14/07/2026
Are South Easterners just hustlers with no structure? Is that why they don’t have billionaires?
I absolutely understand Charles Awuzie’s take on this, but at the same time, I have some areas where I may not agree.
The first time I came across the image, I almost arrived at the same conclusion many writers in this space have. I, too, was tempted to view it through an ethnic lens until I looked beyond the image and into the data. The more I examined the facts, the less convincing the conclusion became. One of the things I have learned over the years is that we must be careful not to confuse observation with explanation.
I came across Charles Awuzie's post arguing that the South West produces better entrepreneurs because many of Nigeria's biggest fintech founders are Yoruba. The conclusion was that the South West builds with structure while the South East builds with hustle, and that this explains why one region has more billion-dollar companies than the other.
At first glance, the argument appears convincing. But when examined more carefully, it begins to fall apart. The first problem is that it uses one industry to explain the entrepreneurial culture of an entire nation, and for me, it is simply too narrow. That makes the conclusion about structure and hustle too broad for the evidence.
There is another problem with the argument, and it is even more fundamental. It assumes that entrepreneurial success can be measured almost exclusively by the market value of publicly traded companies and the estimated net worth of a handful of individuals. But that is only one way of measuring success. It is certainly not the only one, and I would argue it is not even the most useful.
If success is measured by Forbes rankings or the market capitalization of publicly listed companies, the picture looks one way. But if it is measured by industrial capacity, manufacturing output, employment creation, business longevity, wealth distribution, or the number of sustainable indigenous enterprises created, the picture changes considerably. Before we conclude that one region produces "better entrepreneurs" than another, we must first agree on what success actually means.
If someone were to study Nigeria's manufacturing sector instead of fintech, the conversation would immediately change.
Another reason I do not agree with Charles Awuzie’s conclusion is that it assumes every entrepreneurial ecosystem should produce the same outcome. It assumes every successful business culture should create publicly listed billionaires. That assumption is false. Different ecosystems produce different kinds of wealth.
Venture-backed technology ecosystems produce unicorns and billionaire founders. Manufacturing ecosystems produce factories, industrial assets, and long-lived companies. Merchant ecosystems produce thousands of independently wealthy business owners. Judging all three by the same metric leads to misleading conclusions.
Manufacturing Tells a Different Story
For decades, the South East has been one of the principal centres of indigenous manufacturing in Nigeria. Long before venture capital became fashionable, entrepreneurs from the region were building factories, industrial estates, and production companies that created thousands of jobs.
Take Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing (IVM), for example.
Founded by Chief Innocent Chukwuma in 2007, Innoson became Nigeria's first indigenous automobile manufacturer, producing buses, SUVs, trucks, passenger vehicles, and specialized vehicles. Today, the company supplies vehicles to government agencies, private companies, and security institutions while competing in an industry historically dominated by foreign brands.
Then there is Ibeto Group, founded by Dr. Cletus Ibeto in 1988.
What began as a trading company has grown into one of Nigeria's largest indigenous conglomerates with interests in cement, automotive spare parts, petrochemicals, hospitality, real estate, energy, and manufacturing. For well over three decades, the company has remained a significant player in Nigeria's industrial sector.
Cutix Plc, founded in 1982, is another example.
Listed on the Nigerian Exchange, the company manufactures electrical, automotive, and industrial cables used across Nigeria's power and construction sectors. It has operated successfully for over forty years.
Juhel Nigeria Limited, established in 1987 by Chief Sam Maduka Onyishi, grew into one of Nigeria's largest indigenous pharmaceutical manufacturers, producing medicines distributed across the country and parts of West Africa.
Orange Drugs Limited, founded by Sir Tony Ezenna in 1988, built one of Nigeria's most recognizable pharmaceutical and consumer goods companies. Products like Delta Soap, Passion Energy Drink, and Procold have become household names.
Coscharis Group, established by Dr. Cosmas Maduka in 1977, has grown from a spare-parts business into a diversified conglomerate with interests in automobile assembly, agriculture, technology, healthcare, and logistics. It is one of BMW's most recognized partners in Nigeria and has invested heavily in local automobile assembly.
