Asher's Blog

Some of the largest business opportunities are hidden inside problems that most entrepreneurs would rather avoid. They are buried in paperwork, government processes, broken infrastructure, difficult regulations, slow institutions and industries where the customer may not even know how to describe what is wrong. These problems are not fashionable, and they rarely produce the immediate excitement associated with a new social platform or the latest application of artificial intelligence. However, when they are solved properly, they can improve how an entire economy functions.

I do not know whether it is completely accurate to say that nobody wants to solve these problems. Some people are certainly working on them, and governments have announced projects in many of these areas. The deeper issue is that too few ambitious companies are being built around them, particularly at the speed, scale and standard that the problems require.

Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of problems, but we sometimes discuss those problems only as evidence of government failure. We complain about bad roads, inefficient railways, inconsistent regulation, poor customer service and delayed justice, without asking which parts of these systems could become markets for capable private companies. Government will always have responsibilities that cannot be transferred, but it does not have to design, finance, build and operate every part of the solution by itself.

The more useful question is this: what can government regulate and guarantee while entrepreneurs build the technology, infrastructure and operating capacity required to make the system work?

Infrastructure can become a business model

Roads are one of the clearest examples. A bad road does not inconvenience only the driver who passes through it. It increases transportation costs, damages vehicles, delays employees, disrupts deliveries, raises the price of goods and reduces the distance across which a business can serve customers profitably. The economic loss is distributed across millions of people, which makes it easy to underestimate even though everyone experiences part of it.

The traditional model is for government to award a construction contract, pay a contractor and assume responsibility for maintaining the road afterwards. The weaknesses of that model are familiar: slow procurement, abandoned projects, inflated costs, poor maintenance and a process in which the contractor may be rewarded for completing construction rather than for keeping the road usable over time.

An entrepreneurial infrastructure company could approach the problem differently. Instead of functioning only as a contractor, it could finance, build, operate and maintain a road under a long-term concession. Repayment could come through transparent tolling, availability payments from government, revenue linked to commercial facilities along the route or a carefully designed combination of these sources. Technology could manage electronic tolling, monitor road conditions, detect deterioration and publish service-level performance.

This is not an entirely new idea in Nigeria. The Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission already oversees public-private partnerships, and the Highway Development and Management Initiative was designed to use private investment to develop and manage selected federal road corridors. In 2023, the Federal Executive Council approved concessions covering 1,374 kilometres across nine road corridors, with some routes structured around twenty-five-year concession periods. The institutional basis therefore exists, even if execution, financing and public confidence still require improvement.

What could be new is the operating mentality. A fast-moving infrastructure company would not merely wait for another conventional road contract. It would build expertise in project finance, engineering, maintenance technology, traffic forecasting, land use, toll collection and public accountability. Its product would not be the road at the point of commissioning; its product would be twenty or thirty years of safe and predictable movement.

The same reasoning applies to rail. Watching The Men Who Built America reminded me that much of the early expansion of American transport infrastructure involved private capital and private operators, although government support, land policy and public authority also played important roles. Modern air travel provides another visible example: governments regulate airspace, safety and airports, while private airlines operate much of the service customers experience.

Nigeria can create similar operating opportunities around rail without surrendering public responsibility for safety, access and strategic planning. Private companies could operate passenger or freight services on public tracks, maintain rolling stock, manage stations, provide ticketing infrastructure, build logistics terminals or develop commercial activity around transport corridors. The Nigerian Railway Corporation has already granted Lagos State a permanent operating licence and track access for rail services, demonstrating that infrastructure ownership and service operation do not always have to sit inside the same institution.

For roads and rail, the opportunity is not simply construction. It is the creation of reliable movement as a service. The company that can reduce the time, uncertainty and cost involved in moving people and goods will create value for nearly every other sector of the economy.

Compliance is larger than filing forms

Compliance is another category of problems that many founders avoid because it appears boring, fragmented and dependent on regulation. In reality, compliance may become one of Africa’s most important technology markets because every serious sector depends on it.

