By Omoruyi ‘Uyilaw’ Edoigiawerie, Esq
There is a peculiar Nigerian talent for celebrating the announcement of a solution long before the problem it was designed to solve has been addressed.
We commission buildings before asking whether they will serve their intended purpose. We launch initiatives before establishing how they will be funded. We announce policies, organise stakeholder engagements, take photographs, issue communiqués and move on to the next big thing.
The applause is often deafening. The accountability, considerably less so. Nigeria’s technology ecosystem must be careful not to fall into this familiar trap.
On 19 October 2022, Nigeria enacted the Nigeria Start-up Act, a landmark piece of legislation designed to provide a legal and institutional framework for technology-enabled start-ups, improve the business environment, support innovation and position Nigeria as a leading digital technology centre in Africa.
It was an important moment. The Act emerged from collaboration between government and ecosystem stakeholders who recognised that a country with Nigeria’s population, entrepreneurial energy and technological talent needed more than speeches about its digital potential.
I was involved in the work that contributed to this policy journey. I have also spent years working with founders, advising technology companies, structuring businesses and participating in conversations about the legal and commercial conditions required to build sustainable enterprises. I therefore write with a particular interest in the outcome.
But let us be clear about something: the significance of a law is not established by the ceremony surrounding its enactment. It is established by the difference it makes to the people for whom it was created.
As the Act approaches its fourth anniversary, we must move beyond congratulating ourselves for having passed it. We must confront the uncomfortable question: how much easier has Nigeria actually become for a technology entrepreneur who is trying to build a viable business?
That is the question we should be asking. And we should be asking it loudly.
*A law is not an ecosystem
The Nigeria Start-up Act created a framework for start-up labelling, institutional coordination, incentives, regulatory engagement and investment support. It established the National Council for Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship and provided for a Start-up Investment Seed Fund to be managed by the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority.
These are meaningful provisions. They matter. But a legal framework is not the same thing as a functioning ecosystem.
A start-up founder does not pay salaries with the promise of a fund. A business does not become profitable because it has obtained a government-issued label. A technology company cannot assure an investor that regulatory uncertainty has disappeared simply because a law exists that was intended to improve regulatory coordination. The distinction is fundamental.
The Act can create a framework for access to incentives. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that those incentives will be adequately funded, promptly administered or accessible to the businesses that need them.
It can establish mechanisms for engagement between government and industry. It cannot guarantee that the engagement will produce decisions, that decisions will be implemented, or that anyone will be held accountable when implementation stalls.
It can provide a framework for improving the conditions under which startups operate. It cannot automatically eliminate the underlying commercial, infrastructural and institutional constraints that make operating a business in Nigeria difficult.
This is not an argument against the Act. It is an argument for taking its implementation seriously. The real danger is that we mistake the existence of a policy instrument for evidence that the policy problem has been solved.
Where are the measurable outcomes?
Four years is enough time to ask hard questions. It is not necessarily enough time to realise every ambition of the Act, but it is certainly enough time to demand transparent evidence of progress.
How many eligible start-ups have successfully accessed the incentives contemplated by the Act?
The official Start-up Nigeria portal states that the labelling process is intended to identify qualifying start-ups and connect them to benefits under the Act, but the public portal does not provide a regularly updated, downloadable register showing the total number of labels issued, applications received, approvals refused, processing times or the specific incentives accessed by each labelled company. That is a measurable reporting gap, not merely a communications problem.
How much funding has reached qualifying businesses through the relevant support mechanisms?
The Act requires the establishment of a Startup Investment Seed Fund and provides for an annual contribution of at least ₦10 billion to the Fund. Yet the public record should identify, for every financial year since enactment, the amount appropriated or transferred, the date of each disbursement, the fund manager, the investment instrument used, the number of recipients and the amounts received by each recipient. The Act creates the obligation; it does not itself prove that the statutory minimum has been paid or that capital has reached start-ups.
How many start-ups have secured government procurement opportunities?
The Act directs the Council to promote access to public and private procurement opportunities, but neither the Start-up Nigeria portal nor the Federal Public Procurement portal currently presents a consolidated Start-up Act dashboard showing labelled start-ups that won federal contracts, contract values, procuring entities, procurement methods, payment status or delivery outcomes. Without those fields, claims about procurement access cannot be independently tested.
How many regulatory bottlenecks have been resolved through the institutional structures the Act created?
The Council and Secretariat should publish a case register recording the complaint, regulator involved, issue, date opened, action taken, resolution and time to closure. In the absence of such a register, public statements about improved coordination remain difficult to distinguish from activity reports.
What measurable improvement has occurred in the time, cost and complexity involved in navigating public institutions?
How many states have established effective mechanisms for implementing the objectives of the Act within their own jurisdictions?