Beyond these companies, the South East has produced industrial groups like Chikason Group, GZI Industries, Krisoral Group, Louis Carter Group, SABMiller's Onitsha operations, Nigerian breweries' industrial partners, dozens of plastic manufacturers in Nnewi, electrical manufacturers in Nnewi, pharmaceutical clusters in Onitsha and Aba, and one of Africa's largest spare-parts markets. These businesses employ tens of thousands of Nigerians and have been operating for decades.
If companies like Ibeto, Coscharis, Cutix, and Orange Drugs can survive for four decades, build factories, employ thousands, and operate under corporate governance, then the claim that the South East lacks structure simply does not survive contact with reality. These are not small businesses built around informal trading. They are structured organizations with factories, corporate governance, audited accounts, thousands of employees, and decades of sustained operations.
Notice something interesting. None of these companies became successful because venture capitalists gave them billion-dollar valuations. They became successful because they spent decades building factories, supply chains, distribution networks, dealer relationships, warehouses, export channels, and manufacturing capacity. Their value is embedded in physical assets and operational infrastructure, not just investor sentiment.
If manufacturing were the case study instead of fintech, the conclusions would look very different.
Fintech Grew Where the Ecosystem Already Existed, and this is not to diminish what the Southwest has accomplished. Building companies like Paystack, Interswitch, Flutterwave, or Moniepoint required extraordinary vision, ex*****on, and resilience. My argument is simply that exceptional entrepreneurs are more likely to emerge where exceptional ecosystems already exist. Talent is necessary, but ecosystems amplify talent.
However, these companies did not emerge in isolation.
They were built largely within the Lagos ecosystem.
Lagos is home to Nigeria's financial institutions, venture capital firms, regulators, multinational companies, payment infrastructure, legal services, software engineering talent, and the country's largest commercial market.
When an entrepreneur wants to build a payment company, that ecosystem naturally provides advantages that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
This is exactly why Silicon Valley produced many of America's biggest technology companies. No serious economist concludes that people born in Northern California are naturally better entrepreneurs than everyone else in America.
The ecosystem attracted talent from every part of the country and significantly increased their chances of success.
The same principle applies to Lagos.
Measuring Entrepreneurship by Billionaires Is Misleading
Another weakness in the argument is the assumption that billionaire status is the best measure of entrepreneurial success.
It is not.
The market value of a business depends on several factors beyond entrepreneurial ability.
These include:
- Whether the company is publicly listed.
- Access to venture capital.
- Institutional investment.
- Foreign exchange movements.
- Government policy.
- Industry valuation.
- Mergers and acquisitions.
A fintech company backed by international investors may achieve a billion-dollar valuation much faster than a manufacturing company that owns factories, machinery, and land but remains privately held. I had a conversation with a very successful manufacturer when we were discussing overhauling their brand identity and marketing systems. He told me this exact same thing.
These companies often have robust systems, significant physical assets, and healthy revenues, but they operate in industries that do not attract the same valuation multiples or investor attention as venture-backed technology companies. Investors are evaluating different kinds of businesses using different metrics.
Private businesses are often undervalued simply because the public cannot accurately estimate what they are worth.
Now let’s move on a bit and also talk about history because it matters and it is a grave omission when we make arguments like this and do not talk about history.
The South East did not develop its entrepreneurial culture under the same historical conditions as every other region. The Nigerian Civil War fundamentally altered the region's economic trajectory. We might just brush this off and say it is in the past, but that is exactly the point!
Studies of post-conflict economies consistently show that regions devastated by war often require decades to recover their economic output, infrastructure, and human capital. The pace of recovery depends heavily on governance, public investment, institutional stability, and access to capital.
While the federal government received international assistance and enjoyed growing oil revenues in the post-war years, much of Nigeria's large-scale public investment during that period went into developing Lagos, then the federal capital, and other strategic regions. The South East, despite being the epicentre of the war's destruction, did not experience reconstruction on a comparable scale. That imbalance shaped its economic recovery for decades.
During this same period, the Federal Government funded major projects like the Eko Bridge extensions, the National Arts Theatre, and the sprawling highway networks designed to modernize the capital city.
