Opinion
A Sardauna’s path in Kwara By Rafiu Ajakaye
There is a reason Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, Sardauna of Ilorin, enjoys his solo moves within or outside of the state capital: he, among other things, fears the genuflection and the praise-singing that may get in the way of his primary assignment if everyone is in the know.
That habit is grossly misunderstood, but he is contented with seeing things without the fillers and being able to focus on his work while attracting lesser attention to himself.
Like every human being, he welcomes being accorded his due without the praises that come with the political environment. He scoffs at sycophancy and purposeless exposure. Instead, he encourages constructive criticisms for better governance outcomes.
This attitude explains his disapproval of celebrations on his birthdays as a sitting Governor. He fears that the sudden celebration does not last and there is no basis encouraging it. This is fine, although there is a thin line between telling the story of an individual for posterity and buttering them up for whatever purpose.
Regardless, I am persuaded by Edward Said’s statement that ‘nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture’.
As he clocked 65 a few hours ago, bookmakers have a lot to document about the seventh democratic Governor of Kwara State whose tenure is synonymous with unmatched rebuilding and modernisation of the capital city Ilorin, rural development, youth and women empowerment, gender inclusion, and countless economic initiatives that have steadily put the people back to productive work.
Apart from his legacy projects, which are unrivalled in the history of the state, he has effected profound psychosocial reforms with his approach to governance, which many consider strange. His style and personal discipline have put government appointees on a leash.
Along with his no-siren movement and the spartan style, his decision to discontinue the everyday gathering and merriment in Government House, a relic of the past years, is a strong message that attention must now be paid to higher productivity.
A party chieftain recently told me: ‘That style appeared painful and distant at the beginning, but it is really reshaping the mindset of our people. Except for a few people, you hardly see any crowd hanging around the party secretariat these days except during important events. It is a good thing. It simply tells our people to do something much more meaningful, rather than loitering around politicians. It is good for everyone as it restores the dignity of the human person, and I hope his successor does the same.’
The Governor is very nostalgic about the Ilorin of his childhood. He strongly believes in restoring sanity to the GRA, especially — devoid of the health-shattering loud disco music in the evenings— and much of what ought to constitute the central business district of the capital city. A story is told of an old couple who complained that their health had deteriorated with some unhealthy practices within the GRA, a narrative that apparently aligns with his sentiment.
This is a reason he feels that the Kwara Hotel, a fit-for-purpose relaxation facility outside of residentials, must regain its status along with other well-located premium hospitality facilities in the state. This is a critical public health issue, as it is about appropriate land use and sustainable living.
His reforms are not without its critics. Yet true leaders, once convinced of the genuineness of their actions, should not fear being heckled. The sense of pride and the excitement with which Kwarans have received the new look of the capital city have drowned out the criticisms from the political opposition.
Abdulrazaq is a typical leader trapped at the intersection of history, the current realities of the digital age, and the capacity of his own people, Kwarans. This is why his decisions are mostly dictated by the geography, demography, and history of the state, sometimes ruffling feathers.
Restoring the proper land use and aesthetics of the GRA and environs reflects his interrogation of history, such as the location and naming of the Sugar Factory film studios to remind younger generations of the Tate & Lyle. The garment factory, the largest in Nigeria in one single location, brought to memory the legacy of cloth-making and enterprise for which Kwarans were known, while the bespoke Innovation Hub speaks to his understanding of how technology has redesigned how we live in this century.
Governor Abdulrazaq understands that Kwara has one of the largest concentration of shea trees in the country, explaining his establishment of two factories in Kaiama and Baruten in the shea belt, the former being one of the biggest in the country.
He is currently rebuilding the Patigi Motel to resuscitate the regatta, a dream now strengthened by the establishment of the Kampe National Park in the same axis. The Governor is fascinated by the successes of the Okin Biscuits in Offa and Jebba paper mills, but his dream for the two is hampered by boardroom politics and decay in which they are long trapped. The visual arts centre heralds his vision for creativity, tourism, and sports development, explaining the investment in the Owu Water Fall road, eight-winged squash court, international conference centre, and the resuscitation of the indoor sports hall, table tennis area, among others.
