By Jennifer D. Daniel
In the first part of this series, I argued that Nigeria’s chronic low-trust culture was choking innovation at its root. I made the case that the inability to trust our systems, institutions, or each other was preventing collaboration, slowing knowledge-sharing, and stunting the very growth we claim to desire. The response was overwhelming. People nodded, reposted, and agreed. It resonated because it’s a lived truth. Anyone who has tried to build anything here knows the tension: suspicion at every level, ideas hoarded like family secrets, and partnerships dissolving over the smallest slights.
But the more I sat with it, the more something tugged at the edges of my conviction.
What if the distrust wasn’t entirely pathological? What if it wasn’t a barrier to innovation, but a different path through it?
What if we’ve been romanticising collaboration and misreading isolation?
In Silicon Valley, collaboration is fetishized. The founder’s garage has morphed into a ping-pong table at WeWork. We see cheerful group photos on pitch decks and hear TEDx speakers rhapsodize about synergy and “thinking together.” But Nigeria is not Silicon Valley. Here, the archetype isn’t the hoodie-clad group of dreamers, it’s the lone wolf. The hustler. The visionary who builds an empire through grit, secrecy, and sheer stubbornness.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not a failure.
It’s easy to mourn what we lack, like trust, transparency, fluid collaboration but it’s harder to see what’s been born in their absence. We often miss the brilliance hiding in our so-called dysfunction.
Look closer. Nigeria’s most fascinating innovations don’t come from open networks. They come from tight, private ecosystems. Family-run businesses with built-in loyalty systems. Covert distribution strategies that evade red tape. Tech founders who keep their cards so close to the chest that even their co-founders are sometimes in the dark.
It’s tempting to scoff at this. To say we must “grow up” and become more collaborative, more open, more like the West. But that impulse is itself colonial. It assumes that innovation can only look one way: collective, transparent, scalable through shared effort.
Yet some of the most transformative ideas in human history did not come from a committee. They came from solitude. From tension. From conflict, even. From people who didn’t ask for permission or even help. They came from obsession, from necessity, from defiance.
Nigeria breeds these kinds of innovators. People who don’t wait to be empowered. People who assume betrayal and build anyway. People who keep backup plans for their backup plans because they know the system won’t catch them when they fall.
Is that sad? Maybe. But it’s also something more: it’s adaptive intelligence.
We are living in an environment of friction; legal friction, infrastructural friction, emotional friction. And in such an environment, trust becomes expensive. Collaboration becomes dangerous. So people innovate in solitude, or in small clusters bound not by MOU but by blood and loyalty.
This is not a bug. This is a feature.
We have misread Nigeria’s innovation model by applying the wrong lens. We think because we don’t see open-source movements and hackathon alliances blooming everywhere, innovation is dead. But what if it’s simply hidden? Disguised beneath layers of survival logic?
What if all this secrecy, all this caution, is not a refusal to grow but a refusal to be used?
Our incubators preach “sharing ideas,” “failing fast,” “building in public.” But how does one build in public in a society where every success attracts spiritual envy or regulatory harassment? How does one “fail fast” when failure here means not just embarrassment but financial ruin and social ostracism?
So Nigerians hedge. They obscure. They delay announcements. They succeed in silence. This isn’t dysfunction. It’s evolution under pressure.
You cannot punish a society for adapting to its own reality. You cannot shame people into trust when trust has never served them. People don’t avoid collaboration here because they’re backward. They avoid it because they are perceptive.
It’s not that they haven’t read the startup playbook. It’s that they have lived a different story.
We need to stop treating collaboration like a moral virtue. It is not. It is a strategy. One of many. And in places like Nigeria, it is often not the optimal one.
Some of the most powerful founders I know don’t network. They build. Quietly, obsessively. They have no time for pitch competitions. They don’t announce pre-seed rounds on Twitter. But they are generating real value maybe not for the global venture ecosystem, but for their families, their communities, their children.
These people aren’t missing out on collaboration. They’ve outgrown the illusion of it.
There is, of course, a cost to all this. Solo paths are lonely. They are fragile. They can burn you out. And sometimes, they fail simply because one person cannot carry a vision alone.
But let’s be honest: collaboration has its costs too. It dilutes. It delays. It sometimes turns sharp visions into muddled compromises.
Nigeria’s challenge is not that we lack collaboration. It’s that we haven’t built systems that deserve collaboration. Until then, the lone builders will continue. And they should.
Maybe our job is not to drag them into circles and panels and programs. Maybe our job is to build structures that protect and reward their independence until they choose to collaborate on their own terms.
I don’t know how this ends. Maybe we will eventually build the kind of trust ecosystems that allow large-scale collaboration. Or maybe we will continue to innovate through islands, lighthouse ventures lighting up dark waters, distant from each other, but radiant in their solitude.
What I do know is this: the next time you see a Nigerian innovator working alone, withholding details, and moving in silence, don’t assume it’s fear or ego.
It might just be wisdom.
Bio: Jennifer writes about African innovation, technology, and economic development through tech entrepreneurship.
