Easy Places Are Full

What My Lebanese Friend Taught Me About Business in Nigeria

Labour Market Diary  —  Finance, Policy & the View from the Street

Before you scroll off in anger: calm down. He is real. He has been in Nigeria longer than some of you reading this have been alive. His children go to school here. His grandchildren may well be buried here. The Lebanese community in Nigerian business is not a rumour, not a colonial hangover awaiting apology, and not going anywhere. They are woven into the fabric of commerce in this country. So pour yourself something cold and read on.

I will not name him — that was the price of the conversation, and I paid it gladly. As part of my work on Nidacity, I put together a board of advisers and concluded it would not be honest or representative without input from the Lebanese business community. So I assured him he would only ever be identified as ‘my Lebanese friend,’ and in exchange he gave me something rare: the kind of unhurried candour that only becomes available when a man is not managing his reputation. I had expected the usual litany: the generators, the customs officials, the phone calls from people whose names you never quite catch. I thought I knew what he was going to say. I was wrong.

Intentionality

His family did not end up in Nigeria by accident or desperation. They chose it. After careful study conducted over generations — cousins sent ahead like scouts, findings reported back, sectors analysed for structural need. The question was never “Is Nigeria easy?”

“We don’t come to easy places. Have you been to Lebanon?” he said. “Easy places are full. We look for places where there is need and where many are too fearful to take on.”

A conscious decision, renewed deliberately, to believe in the upside of a place that some investors treat as a risk footnote. Compare that to the Nigerian entrepreneurs I have encountered who entered sectors because they fell into them — because an official had briefly left a door open. Circumstantial businesses, built not on a view but on an accident. There is nothing wrong with opportunism. But it is not the same as intentionality, and in a market as volatile as Nigeria’s, the difference reveals itself quickly.

Preparation and Optimism — Held Together

I have watched enough foreign investors arrive in Nigeria with optimism, survive the first six months on momentum, and then — somewhere around the fourteenth week a container sat in Apapa, or a promised approval went quiet — curdle into bitterness. Undone not by a single disaster but by the accumulated weight of friction.

My friend’s answer was almost offhand. Before any member of his network opens a business in Nigeria, there is a period of what he called “mental loading” — an acceptance, in advance, of the specific costs Nigeria will impose. The generator will fail. The duty will change. The official will need to be managed. These are not surprises to be absorbed; they are variables to be budgeted.

“When it happens,” he said, “we are not shocked. Shocked people make bad decisions.”

But here is where it gets interesting. You might assume that a community which prepares for friction would develop a siege mentality. The opposite is true. The mental preparation does not produce pessimism — it liberates optimism. Because the difficulties have already been priced in, he is free to focus entirely on the upside.

“The problems here are the opportunities. Every broken thing is a business waiting to be built. We just have to decide we are staying long enough to build it.”

Two hundred million people with needs the formal economy has consistently failed to meet is not a crisis. It is an unserved market. Most people who fail in Nigeria fail not because Nigeria defeated them, but because they were surprised by the Nigeria that actually exists. Pre-acceptance of the cost is what turns friction from a shock into a schedule.

Nigeria Is Not Lebanon

Lebanon’s economy has contracted by more than 38 per cent since 2019. The pound has lost over 98 per cent of its value. Banks are effectively insolvent, having accumulated losses north of $72 billion, with depositors locked out of their own savings for years. The country defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2020 — the first time in its history. The economy that was $54 billion in 2018 was worth around $28 billion in 2024.

I asked him, as carefully as I could: is the loyalty to Nigeria strategic, or is it simply that going home is no longer an option?

“Nigeria is not our consolation prize. Lebanon happened to Lebanon because Lebanon had no size to absorb the shocks. Nigeria can always absorb the shock. That is the asset you people keep undervaluing.”

Lebanon’s commercial model depended on openness — the banking sector, tourism, remittances, regional transit. When those foundations cracked together, there was nothing structural underneath. Nigeria’s famous problems — its infrastructure gaps, its institutional friction — are also, viewed from the right angle, the moat. They keep out the faint-hearted and make the businesses built here difficult to displace. “Lebanon has no moat,” he said. “Anybody can come in and anybody can leave. That is why everybody left.”

The Money Never Goes to the Bank

Then I made the mistake of mentioning banks. His expression shifted in a way that only good manners prevented from becoming a laugh.

His community does not put its money in banks. Not as a cultural quirk but as a lesson paid for by people they knew personally — depositors who worked forty years and could not withdraw their own savings from a machine on the street. So they use banks as transaction rails, nothing more. The actual capital circulates within the network.

“We lend to each other. If my cousin needs capital, I give it to him. If I need to bridge a gap, someone gives it to me. We know each other. We know who is good for it.”

I told him Nigerians would recognise that — ajo, esusu, the thousand small arrangements by which money moves between people who trust each other more than they trust institutions. He shook his head gently. Correctively.

“You call it helping. We don’t see it that way. Helping is emotional. What we do is structural. If I put my money in a bank and the bank fails, I have nothing. If I put my money in my nephew and his business fails, I know where he lives. I know his father. That relationship is the security. The bank was never the security — it was just the place we pretended the security lived.”

The $72 billion locked behind Lebanese bank counters belonged largely to people who trusted the institution over the network. The people who kept their capital in the family, in the cousin’s trading account and the nephew’s warehouse, lost far less. Not because they were lucky. Because they had decided, long before the crisis, that trust was the only bank that does not fail.

This is not a piece about why foreigners understand Nigeria better than Nigerians do.  Indeed my work interviewing Nigerian entrepreneurs suggests otherwise. There are Nigerians putting serious  capital to work in Nigeria and making money. The Lebanese community did not invent discipline or patience or long-term thinking. What they have done is systematise it — intentionality over accident, preparation over surprise, the network over the institution, and a generational commitment that outlasts any single political weather change.

The good news is that what is transmitted can be learned.

It is the decision, made in advance and renewed daily, to stay.

. Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com. She writes from Lagos.