“It’s hard to innovate around bad governance and weak infrastructure.
“You can only innovate towards infrastructure. It makes no sense for banks to try to spread across Liberia when parts of the country are inaccessible during the rainy season.”
– Digital Nomads; the Nigerian who has seen West Africa and has theories for the region’s progress
On most days, I start the day by opening my Twitter app and convincing myself that it’s the fastest way to catch up with the news. While the app doesn’t always deliver on my expectations, some days it throws up gems.
Like this one;
Maersk Line shipping company and its sister company, APMT are planning on ditching the seaport in Nigeria in favor of investing in a maritime hub in Cote d’Ivoire.
Why are major shipping companies looking to move their focus from Nigeria to Cote d’Ivoire?
The answer starts with poor infrastructure in Nigeria as well as how weak infrastructure often drives up costs. There’s also the fact that Nigeria’s export traffic is pretty weak.
There’s a reason I’m leading with this bit about Nigeria’s ports. It feels like a coincidence that I found this news story a week after Fu’ad, who has been to all the countries in West Africa made an interesting prediction about Nigeria’s ports in this Digital Nomads story.
Here’s what he said; “Nigeria cannot sort out its major port in Lagos, so that’s a big opportunity for both countries.”
While he could not have predicted that Cote d’Ivoire would be where attention would turn to for shipping, it shows once again that it is pretty hard to work
around the problems of bad infrastructure.
I have one more example to help push home this point and once again, it’s from Twitter but in place of shipping, it’s real estate.
This helpful thread, written by a Nigerian who lives in Lagos tells renters what to look out for when they’re house hunting. If you’re wondering why a thread like this is valuable, it’s because house hunting in Lagos is like preparing for war.
There have been a number of attempts to solve this problem with technology. One strategy has been to allow renters to find houses online.
That process has since been
hijacked by home agents, who post houses which are unavailable. Some agents dupe unsuspecting renters by demanding agent fees for such houses. But the bigger issue is a quality problem in the housing sector.
One may argue that services like Muster and Fibre take some of the stress out of the renting process, but only a small fraction of Lagosians can afford such services.
So, we’re back right where we started, there’s only so much that technology can do – we need better infrastructure.
