04. Mr. Emeka has what you’re looking for.

Two slightly unsettling things happened this week.

Not the dramatic kind of unsettling. More like a quiet nudge. The kind that makes you put your phone down for a second and stare at nothing.

A vibrant market stall brimming with colorful fabrics and diverse goods, arranged in a lively, densely packed display under a patterned canopy.

The first one came from watching people move between AI tools - which I wrote about earlier this week. What I’ve noticed is that everyone seems to be building their own version of what they think AI should be. Some are going deep on conversation, on warmth, on making the thing feel almost human. Others are becoming extraordinarily good at image generation - hello Nano Banana. Some will have a full presentation ready for you, images included, before you’ve finished your sentence.

They are all moving. Just not together. And not toward the same thing.

I found myself sitting with that feeling, because it reminded me of something much closer to home.

Every Nigerian business wants to bake its own cake.

Which means nobody really talks about market share. The data that exists inside markets for household appliances, cookware, gift items, imported edibles - the kind of data quietly sitting inside warehouses and behind stalls across this city - is probably staggering. But because it’s all informal, and privately owned, and nobody can compel anyone to disclose anything, it just stays invisible. I remember being in business school and encountering case studies for the first time and wondering - who is writing case studies about Nigerian businesses? Because there must be so many. But digressing as usual.

This is why I always say - if you walk into a banking hall on Lagos Island and you see a man with his trousers rolled up at the ankles, you treat him like any other HNI. Because that man may be sitting on assets that would rearrange your assumptions entirely. These traders have perfected invisible accumulation. Quiet compounding. The Iroko strategy in practice - growing wide and deep underground before anyone looks up and notices the canopy.

But here’s where the beauty of it stops and the problem starts.

Because customers suffer for the lack of visibility.

The goods exist. The demand exists. The two sides simply cannot see each other.

If Mr. Emeka in the market has exactly what you are looking for - and he very likely does - you may never find him.

Not unless he has found his way onto a visible platform. Not unless he has a website, or an Instagram page where someone on his staff is posting products in between customer arguments.

So what happens? You end up importing at some absurd rate. The item was in Lagos the whole time. Those who knew Mr. Emeka kept that information close and resold it selectively within their own networks. And if Adaeze’s shop is physically in Bariga, a customer sitting in Oniru may never discover her inventory.

Is this capitalism? Am I advocating for a free economy? Not really. What I want is simply a country where I can search “taro pearl beads” and actually find every person who has them in stock.

Platforms like Bumpa have tried. I respect the attempt; the idea of bringing website ownership down from whatever pedestal it was sitting on so that a trader anywhere in Lagos could say I have a site, that matters. But the gaps are still wide. The SEO is almost non-existent. You cannot Google a product and land on a Bumpa store. And God help you if the trader has serious inventory - you scroll, the page loads, you click something, you press back, and you are at the very top again. Starting over. The products were there. You just couldn’t hold them.

So even when traders pay their subscriptions and list their goods diligently, the goods remain invisible.

And then Temu arrives.

And everything is listed.

Temu doesn't win because the products are better. It wins because everything is listed.

Think about what that means over time for markets like Iponri. For the traders who have spent years sourcing and importing and storing and selling - building the kind of informal infrastructure that quietly holds entire neighbourhoods together. When a customer can open an app and instantly see every variation of what they want, priced clearly, in one place - yes, a few centimetre-inch discrepancies here and there, yes, the wait time - but findable - what happens to the walk-in option?

We already notice it in small ways.

A shop closes.

A familiar storefront goes quiet.

Someone says aww and moves on.

But it compounds. Love Home Shop has closed. She is no longer in that space. You say eh-yah and keep walking.

But all of it adds up - to the slow effect of a heavily import-dependent economy that never built the layer that would have let it see itself clearly.

Jiji tried. But five listings in and you’re paying. Jumia and Konga take cuts that reshape the economics for the average trader. Ubuy existed before Temu but their pricing formula is built for the desperate.

What we need is an aggregator. A real one. Not a marketplace that clips every transaction - something more like a window. Wide, clean, searchable. Something that finally lets the demand and the supply see each other.

I think I know what that could look like.

And so... I noticed something.

I almost didn’t write that sentence.

I sat with it for a while - the instinct to protect the idea, to keep it close, to build quietly before anyone could see.

That instinct is so deep in me it feels like common sense.

But I’ve been writing this whole piece about how the hoarding of information is slowly costing all of us. Yet here I am, doing the same thing.

Maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about this problem.

It doesn’t just live in the markets.

It lives in the people who can see the solution and choose to stay quiet.

I’m working on that.