These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions that should accompany a national economic policy of this significance.
The federal government’s own strategic planning documents identified access to incentives, access to procurement opportunities and improved policy coherence as outcomes to be measured. Those commitments should provide a starting point for public accountability.
The official Nigeria Start-up portal explains the Act’s structures, intended benefits and available processes. But explaining what a policy offers is different from demonstrating what it has delivered.
We need a publicly accessible implementation scorecard. We need targets, timelines, responsible institutions, actual expenditure, beneficiaries and independently verifiable outcomes.
If the numbers are encouraging, publish them. If progress has been slow, explain why. If interventions have failed, identify the failures and correct them.
What we cannot afford is a situation in which the policy’s ambitions are always more visible than its results. A government should not have to be reminded indefinitely that implementation is the purpose of legislation.
*The founder does not experience government in departments
One of the most persistent problems in Nigeria’s technology landscape is the distance between how government organises itself and how businesses experience it.
A start-up does not wake up in the morning thinking about institutional mandates. It wakes up thinking about whether it can make payroll, acquire customers, protect its intellectual property, comply with applicable laws, raise capital and remain in business long enough for its product to succeed.
Yet, depending on its business model, that same company may need to navigate corporate registration, taxation, data protection, financial regulation, consumer protection, intellectual property requirements and sector-specific licensing.
Each institution may have a legitimate mandate. The problem arises when the combined effect of those mandates becomes unpredictable, duplicative, disproportionate or unnecessarily expensive.
For an early-stage business, compliance is not an abstract administrative issue. It consumes money, management attention and time that might otherwise be spent developing products and serving customers.
This does not mean start-ups should be exempt from legitimate regulation. Consumers deserve protection. Personal data must be safeguarded. Financial systems require integrity. Investors and the public must not be exposed to avoidable risks simply because a company describes itself as innovative. But regulation must be coherent, proportionate and predictable.
In July 2026, the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy announced a directive towards a harmonised approach to the regulation of internet platforms and online intermediaries, acknowledging areas where the responsibilities of different institutions intersect.
That acknowledgement matters. It also illustrates the work that remains necessary to achieve predictable governance across a rapidly evolving digital economy. The question is not whether regulators should regulate. They must. The question is whether Nigeria can build a regulatory environment in which innovation and legitimate public safeguards reinforce rather than unnecessarily obstruct one another.
A founder should not need to become an expert in bureaucratic navigation simply to understand which institution has authority over a particular activity. Nor should a business have to discover conflicting expectations only after it has invested substantial resources in compliance.
The Start-up Act was intended, in part, to address this kind of problem. Its promise must be judged against the actual experience of businesses navigating the system.
*We cannot fund our way out of every problem
There is another uncomfortable truth about the Nigerian start-up ecosystem: we sometimes talk about capital as though it were the answer to almost everything.
Capital matters. Without it, promising businesses struggle to hire, develop products, enter new markets and survive the long interval between building something valuable and generating sufficient revenue. But capital cannot compensate indefinitely for weak governance, poor commercial discipline, unclear ownership arrangements or the absence of a credible business model.
I have seen how important it is for founders to understand the difference between starting a business and building an institution. The two are not the same.
A company may have a compelling product and still be vulnerable because its founders have not properly documented their respective contributions, responsibilities, ownership interests or decision-making powers.
It may attract investors without having adequately considered the consequences of the investment. It may generate revenue while neglecting financial controls, intellectual property ownership or basic corporate governance. Eventually, the weaknesses become expensive.
Founder relationships deteriorate. Disputes emerge over ownership and authority. Investors question the reliability of the company’s records. Decisions that should have been resolved at the beginning become difficult and costly disputes. The tragedy is that many of these problems are foreseeable.
We must therefore resist the temptation to measure the health of our ecosystem exclusively by the number of start-ups incorporated, accelerator programmes conducted, pitch competitions held or funding announcements made.
Those activities have their place. But they are inputs, not necessarily outcomes.
We should also be asking how many businesses survive, how many achieve sustainable commercial traction, how many create lasting employment, how many develop defensible intellectual property and how many grow into institutions capable of operating beyond the personalities of their founders.
We need a support ecosystem that understands that building a company is not a competition to see who can announce the biggest valuation. It is the difficult, unglamorous work of creating something that can endure.
*The problem does not stop at Abuja
Nigeria’s federal structure creates another important implementation challenge. A national policy cannot deliver its full economic promise if the practical conditions for entrepreneurship remain significantly different across the states in which businesses operate.
A technology entrepreneur in Lagos, a founder in Enugu, an innovator in Kano and a developer building a business in Bayelsa may face different local infrastructure constraints, access to networks, public-sector processes and commercial opportunities. The federal government cannot resolve every one of these differences by itself.