Along with dozens of rural roads that connect towns and agrarian communities, the Governor has recently delivered the Osi and Ilesha Baruba campuses of Kwara State University, a pointer to his effort to ensure statewide development and roll back rural urban migration.
The focus on Offa and Lafiagi Stadia this year will strengthen this effort, as would the ongoing Shonga ICT Centre and the upcoming rehabilitation of the Patigi Cultural Centre.
He believes that the capital city is filled up and growing informally. This has consequences for sustainable living in the future. The Ilorin smart city, his brainchild, is to allow for a well-planned physical development.
But his dreams will require a successor who views Kwara as a state in a race to fulfil its destiny, bolstered by its geography, culture, and the lofty aspirations of its people. From health, education, agribusiness, social protection, and infrastructure, his successor will be lucky to inherit a template to move faster, possibly less encumbered by the hugely entrenched prebendary politics that stared Abdulrazaq in the face.
His achievements are a new record breaker in the annals of Kwara. He has hired up to 8,600 teachers between 2019 and now, the highest that any (Kwara) administration has employed since 1999, while his KwaraLEARN continues to improve literacy, numeracy, and general learning outcomes.
Abdulrazaq’s handling of sensitive issues of national importance proves his bonafide as a true leader who, like Konrad Adenauer, prefers dialogue, strategic humility, consensus-building, and patience in place of grandstanding and media show. In deference to the President, whom he holds in high esteem, and in national interest, he convinced his colleagues of the need to work out a consensus tax policy for Nigeria. He had acted in the same way following the subsidy removal, the transitional difficulties, and the multifaceted responses to mitigate the effects on the public. He proved that such sensitive moments require leaders to act with extreme caution — a quality that speaks to his standing as the Sardauna of the southernmost emirate in Nigeria.
▪︎ Rafiu Ajakaye is Chief Press Secretary to the Governor
“The number that gets you celebrated is often the number that should make you nervous.”Somewhere in African tech right now, a founder just crossed 50,000 users.They screenshot it. They post it. The reactions come quickly; congratulations, fire emojis, “next stop 500k.”It looks like progress. It feels like traction.But most times, it’s neither.It’s acquisition doing its job, not your product.The number that liesUser count is the easiest metric to celebrate — and the easiest to misread.It only goes up. It creates the illusion of momentum even when nothing underneath is working.Because user count doesn’t measure behaviour.It doesn’t tell you who came back after day 7. Who completed a second transaction by choice. Who is still active three months later. Who only showed up because of an incentive that will never repeat.So what looks like 50,000 users is often something else entirely:12,000 retained. 8,000 occasional. 30,000 gone.That is not traction. That is a dataset. And a dataset only has value if you’re willing to read it honestly.What 50,000 users actually is50,000 users is not validation. It’s exposure.It’s the point where your product has been used enough that the patterns are no longer noise, and the truth becomes visible whether you want to see it or not.Your retention curve is already telling a story. Your best acquisition channels are already clear. Your weakest product moments are already exposed.The signal is there. The only question is whether your team is looking at it or celebrating over it.In the words of my CEO: “We need to understand the numbers before making any decision.”It sounds simple. Most teams skip it anyway.Because growth at this stage does one of two things — it amplifies something that works, or it scales something that is already broken. Most teams don’t know which one they’re doing. And they won’t find out until scale makes the problem impossible to ignore.The ecosystem problemThis isn’t just a founder issue. The ecosystem rewards the wrong numbers.Investors ask for user counts. Media platforms publish them. Accelerators highlight them.Because they are simple. They are impressive. They travel well.”50,000 users” sounds better than “12,000 retained users with consistent repeat behaviour”, even though the second number is worth ten times more.So founders optimise for visibility. And in doing that, they move further away from the truth that would actually help them build something lasting.What to do instead?If you’ve just crossed 50,000 users, don’t rush to post. Interrogate the number.Pull your cohort data. Who is still here? Who came back without being pushed? What behaviour repeats naturally without a promo propping it up? Find your real users, not your total users. Then build for the ones who stayed.Because growth without retention isn’t growth. It’s leakage with a good-looking dashboard.The part most teams avoidAt 50,000 users, you are no longer guessing.You have enough data to know whether your product is actually working. What most teams avoid is not the data, it’s what the data implies.That the product may not be as strong as the numbers suggest. That acquisition may be masking weak retention. That growth may be happening in exactly the wrong direction.Looking at that honestly is harder than screenshotting a milestone. But it’s the only thing that separates founders who scale something real from founders who scale something fragile.50,000 users doesn’t mean you’ve found product-market fit. It means your product can no longer hide.The question is no longer “are we growing?” It’s “Is this worth growing?”
