By KAYODE OLANIYAN
Rather Than Compete and Duplicate Nigeria does not have a shortage of ambition when it comes to sustainability, it has a shortage of follow-through. Across industries, organisations continue to build what already exists next door, duplicate infrastructure that could be shared, and hoard assets that could be put back into productive use.
The result is a country spending more than it needs to, emitting more than it should, and moving slower than it can afford to. Kayode Olaniyan, Principal Consultant at Avant-Garde Innovation and Technology Service Limited, puts it plainly: “When we talk about the circular economy, it’s an economy where we are not wasting. Sometimes, I feel like we don’t even have enough not to talk about wasting.” That tension between scarcity and waste, between what Nigeria has and how poorly it manages it, sits at the centre of the circular economy conversation.
And it is a conversation Nigerian businesses can no longer afford to treat as theoretical. The telecoms sector offers the clearest proof of what sharing infrastructure can achieve. For years, network operators erected their own base stations, each company building towers within sight of a competitor’s. When regulators stepped in and mandated collocation, requiring operators to share infrastructure rather than duplicate it, the results were tangible. Emissions fell. Capital costs dropped. And service quality, counter-intuitively, improved.
“On that promise,” Olaniyan notes, “we are seeing a reduction in the amount of emissions and also improvement in the quality of service that the populace is enjoying.” The model is replicable. The same logic applies to energy infrastructure, cold chain logistics, industrial warehousing, and free zone facilities. The barriers are not technical, they are cultural. Nigerian organisations have long treated ownership as a proxy for strength, and sharing as a concession to weakness. Olaniyan traces much of this back to trust.
Ask a room of people why they still hold on to old mobile phones they no longer use, and the answers are revealing: sentimentality, habit, and above all, distrust.
“Trust,” he says, “is one of the major problems.” But economics is beginning to do what culture has resisted. Urban mining, the practice of recovering copper, gold, lithium, and other materials from discarded devices and equipment, is making circular thinking not just sensible but profitable. Manufacturers are approaching businesses and consumers directly to reclaim old hardware, extracting valuable materials at a fraction of the cost of mining virgin inputs. Battery makers are collecting spent cells for lithium recovery. “It’s worked out a lot cheaper for both the user and the original equipment manufacturer,” Olaniyan observes.
For Nigeria, the foreign exchange dimension makes this even more urgent. Every tonne of raw material that can be recovered domestically is a tonne that does not need to be imported. With naira pressures continuing to squeeze margins, companies that build circular models into their operations gain a real structural advantage.
Those still locked into linear, extract-and-discard thinking will find the cost of that habit compounding year on year. The harder challenge, as always, is leadership. Olaniyan is direct about the gap between what Nigerian organisations say in public and what they do in practice.
Words spoken at forums do not automatically translate into decisions made in boardrooms. Circularity has to be chosen, built into procurement policy, asset management strategy, and supplier agreements, not merely endorsed at industry events.
The circular economy in Nigeria is not waiting to be invented. It is already emerging, quietly, in collocated towers, recovered batteries, and businesses rethinking what ownership actually costs them. The question is whether Nigerian organisations will get ahead of that shift or be dragged into it reluctantly, one regulatory mandate at a time.