Build for Nigeria’s worst day, says OPay COO Dotun Adekunle

Nigeria’s technology market is usually described by its problems, from unreliable infrastructure to a volatile economy. Dotun Daniel Adekunle, OPay’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer, argues that the country’s most durable companies are the ones built to survive its worst days.

“Stubbornness is a business model in Africa,” Adekunle said in a keynote titled “Markets That Refuse to Break” at Moonshot by TechCabal on 28 October. A market this hard, he argued, rewards companies that keep adapting to local conditions.

On 9 October, OPay filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The filing shows revenue of $467.1 million in the first half of 2026, up from $197.5 million a year earlier, with lending overtaking payments as its largest business. Nigeria supplied 89.5% of that revenue, and the filing lists credit risk and regulation among the main threats to the business.

Adekunle pointed to the 2023 cash crunch as an example. When the naira redesign left Nigerians short of cash, transfers surged and bank apps buckled under the load. The number of payments on the NIBSS Instant Payment system jumped 45.5% in February 2023, while their total value fell 5.12%, as Nigerians moved small, everyday spending onto transfers. OPay, Adekunle said, held up because of its nationwide agent network.

“You have to adapt to the local environment, or you’ll die,” he said. “Technology is designed for the local reality.”

On August 30, a fake notice spread online claiming OPay would shut down on 1 September and urging customers to withdraw their money. Some did. OPay denied it, the Central Bank of Nigeria called it false, and police arrested a woman on 4 September over the post. “When we had the issue, we had to bring the market together because it could be you the next day,” Adekunle said. “Resilience cannot be achieved alone.”

His argument is that markets rarely break companies on their own. “Fragile markets don’t break businesses, fragile assumptions do,” he said. He named three assumptions builders should drop: that they can design for an average day, that technology can stand in for people, and that regulators are opponents. Regulation, he said, should be treated as a design input.

He closed by urging builders to treat the world as their operating system. “If you can survive Nigeria, you can survive the world,” he said. “Let’s have the courage and conviction to take on the world, because if Nigeria can’t break you, the world cannot break you.”

Source: TechCabal (Africa)