Inside most companies, product, growth, and brand exist as separate functions with shared goals but different incentives. Product is focused on building, Growth is focused on scaling and Brand is focused on perception. In theory, they should reinforce each other. In practice, they often operate in tension.Product optimizes for functionality and delivery timelines. Growth optimizes for acquisition and conversion. Brand attempts to create coherence across both, often after key decisions have already been made. The result is misalignment that is subtle at first but compounds over time.The product promises one thing through design and capability; growth amplifies another through messaging and campaigns, brand tries to reconcile both into a narrative that feels consistent, and users experience the gaps. This is not a communication failure. It is a systems failure.Alignment does not happen at the level of messaging. It happens at the level of decision-making. To understand this, it helps to reframe what each function is actually responsible for. Product is not just building features. It is defining what the system does, how it behaves, and what users can reliably expect. Growth is not just acquiring users. It is setting expectations at scale. Every campaign, every headline, every incentive communicates a version of reality that users will later validate against their experience. Brand is not decoration. It is the governance layer that ensures what is said, what is built, and what is experienced are in sync. When these roles are not clearly understood, misalignment becomes inevitable.A common pattern looks like this. Growth identifies a compelling angle that drives acquisition. Speed, for example. Instant payouts. Fast transactions. Seamless experience. The message performs well, acquisition increases, but the product, constrained by infrastructure or operational realities, cannot consistently deliver on that promise under all conditions. Delays happen, edge cases emerge and exceptions increase as scale grows. Brand is then forced into a reactive position of managing perception, adjusting language and explaining gaps, and trying to maintain trust while the underlying system is still stabilizing. This is where most companies begin to erode credibility without realizing it, not because they intended to mislead, but because their system allowed expectation to outpace reliability.True alignment requires a different approach. It starts with a shared definition of truth within the company. What can the product consistently deliver today, not occasionally or under ideal conditions, but reliably across real use cases. This becomes the foundation. Growth does not amplify the best-case scenario. It amplifies the most dependable reality. This may feel less exciting, but it creates a stable feedback loop where user expectations are consistently met or exceeded. Brand then encodes this into clear, repeatable signals, language that reflects reality, positioning that users can verify through experience and a narrative that does not need to be defended because it is continuously proven.As the product improves, the ceiling of what can be communicated expands. Growth scales what is already working and Brand evolves the narrative without breaking continuity. This creates compounding trust.The alternative is far more common. Growth leads with aspiration. Product catches up under pressure, and Brand manages the gap. While this can drive short-term metrics, it introduces long-term instability. Users learn to discount messaging; internal teams begin to operate with different versions of truth and decision-making becomes fragmented.The alignment, then, is not about collaboration meetings or shared documents. It is about sequencing and discipline. Product defines reality, Growth scales reality, and Brand ensures reality is understood the same way everywhere. Anything outside this order creates distortion.The companies that sustain trust over time are not the ones with the most aggressive growth strategies or the most creative campaigns. They are the ones where what is promised, what is built, and what is experienced are tightly coupled. Because in the end, users do not evaluate functions. They evaluate outcomes. And alignment is what makes those outcomes feel intentional, not accidental.About the authorEmemobong Udofot E. is a branding and communications executive specialising in strategy, systems thinking, and trust design within financial technology. She currently leads Branding and Communications at FlashChange, a digital value exchange platform focused on enabling reliable, efficient movement of digital assets.Her work sits at the intersection of brand, product, and growth, where she focuses on building coherent systems that align what companies promise with what users consistently experience. With a strong grounding in behavioural insight and market dynamics, she brings a structured, operator-led perspective to how trust is built, communicated, and sustained in low-trust environments.Through her writing, Ememobong explores the deeper mechanics of user behaviour, credibility, and execution in emerging markets, offering clear models and practical thinking shaped by real-world application
