By Josephine Miller/Michael Ajayi
The Chief Executive Officer of Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola, has urged Nigerian youths to leverage consistency and excellence to dismantle structural economic barriers across Africa.
Agboola shared his professional journey during the 2026 Youth Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Programme (YEEP) summit in Abuja, explaining how his background as a software engineer led him to identify payment fragmentation across the continent.
He explained that while Nigeria possesses one of the world’s most advanced real-time financial systems through the NIP network, the lack of integration across other African nations inspired the creation of Flutterwave as an infrastructural highway.
The source reports that the NIP network (Nigeria Instant Payment system) is the pioneering financial infrastructure that facilitates instantaneous transfer of funds across different banking platforms in Nigeria.
It represents the apex of local financial technology, operating at a real-time speed that outpaces conventional transaction processing timelines found in parts of Europe and the United States.
The tech executive emphasised that building global business relations requires extreme trust and maintaining bridges.
Agboola challenged the thousands of National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members present to actively invest in emerging artificial intelligence technologies, noting that digital tools have democratised global economic opportunities.
Similarly, celebrated music producer, Cobhams Asuquo, stated that early-stage ignorance of failure and forced focus allowed him to master his creative industry in spite of being visually impaired.
Asuquo noted that growing up in the military barracks without physical sight forced him to spend thousands of hours practicing the piano while his peers engaged in conventional sports.
The iconic producer cautioned youths against the habit of relying on excuses, stating that individuals must work multiple times harder to ensure their competency overshadows any physical or societal limitations.
He urged emerging entrepreneurs to actively seek out structured mentorship networks to avoid navigating long, lonely professional paths, while maintaining basic acts of mutual kindness.
Also, a renowned fashion designer, Prudent Gabriel-Akpobi, declared that sustainable entrepreneurship is entirely dependent on personal grit, innovation, and an unwavering vision rather than starting capital.
She emphasised that true entrepreneurship requires absolute mental strength, stating that individuals must ignore excuses, save the little they can, and use whatever local resources are available to them to build their enterprises.
The fashion mogul, who now funds annual fashion scholarships worth millions of naira, urged youths to eliminate excuses and utilise their lives to make an immediate, tangible impact on those around them.
