Government has no business in business? Ask Odu’a

Long before “government has no business in business” became an article of faith in Nigerian public life, the people of the Old Western region had answered it in concrete. They took the proceeds of cocoa, gathered through public institutions, and built roads, schools, industries and estates. In 1965, Cocoa House rose above Ibadan as West Africa’s first skyscraper. It was more than a tall building. It was confidence given height: proof that a people could turn the sweat of farmers into capital, and capital into an inheritance for generations yet unborn.

That inheritance survives in Odu’a Investment Company Limited, jointly owned by the six South-West states. Its recent renewal challenges a stubborn orthodoxy: that the state must retreat, the market must advance effectively on autopilot, and development will somehow emerge.

In 2017, I reviewed Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, which exposed the gap between the economic sermons of rich countries and their own history. Many prosperous nations protected infant industries, directed credit, financed research, used public procurement and gave domestic firms room to grow. Having climbed the ladder, some became energetic lecturers on the virtues of climbing without one.

The free market remains one of humanity’s most productive inventions. Competition can punish laziness, reward innovation and allocate resources better than a room full of civil servants. But the market is an engine, not an oracle. It can reveal where profit is available today. It cannot, by itself, decide what kind of country we should become tomorrow.

Nigerian suspicion of state enterprise did not fall from the sky. We have seen public companies turned into feeding troughs, warehouses of abandoned assets and retirement homes for political loyalists. When Nigerians say government has no business in business, they are often speaking from the bitter evidence of government in business without discipline.

Odu’a also suffered a period of decline, long and costly. When Adewale Raji became Group Managing Director in 2014, the Odu’a Group had gone six years without paying a dividend. Assets estimated above ₦80 billion generated barely ₦1 billion, while Nigeria Wire and Cable, Askar Paints, Epe Plywood and Cocoa Industries had become moribund. Stakes in major companies had been heavily diluted, sometimes to keep the group afloat. Odu’a had drifted from industrial ambition into rent collection: rich in property, poor in productive motion. Raji began the climb back. That valley is the measure of its recovery.

But failure does not settle the argument. Otherwise, collapsed private banks, airlines and factories would also prove that private enterprise should be abolished. The harder questions are who governs, who appoints, who measures performance, who bears consequences and whether political owners can let professionals work.

Odu’a gives us a serious answer. The reform journey gathered momentum under Chief Segun Aina, whose board helped establish a new governance framework and the SRC 2025 strategy: Sweat, Revive and Create. Odu’a possessed a celebrated inheritance, but heritage can become a comfortable chair in which institutions sit until they fall asleep. Its assets had to work again.

Otunba Bimbo Ashiru, who became Group Chairman in June 2022, inherited that direction and drove it forward. Independent directors joined subsidiary boards and oversight was strengthened. For the first time in Odu’a’s history, a Group Managing Director emerged from within: Abdulrahman Yinusa, previously Executive Director of Finance, succeeded Adewale Raji. Institutions become durable when they can reproduce leadership rather than begin life again after every change of guard.

Odu’a declared dividends of ₦428 million for 2022, another ₦428 million for 2023 and ₦518 million for 2024, returning ₦1.374 billion to its owners in three years. Agusto & Co raised its corporate rating from A in 2023 to A+, and then to Aa- with a stable outlook in July 2025, citing stronger income and cash flow, increased rental earnings and the disposal of underperforming assets.

The portfolio is also moving beyond inherited property. The South West Agriculture Company entered partnerships worth nearly ₦10 billion, covering cocoa cultivation, integrated farming, maize production and smallholder support. Odu’a activated a technology subsidiary, advanced the redevelopment of Premier Hotel and committed one per cent of profit after tax to its charitable foundation. By 2026, the foundation’s DEFINED programme had introduced more than 4,000 pupils to digital literacy and coding, and launched a cascaded train the trainer programme for thousands of school teachers in the public sector.

Odu’a is not beyond scrutiny, of course. A corporate compendium is not an independent audit, announced partnerships are not completed projects, and a groundbreaking ceremony does not pay a dividend. The next board must turn today’s promise into productive capacity. Yet the direction is difficult to deny. Chief Segun Aina helped lay the institutional rails; Otunba Bimbo Ashiru and his team moved the train considerably farther. Their strongest achievement may be that Odu’a’s renewal looks less like the performance of one man and more like the recovery of an institution.

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There is a larger African lesson. “Government has no business in business” may sound sophisticated, but repeated as universal truth, it becomes an act of epistemic surrender: a people lowering the flag of its own judgement before the altar of laissez-faire. Epistemic freedom is not hostility to ideas from elsewhere or a retreat into wounded nationalism. Knowledge has no tribe. We must remain open-minded without becoming empty-minded: willing to borrow ideas, never judgement.

The West itself has never spoken with one economic voice. Paul Krugman’s work on increasing returns and economies of scale challenged the idea that countries prosper simply by specialising in whatever nature initially gave them. In industries with enormous start-up costs, early entrants accumulate skills, capital and markets that make it harder for latecomers to compete. Comparative advantage is not always discovered like crude oil beneath the soil. It can be built.

In his 1987 essay, “Is Free Trade Passé?”, Krugman reduced free trade from an unquestionable optimum to a “reasonable rule of thumb”. A rule of thumb is useful; it is not holy writ. He also warned that industrial policy can be captured by vested interests. Nigeria knows that danger intimately. But the possibility of state failure is not an argument for state disappearance. An activist state must never become a busybody state. Industrial policy without discipline is patronage wearing a laboratory coat.

Artificial intelligence now gives the argument fierce urgency. Countries will not become serious AI powers through conferences, motivational speeches and the brilliance of isolated young people. AI requires vast computing capacity, stable electricity, specialised talent, patient finance, research universities, secure data infrastructure and governments capable of using procurement to create markets. We cannot code our way around the absence of power, capital and computing capacity.

The evidence is plain. The United States backs chips and frontier research; the European Union finances AI factories; China directs investment; Gulf states deploy sovereign wealth. These systems differ sharply, but all reject the false choice between dynamic enterprise and an active state. No serious power leaves its future entirely to the invisible hand.

Nigeria should not ask government to manage every start-up or write every algorithm. The state should expand reliable energy, finance shared computing infrastructure, support research, use procurement to give credible Nigerian firms a first market, invest in Nigerian-language technologies and provide patient capital tied to performance. Beneficiaries must face transparent selection, independent oversight and the withdrawal of support when promises fail. The choice is between a capable state that enlarges enterprise and a weak one that leaves its citizens competing on a field built by others.

Odu’a does not prove that every state enterprise will succeed. It proves something more useful and consequential: public ownership is not a sentence of death. Political owners can exercise restraint. Professional boards can impose discipline. Public capital can work with private expertise. One generation can build upon the institutional gains of another. That is the creative confidence Africa must recover.

The generation that turned cocoa into Cocoa House did not wait for foreign permission to imagine at scale. Our generation’s raw materials include data, talent, language and human ingenuity. We can organise them into productive power or export them cheaply and import their finished value at great cost. The next Cocoa House may be the computing infrastructure, research institution or technology company from which a new generation looks confidently upon the world.

The question is no longer whether the state has a place in the future. Every successful state has already answered that question. The question is whether Nigeria will enter that future as a builder, or arrive once again as a customer.