For years, Africa’s financial story has been told through one statistic: millions of people remain unbanked. But that framing may already be outdated. The more interesting question today is not whether Africans have bank accounts. It is whether banking itself is quietly becoming optional.Across parts of Africa, people are beginning to interact with money without ever touching a traditional bank in the way previous generations did, and stablecoins are at the centre of that shift.Most people still think stablecoins are “crypto” that is the wrong framework. Speculation is not the real story here. Infrastructure is.A stablecoin is simply a digital asset tied to a stable currency, usually the US dollar. Unlike Bitcoin, its value is designed not to fluctuate wildly. But what makes stablecoins important is not the technology itself. It is what they remove.They remove waiting, they remove borders, and they remove conversion friction. And increasingly, they remove dependence on local banking limitations.That changes everything in places where financial inefficiency is expensive.In many African countries, people are not running toward stablecoins because they are fascinated by blockchain technology. They are running toward predictability.A freelancer in Lagos working for a client in London does not want a seven-day transfer process with multiple deductions. A business owner importing goods does not want to lose value between currency conversion windows. A family receiving money from abroad does not want remittance fees eating into already stretched income.Stablecoins solve a very different problem than traditional banks were originally built to solve.Banks were designed around geography. Stablecoins operate around connectivity. That distinction matters more than most people realize.Traditional banking assumes you are financially tied to where you live. Stablecoins assume you are connected to wherever value is moving globally. One system is location-based. The other is internet-based.That is why this shift feels bigger than fintech. What many people call “crypto adoption” in Africa is actually a redesign of financial behaviour. People are choosing speed over institution, access over paperwork and utility over legacy trust systems.Here is what some analysis miss:Stablecoins are not replacing banks because banks are failing completely. They are replacing specific banking functions that no longer justify their friction.That is an important distinction.People still need lending, they still need compliance, they still need financial protection. And they still need identity verification and business financing. But they may no longer need banks to move value from Point A to Point B.That layer is becoming modular. The smartest way to understand this is through what I call the “three-layer money framework.”- Layer one is storage.Where money sits.- Layer two is movement.How money travels.- Layer three is trust.Who legitimacy is verified, and security guaranteedFor decades, banks controlled all three layers simultaneously.Stablecoins are dismantling them.Now, money can be stored in one place, moved through another system entirely and verified by a different network altogether. That unbundling is the real disruption.Africa may become one of the fastest adopters of this model because necessity accelerates innovation faster than convenience ever will.In regions with stable banking systems, people tolerate friction because the system already works reasonably well. In emerging markets, inefficiency creates pressure for alternatives much faster.This is why some African users understand the practical value of stablecoins more clearly than people in wealthier economies do.To them, this is not theory. It is operational. But there is also a danger in oversimplifying what comes next.Stablecoins are not a magic replacement for financial systems. They introduce new risks: regulatory uncertainty, fraud exposure, platform dependency and digital literacy gaps. A financial system cannot scale sustainably without governance.That means the future probably does not belong entirely to banks or entirely to decentralized systems, it belongs to hybrids.Banks that understand this early will survive differently. Instead of competing against stablecoins, they will integrate them. The winners may not be the institutions with the largest branches, but the ones that reduce friction fastest because the future of finance in Africa may not be about who holds the money.It may be about who makes money move most intelligently and that is a very different game from traditional banking.
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