State governments have a role in developing local innovation ecosystems, improving public services, supporting technology adoption, facilitating access to markets and creating conditions in which businesses can grow.
This is why state-level engagement with the Start-up Act matters. But state adoption must not become another ceremonial exercise in which a state announces its commitment to innovation without establishing the institutions, budgets, implementation plans and accountability mechanisms needed to make that commitment meaningful.
Passing a law at state level, where appropriate and necessary, is only one part of the work. What follows must include clear institutional responsibility, realistic funding, engagement with local businesses, transparent eligibility criteria and measurable delivery.
A state should be able to explain what it is doing to help technology businesses access public-sector opportunities, improve the local business environment and develop commercially useful relationships between innovators, established enterprises and government.
Otherwise, we risk creating a country in which the language of innovation is national but the practical benefits remain concentrated in a few locations. That would be a considerable waste of Nigeria’s talent.
*The government must become a customer, not just a policymaker
One of the most underappreciated opportunities in Nigeria’s technology policy conversation is public procurement.
The government is not merely a regulator of the digital economy. It is also a potential customer, a large institutional buyer and a user of technology across numerous public services. The Nigerian public sector has real problems to solve. Technology-enabled businesses have products and capabilities that may help solve some of them.
Yet the relationship between public institutions and emerging technology companies must be deliberately developed. Start-ups need transparent routes to compete for appropriate contracts, clearly defined procurement requirements, predictable payment processes and opportunities to demonstrate that their products work.
The government must also protect public funds, maintain procurement integrity and ensure that technology purchases deliver value. Opening procurement to innovation cannot mean abandoning those obligations.
The opportunity is to do both: maintain accountability while making legitimate opportunities accessible to capable businesses, including smaller technology companies.
When a government agency buys a product from a Nigerian technology company, it may do more than support one business. It may help validate a product, generate revenue, create jobs and establish a reference customer that enables the company to compete in other markets.
The Start-up Act’s policy ambitions include improving access to procurement opportunities. That ambition deserves serious attention.
If government wants a stronger domestic technology industry, it should examine whether its own procurement practices help create a market for credible Nigerian innovation. We cannot spend years telling entrepreneurs to build solutions for Nigeria and then fail to create practical pathways through which those solutions can be adopted by Nigerian institutions.
There is no shortage of intelligence, ambition or entrepreneurial energy in Nigeria. What we must now confront is the institutional work required to convert those assets into durable economic value.
The next phase of the Start-up Act should be guided by a few non-negotiable principles.
First, publish a credible implementation scorecard. It should show the commitments made, the funds allocated and disbursed, the number and categories of beneficiaries, the incentives actually accessed, the procurement opportunities opened and the barriers resolved. Where the data are unavailable, the responsible institution should say so and establish a deadline for producing them.
Second, make the incentives real. A benefit that exists in legislation but remains difficult to access has limited practical value to the business it was designed to support. The relevant institutions must publish clear procedures, eligibility criteria, timelines and channels for resolving complaints.
Third, improve regulatory coordination. Government should establish practical mechanisms for resolving overlaps between institutions, clarifying responsibilities and providing consistent guidance on cross-cutting issues. The objective should be predictable regulation, not the weakening of legitimate regulatory safeguards.
Fourth, involve the states in measurable implementation. State-level efforts should be judged by their operating structures, budgets, services, procurement pathways and demonstrable benefits to local businesses, rather than by the number of policy launches they organise.
Fifth, measure the development of businesses, not merely the activity of the ecosystem. Funding raised and programmes attended can be useful indicators, but they should sit alongside measures of survival, revenue, productivity, employment, exports, intellectual property development and the ability to attract sustained private investment.
Finally, demand accountability from every participant.
The government must implement the policies it has adopted. Regulators must administer their mandates predictably. Investors must exercise sound commercial judgment. Founders must build responsibly. Ecosystem intermediaries must demonstrate the value they create.
No single participant can build a sustainable technology economy alone. Nigeria’s technology ecosystem has real strengths. Our entrepreneurs have demonstrated an ability to identify problems, develop products and pursue opportunities in difficult conditions. Our technology professionals contribute to markets far beyond our borders. Our businesses have shown that locally developed solutions can compete in demanding commercial environments.
Those achievements deserve recognition. But potential is not progress. Activity is not necessarily growth. And the existence of a law is not proof that the law is working.
The Nigeria Start-up Act was an important step. It should not be dismissed because implementation is difficult. Equally, it should not be insulated from criticism because its original ambition was commendable.
*Omoruyi ‘Uyilaw’ Edoigiawerie is the Founder and Lead Partner at EandC Legal, a full-service law firm offering bespoke legal services with a focus on start-ups, established businesses, and upscale private clients in Nigeria. To get in touch, please email: hello@uyilaw.com.
