Brilliant piece by Samuel Nwite here: “Since attaining unicorn status in March, Nigerian fintech startup, Flutterwave, has through partnership and acquisition, onboarded other businesses – expanding its services in unified diversification. Now, the payment company is adding e-commerce to its brand of services.”
The paytech category-king has a chance but this B2C ecommerce business is never really going to move the needle that much until someone can figure out logistics at scale. And that is where I expect the nation to take action for the sake of its digital economy.
If I get Nigeria’s postal service up and lose $100 million yearly but that loss stimulates economic activity of say $50 billion which brings cumulative VAT and tax of $200 million, it may not be a bad strategy. If I do that, rural Nigeria will get back to action and digital commerce will move faster. The tax is used to capture value at the edges while the NIPOST builds at the center of the smiling curve.
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Something for Nigeria’s policy architects to think about.
Flutterwave’s E-commerce, Flutterwave Market, A New Bait for Investors
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What we term e-commerce or marketplace here is more or less a display board, where sellers display their wares for buyers to see, nothing sophisticated there, that is why the impact is always marginal, if any at all.
Nobody has explained why it’s more attractive to click links to make purchases on items, if you live close to any of the open markets and mega stores, but we keep announcing new websites we label e-commerce, while the old demon persists.
As for Nigeria and NIPOST, it doesn’t require any policy architecture, just that we are never really serious about anything, but once a serious entity approaches the government for a solution, everybody will become interested. I will it leave here, in case…
The N50 stamp duty they have been fighting for its rightful custodian can be handy here, only that we are incapable of weaning ourselves off squandering mentality, because we are great at spending money that is yet to be earned, we are that forward-looking.
How many NIPOST assets are still in good shape? There is a way forward, as long as the government and its officials will stop being greedy, especially on assets they have zero capacity to revitalize.
We see how it goes.