When people hear compliance, they may think about tax returns, payroll deductions or documents submitted to a regulator. Those are important, but compliance is much broader. A bank must comply with financial, security, data-protection and consumer-service obligations. An airline must comply with safety standards, passenger protections and operating requirements. A hospital must protect patient information and maintain clinical standards. An employer must meet obligations relating to tax, pensions, workplace records and employee welfare.

The regulator should determine the standard, investigate misconduct and impose consequences. However, private companies can build the infrastructure that makes compliance easier to perform, easier to verify and harder to falsify. They can create systems that collect evidence continuously, identify missing obligations, reconcile transactions, alert organisations before deadlines and give regulators appropriate access to reliable information.

This is where apparently boring work becomes extremely valuable. Reconciliation, audit trails, document management, licence monitoring and complaint resolution are repetitive activities, but they sit close to money, risk and institutional trust. If a company reduces the cost of doing this work while improving its accuracy, it is not merely making paperwork faster. It is reducing the probability of fines, fraud, service failure and reputational damage.

At Eazipay, we began with one part of this opportunity by helping businesses manage payroll and employer compliance. The longer we work in the market, the clearer it becomes that compliance should not feel like a collection of disconnected deadlines that a founder remembers only when a regulator sends a letter. It should become an operating system that shows the company what it owes, what has been completed, what evidence exists and what is at risk.

There is room for many specialised companies in this market. One could build continuous compliance monitoring for financial institutions. Another could help airlines manage passenger claims and service standards. Another could create verified environmental and safety reporting for manufacturers. Others could build compliance infrastructure for healthcare, education, construction, insurance or data protection.

The opportunity becomes even larger when the system serves both businesses and regulators. A good compliance platform can help a company meet its obligations while giving the regulator better information and giving the public a credible way to see whether standards are being followed. The goal is not to privatise regulation; it is to build better rails on which regulation can operate.

Consumer complaints are valuable economic data

Customer service is often treated as an internal matter for each company, but at national scale it is also a compliance and market-quality problem. If banks repeatedly reverse transactions late, airlines ignore passenger complaints, lenders abuse customer data or service providers collect money without delivering, the harm extends beyond an individual inconvenience. It teaches consumers that formal systems cannot be trusted.

Nigeria already has institutions through which consumers can seek redress. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission provides an online complaint process and allows consumers to submit supporting documents. It has also taken sector-specific action in areas such as digital lending and banking-service disruptions. What remains possible is a stronger technology and operating layer connecting consumers, companies, regulators and sector ombudsmen.

Imagine a platform through which a customer submits a complaint once, with transaction evidence, correspondence and the desired resolution. The system identifies the correct company and regulator, categorises the issue, starts the applicable response deadline and maintains a complete record of what follows. Companies receive structured cases rather than scattered social-media attacks, regulators see recurring patterns across the market, and consumers can track progress without repeatedly explaining the problem.

Artificial intelligence could help organise evidence, identify similar complaints, detect systemic failures and recommend the correct escalation route. However, final enforcement authority should remain with accountable institutions, and the design must protect consumers from automated decisions that they cannot challenge.

Such a platform could earn revenue through enterprise complaint-management software, regulatory infrastructure contracts, independent dispute-resolution services or industry-funded ombudsman schemes. The commercial model must be designed carefully so that the party funding the system cannot secretly determine its outcomes. If that governance problem is solved, better complaint infrastructure could improve customer service across several industries at once.

Justice needs infrastructure, but judgment must remain accountable

The justice system presents the most sensitive opportunity. Businesses need courts because contracts have little value if they cannot be enforced within a reasonable period. Citizens need courts because delayed justice can preserve an unfair situation for years. Speed is not separate from fairness: a correct outcome that arrives after a person’s business, reputation or liberty has already been destroyed may offer very little practical justice.

The private sector should not own judges or determine criminal guilt. Judicial power must remain independent, publicly accountable and protected from commercial influence. Nevertheless, almost everything surrounding the act of judgment can benefit from better technology and specialist operators.