International funding and federal revenues were also heavily directed toward the North to balance regional development. This included financing massive irrigation dams (like the Bakolori Dam project), establishing state-owned assembly plants, and building up military infrastructure.
Heavy investments were made in manufacturing and industrial hubs in the West, establishing ports, factories, and power infrastructure far away from the conflict zones.
Compared to the scale of destruction the region suffered, the South East received nowhere near the level of reconstruction many expected. Businesses had been destroyed. Industrial assets were gone. Properties had been abandoned. Families that had spent decades building wealth suddenly found themselves starting over. The war fundamentally disrupted the region's economic base, a fact acknowledged by historians across different political and ethnic perspectives.
That reality influenced how entrepreneurs rebuilt.
Instead of relying on institutional finance, many businesses developed around apprenticeship, family capital, reinvested profits, and gradual expansion. This model became known as the Igbo apprenticeship system, arguably one of Africa's most successful informal business incubators.
It has produced thousands of business owners across manufacturing, distribution, importation, and wholesale trade.
The apprenticeship system also shapes the kind of wealth it produces. Rather than concentrating enormous amounts of capital in a single enterprise, it deliberately creates new entrepreneurs. A successful trader mentors apprentices who eventually establish businesses of their own. Those entrepreneurs, in turn, train others, creating an expanding network of independently owned businesses. The outcome is often thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises spread across different industries rather than a handful of publicly listed corporations controlled by a few individuals. That is a different model of wealth creation. It should not be mistaken for an absence of structure or ambition simply because it produces different outcomes.
Comparing this entrepreneurial model with venture-backed fintech startups without acknowledging their different historical foundations leads to incomplete and sometimes dishonest conclusions.
And don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-Yoruba or anti-North. I am a very strong pan-Nigerian who will never let the desire to see a united Nigeria also lead me into making some dishonest remarks that trivializes what the South East went through and how the South East is rebuilding to come back on its feet.
Every Region Has Its Strengths
The truth is that every region in Nigeria has developed unique entrepreneurial strengths, and these strengths are often tied to what makes that region peculiar. With Lagos, the South West has built an exceptional ecosystem for finance, technology, and startups.
The South East has become a powerhouse in manufacturing, trade, industrialization, and SME development.
The North has produced remarkable entrepreneurs in agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications, and large-scale commerce.
The South-South has made enormous contributions through banking, energy, maritime services, and oil-related industries.
None of these strengths exists because one ethnic group is inherently more intelligent or more structured than another. They emerged through history, geography, policy, education, infrastructure, access to capital, and economic opportunity.
The real lesson is not that one region builds better businesses than another. The better lesson is that successful businesses evolve differently depending on the environment in which they are built.
Fintech requires access to technology, venture capital, and regulators; manufacturing requires land, machinery, logistics, and patient capital. Agriculture depends on geography. Oil and gas depend on natural resources, retail depends on distribution networks, and each industry rewards different kinds of entrepreneurship. When we reduce all of that complexity to ethnicity, it does a disservice to the entrepreneurs themselves.
Nigeria's entrepreneurial story is far too rich to be explained through one industry or one tribe. If the fintech argument were sufficient to conclude that the South East is merely a region of hustlers, then one must also ask why the fintech industry itself is not equally dominated by entrepreneurs from every other region. The answer is not that one ethnic group possesses superior entrepreneurial ability. It is that ecosystems matter. Entrepreneurs are more likely to flourish where capital, regulation, infrastructure, talent, and opportunity converge. That is precisely what happened in Lagos, just as Silicon Valley became the centre of American technology.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the very people dismissed as "hustlers" built one of the most successful indigenous business incubation systems in modern Africa without venture capital, without unicorn valuations and, for decades, with very limited institutional support. That does not diminish what Lagos has achieved in technology, nor what the North has achieved in commerce, nor what the South-South has achieved in banking and energy. It simply reminds us that entrepreneurship takes different forms depending on the environment in which it develops.
The lesson, therefore, is not that one region is superior to another. It is that every region has built strengths from its own history and circumstances. Nigeria would make far greater progress if we spent less time ranking entrepreneurial cultures and more time learning from them.
