it is a competitive advantage.

The forward-looking question is whether we will build the rails, capital, capability, digital trust, and market access fast enough to earn the growth already waiting in plain sight. If we are serious about inclusive growth, we should be equally serious about inclusive balance sheets and about building the underwriting, data, and distribution models that make inclusion commercially sustainable.

Vivian Imoh-Ita is Head, Retail & SME Business at Union Bank of Nigeria, with a focus on building retail and SME propositions that drive inclusion, growth, and long-term customer value

By Olumide Balogun

Picture this scenario. You are at a fun party in Lagos. Amidst the sea of colourful jackets and perfectly tailored pants, you spot a guest wearing a pair of striking sneakers that perfectly blend modern streetwear with traditional Aso-Oke fabric. You want to buy a pair immediately. The music is loud, and the guest is across the banquet hall. A few years ago, you would simply have to wonder who made them. Today, you pull out your smartphone, tap the camera icon in your search app, and snap a quick photo. Within seconds, the technology identifies the exact local designer, shows you product reviews, and provides a direct link to their online store.

As the great Chinua Achebe famously wrote, “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”

The modern Nigerian consumer has certainly moved. They are actively experiencing the world visually, turning their smartphone cameras into their primary shopping tool. Nigerians are highly optimistic about this technological shift. In fact, 80% of Nigerians are more excited about the possibilities of AI, versus just 20% who are more concerned. This enthusiasm translates directly to commerce and innovation. Currently, 80% of Nigerians are using AI to explore a new business or career change, nearly double the global average of 42%. For Nigerian marketers, understanding this shift is the exact key to unlocking unprecedented business growth.

We are witnessing a massive transformation in how people consume media and discover products. YouTube watch time in Nigeria recently jumped by over 55% year over year. Our incredibly young, digital native population is actively redefining the media landscape by immersing themselves in video and visual content. Consequently, they are moving rapidly toward visual and video-led discovery.

The Rise of Visual Search. The modern Nigerian shopper uses their camera to ask questions. Globally, Lens is used for over 20 billion visual searches every month. Features like Circle to Search and video understanding allow users to interact with their surroundings instantly.

A shopper can now circle a fashion item they spot in a social media video or use their camera to scan a product in real life to find out more. Gen Z consumers are leading this charge. They use visual search to effortlessly discover products they cannot easily describe with words. They see something they love, and they use their camera to find it.

Making the Real World Shoppable. This visual behaviour creates a powerful new reality for retail. Imagine a consumer walking through a busy mall and spotting a stylish backpack in a store window. They simply tap the Lens icon on their phone and snap a photo. Instantly, they see a highly helpful results page showing product reviews, price comparisons across different retailers, and direct links to buy.

Google is integrating Shopping Ads directly into these visual search results. Advertisers can now connect with highly motivated shoppers at the exact moment their interest is piqued. The opportunity for businesses is immense, considering 1 in every 4 visual search queries done using Google Lens has a commercial intent. Your product can appear right alongside the items people are photographing out in the real world, turning everyday inspiration into immediate sales.

Video as the New Storefront. This visual revolution extends directly into online video. With YouTube becoming the primary screen for many Nigerians, video serves as the new digital storefront. Consumers turn to YouTube to discover trends, learn new skills, and make confident purchase decisions based on trusted creator reviews.

Brands must capture customer interest while users are deeply engaged in this video content. Google’s Demand Gen campaigns make this process highly effective. These AI-driven campaigns take your best video and image assets and automatically serve them across YouTube and other visual platforms. The results speak for themselves. Advertisers are more likely to say Google Search and YouTube drive business growth more than any other paid advertising platforms.

Step Into the Frame The language of commerce is increasingly visual. Nigerian consumers are already using their cameras and screens to navigate their shopping journeys. Marketers who embrace this visual commerce revolution will build stronger, more profitable connections with their audiences.

By optimising your visual product assets, leveraging AI tools like Demand Gen, and preparing for ads in visual search, you position your brand right at the heart of the modern shopping experience. The camera is the most powerful tool in your customer’s hand today. It is time for your business to step into the frame.

Olumide Balogun is the Director for Google West Africa