Believer & Disciple of Jesus Christ | Husband | Product Storyteller | Co-founder, Zane Africa
Africa
Joined August 2020
- Tweets4.9K
- Following1.1K
- Followers777
- Likes18.4K
The kind people of Techsudor decided to tell our story
Been an interesting journey so far 🎉
techsudor.com/how-zane-afric…
This frame of thinking is what powers how we finance assets for our customers at Zane Africa
- Productive assets only
- Good resale value
- Daily repayments
Our NPL after financing over 300 million naira in assets is at 0%
Buy Now Pay Later is just too difficult in this market.
The likes of @CDcareNG may have struck gold with 'Pay Small Small': longer repayment plans, with sold items as collateral.
In this 2022 interview, CEO Oluwatobi Odukoya explains the model they still largely use today.
There’s so much to be done in financing productive assets for the real economy and this partnership is another step in that direction
lnkd.in/p/eYSha5My
✌️
Was so nice to finally meet in person, My Chief
Exciting times are truly ahead.
@levi_ceec @zippeny @hackSultan @africadeeptech @_successakanbi @Mastarcard
Let’s go!! 🚀
A couple of months ago, a fleet operator in uyo bought 6 bicycles from @StrideEv to add to his logistics business. Over the weekend I traveled down to uyo to check in and see how things are going.
Levi Cee | Zane Africa retweeted
@levi_ceec is solving this for transport workers with his startup.
One major difference between life in Nigeria and life in developed economies is something we don’t talk about enough:
ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE CREDIT.
In Canada, car loans can be around 6–7% per annum. Mortgages can be around 4–6%.
In the UK, new mortgages are around 4–5%.
Across the Eurozone, new housing loans are around 3–4%.
In the United States, even with today’s relatively high rates, a 30-year mortgage is around 7%.
Now come to Nigeria.
Our Central Bank policy rate is 23%, while commercial lending rates can run above 30% and, depending on the lender and borrower, considerably higher.
Then there are short-term digital lenders and informal loan sharks whose effective borrowing costs can be brutal.
Think about what this does to a society.
In developed economies, a hardworking person does not necessarily need the entire cash to buy a car, own a home, acquire equipment or build a business.
The financial system allows you to bring tomorrow’s income into today’s productivity.
You buy the house and repay over 15, 20 or 30 years.
You buy the car and repay over several years.
A business buys equipment today and pays for it from the income that equipment generates tomorrow.
That is one of the hidden infrastructures of prosperity: AFFORDABLE, LONG-TERM CREDIT.
In Nigeria, we have almost criminalised not having cash.
If you don’t have ₦50 million today, you may simply not be able to buy the ₦50 million asset, even if you have a stable income capable of paying for it over several years.
And when credit is available, the cost can be so high that the loan itself becomes the problem.
This affects everything.
Home ownership.
Transportation.
Manufacturing.
Agriculture.
Small businesses.
Education.
Technology.
Job creation.
We cannot build a productive middle class entirely on CASH AND CARRY.
A modern economy must allow responsible people to use their FUTURE INCOME to build their PRESENT PRODUCTIVITY.
Nigeria doesn’t only need more jobs.
We need a financial system that makes the income from those jobs actually capable of building wealth.
Affordable credit is not a luxury.
It is economic infrastructure.
For the past one year plus, we have been building Zane Mobility, a vehicle financing and community finance platform for mobility workers, brick by brick from Uyo, Akwa Ibom State.
Yesterday, we handed over 10 brand-new financed tricycles to drivers.
It was one of those moments that makes you pause and appreciate how far we have come.
We started with vehicle financing, and so far, we have financed over 41 vehicles.
Today, we serve over 300 mobility workers, from Keke drivers and bus drivers to delivery riders, Bolt drivers and truck drivers.
In the second quarter of this year, we expanded beyond vehicle financing and launched savings and microloans for mobility workers.
Today, our drivers have deposited over ₦10 million in savings, and we have disbursed over 100 loans with an NPL of 0%.
What makes this particularly exciting for us is how we are building the infrastructure to make this possible.
We have built technology around the driver, including our Driver App and BRM App, but we have also recognised that technology alone cannot solve the problem.
So we have combined our digital infrastructure with an offline distribution network of Relationship Service Centres, Agents and Deposit Points, which we are steadily expanding across the city.
Because the reality is that not every mobility worker operates through a smartphone or a digital platform.
And this is where I think our work becomes particularly important.
A lot of financial and mobility solutions in Nigeria are built around the major hubs, especially Lagos and a few other large cities. But mobility workers are everywhere.
There are drivers in Uyo. Port Harcourt. Aba. Benin. Enugu. Calabar. And hundreds of other cities across Africa.
They have the same aspirations. They want to earn more. They want to save. They want access to credit. They want to own the vehicles they drive. They want to provide better lives for their families.
Geography should not determine who gets access to financial opportunity.
That is the narrative we are trying to rewrite with Zane Mobility.
Every vehicle we finance represents a driver moving closer to ownership. Every savings deposit represents a driver building financial capacity. Every loan that helps a driver solve a genuine need represents one less reason to turn to expensive informal borrowing.
And behind every driver is often a family whose livelihood depends on that person’s ability to keep working.