Companies can build electronic filing, case scheduling, digital transcription, evidence management, secure service of documents, legal research, remote-hearing infrastructure and systems that identify avoidable delays. The National Judicial Council’s policy already supports information technology, electronic recording and digital transcription, while the Nigerian Case Management System was created to help courts manage their work. The opportunity is therefore not to replace the judiciary, but to make its processes visible, measurable and much harder to delay unnecessarily.

I recently watched a film built around an AI judge and a man who had a limited period in which to prove that he had been framed. The system itself had been manipulated, which is precisely the danger of assuming that faster technology automatically produces fairer justice. An automated system can process a wrong assumption more quickly and apply it to more people before anyone notices.

AI can help summarise filings, locate precedents, compare evidence, prepare transcripts and detect inconsistencies, but a person affected by a decision must know how it was reached and have a meaningful route to challenge it. Justice requires not only speed but legitimacy, independence, context and mercy. Technology should reduce administrative delay and improve access to facts; it should not create an unaccountable machine whose conclusion becomes law simply because it was delivered efficiently.

How entrepreneurs should approach these markets

These difficult markets require a different kind of founder from the person looking for a product that can be launched in a weekend. They involve regulation, patient capital, public institutions, long sales cycles and consequences that affect people who may never become direct customers. However, the difficulty is also part of the opportunity because it prevents easy imitation.

The first step is to reduce a national problem to a specific entry point. “Fix Nigerian roads” is too broad to become an initial product, but maintaining and operating one commercially important corridor under measurable service standards is concrete. “Improve justice” is too broad, but reducing adjournments caused by failed service of court documents is a problem that can be measured. “Solve compliance” is too broad, but automating pension, tax and payroll evidence for growing employers creates a clear starting market.

The second step is to understand who pays, who benefits and who has authority. In infrastructure, the user may pay through tolls while government grants the concession and investors provide the construction capital. In compliance, businesses may buy the software while regulators define the standard. In justice technology, courts may be the buyer, lawyers and citizens may be the users, and government may control procurement. A good idea can fail when these roles are confused.

The third step is to make transparency part of the product. Where public money, compulsory fees or regulatory power are involved, people should be able to understand performance, pricing and accountability. A road concession should publish service standards and maintenance outcomes. A complaint platform should show response timelines. A court system should make case progress visible without exposing protected information. Transparency is not a public-relations feature; it is what makes private participation legitimate.

Finally, the company must build for endurance. Roads, railways, compliance systems and justice infrastructure cannot be abandoned whenever investor fashion changes. They require founders who are willing to stay with an unfashionable problem long enough to acquire expertise, earn institutional trust and prove that the model works.

Important companies are often built where frustration has become normal

The most dangerous problems are sometimes those a society has experienced for so long that people stop imagining that they can be solved. Bad roads become part of the journey, delayed cases become part of litigation, poor customer service becomes part of banking, and compliance becomes a last-minute struggle before a deadline. When frustration becomes normal, the entrepreneur has to see possibility before the market can fully describe it.

Nigeria needs more companies that are willing to build in these difficult areas. Government must provide laws, enforcement, public accountability and long-term policy, but entrepreneurs can provide speed, technology, operating discipline and new financing models. Neither side can solve the most important problems alone.

The problems nobody seems eager to solve may demand more patience than the fashionable opportunities, but they also carry greater consequences. A company that improves a payment feature creates value for its users. A company that makes roads reliable, compliance transparent, consumer redress credible or justice faster can change the conditions under which thousands of other companies and millions of people operate.

That is the kind of problem worth building around.

References and further reading

• Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, Highway Development and Management Initiative materials and Nigeria’s public-private partnership project portfolio.
• Nigerian Railway Corporation, announcements on operating licences, track access and service development.
• Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, consumer complaint-handling guidance and sector enforcement materials.
• National Judicial Council, National Judicial Policy and Nigerian Case Management System materials.