A big thank you to our finance partners who continue to provide the capital that makes our vehicle financing programme possible. We provide the distribution, technology and operating infrastructure, while our partners help provide the financing capacity to put more productive assets in the hands of mobility workers.
Yesterday was 10 new tricycles.
We are already thinking about the next 100.
We keep building!
Building anything impactful takes time….
We are building the financial infrastructure for mobility workers - vehicle financing, savings, loans, phone financing and health insurance.
Levi Cee | Zane Africa retweeted
So, GoLemon shut down last week. FoodCourt went dark a few months before it. EdenLife quietly buried its consumer business and ran to corporate clients.
Everybody online, even the ones who shouldn't, explained it almost the same way:
👉🏾 Funding winter, but it's sunny all year around here
👉🏾 Brutal macro, yes tough break boyz
👉🏾 Naira, it's already somehow at fault
All true. All incomplete.
Here is the part nobody wants to say: most of these were not killed by the market being cruel to them. They were killed by US NOT PAYING for the things we swore we LOOOOVVVEEEEEDDDD!
GoLemon said its orders were actually profitable, around ₦43K a basket. It still died, because it never hit the volume to carry the warehouses, the engineers, the fleet, the whole stack it owned
FoodCourt hit $4.3M in ARR and called itself profitable in 2024, then couldn't make payroll a year later
EdenLife was the poster child of the entire Africa-rising middle-class dream, premium concierge for the upwardly mobile Lagos professional. It took an honest look at its own unit economics and surrendered the consumer business.
Now look at who is winning in the exact same sectors. Chowdeck, asset-light, moving over ₦1.5B of groceries in a single month. Moniepoint. Twiga. Eden itself, now chasing corporate contracts. The pattern is not subtle.
In a market like ours, necessity scales and nice-to-have doesn't.
The businesses that reach real size sit on top of things people cannot say no to
Moving money(Paystack, Flutterwave, MoniePoint)
Financing an asset that earns(Carbon, MKopa, Sycamore, etc...)
Feeding a company(Mono, Lendsqr, etc...)
Credit
The middle-class convenience app dies because our middle class is thin, stretched, and one bad week away from cooking at home to save money. There is a cheaper informal version of almost everything you sell. So people don't pay. Then we blame VCs for not funding the very thing we ourselves won't buy. That math has never worked.
But here is where I have to be careful, because this is where people get loud and wrong. An earlier version of me did too
The problem is NOT that companies serve poor or desperate people. Serving the underserved is the most important work on this continent. The problem is that necessity demand is dangerously easy to abuse. When your customer cannot walk away, bad terms stop being a mistake and become the model. Opaque pricing. Punitive collections. Locking an asset after it has been fully paid for.
That is the real line. Not who you serve but the terms
Same customer. Same poverty. Clean terms, you built financial inclusion. Dirty terms, you built a debt trap with a pitch deck. One market already proved it is the terms and not the poverty: force real price disclosure on lenders and the rates fall overnight, same borrowers.
So, the culture is not "exploitation" not really. That is lazy and I no longer believe it. The honest version is harder:
Our market rewards necessity over nice-to-have. Necessity is easy to exploit if you choose to. And the whole game, the only game, is refusing to blur inclusion and extraction at exactly the moment blurring them pays better.
That is the conversation. I am ready to have it in the open
Are we?
This is a terrible thing to do
No where in that videos did he say that. For everything he said, he referenced scriptures clearly speaking the same thing.
This thing you people are doing in this our body of Christ, you better repent o!
Levi Cee | Zane Africa retweeted
IN THE CASE OF ADEFIRE.
This is what HYPERGRACE teaches.
1. His sins have been forgiven once for all.
By Jesus’ blood, he stands holy, blameless and spotless as God’s son.
“For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”
Hebrews 10:14 KJV
God rejects his sinful actions and ours, yet God accepts him forever as his son.
He has eternal life and will not perish.
2. God’s Spirit indwells Him forever. Despite His many sins, God remains faithful to him and God’s Spirit is ministering both forgiveness and correction to him.
“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;”
John 14:16 KJV
3. He must be disciplined by gracious people who will not destroy his awareness of God’s love while his sinful proclivities are destroyed.
“Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such a one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.”
Galatians 6:1 KJV
4. He must apologize to the body he represents for misrepresenting godly virtues and bringing disrepute to the ministry.
5. If he has done anything illegal and criminal in the process, the law should take its course and hopefully he learns that actions have consequences on earth!
6. All the ladies involved should please forgive themselves and seek true healing from the Lord.
Men of God can fail, Jesus does not fail.
7. If he is truly repentant and seeks proper guidance, ADEFIRE will yet become all that God has planned for him to be in ministry , God’s light will yet shine through him, he will yet be a voice that blesses many.
God is able to restore and rebuild.
We all need grace, we all need discipline, we all need another chance to show God’s glory.
Amen.🙏
About my time selling Health Insurance and how we pivoted our sales strategy
The head of sales loved it.
The CTO killed it.
Levi Cee kept running into the same wall selling health insurance to Nigerian fintechs. The commercial teams would say yes; product teams would say the roadmap was full.
So he changed who he sold to entirely. He started going directly to CTOs. This changed everything.
Read the full Questing conversation here:
questinghq.com/p/levi-cee-we…
