In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria directed all financial institutions to close accounts linked to crypto transactions. Overnight, businesses that had built their entire operation around crypto payments lost access to their banking infrastructure. No warning. No transition period. One circular and the model that had been working stopped working. The businesses that survived were not the ones that predicted the policy. Nobody predicted it. They were the ones that had not built everything on a single point of regulatory failure.
That is the specific risk that most Nigerian business owners underestimate — not that the government will act, but that it will act without notice, in a direction that directly cuts the foundation the business is standing on. Forex restrictions. Import bans. Sudden changes to fuel pricing. New tax directives. Platform shutdowns. The Nigerian regulatory environment has produced all of these within the last five years, and in each case the businesses most damaged were the ones that had built their model on the assumption that the current rules would stay in place.
The instinct most founders have after a policy change is to treat it as a temporary disruption — something to manage through until things return to normal. That instinct is expensive. Nigerian government policy does not always reverse. The 2021 crypto banking restriction took years to partially unwind. Forex restrictions introduced as temporary measures become permanent features of the operating environment. The businesses that wait for conditions to return to what they were often wait longer than they can afford to.
The argument is not that Nigerian founders should stop building. It is that they should build with the unpredictability of the environment factored in from the beginning. A business that depends entirely on one payment channel is exposed the moment that channel is restricted. A business that depends on imported inputs at a fixed exchange rate is exposed the moment that rate moves. A business that operates in a regulated category — crypto, fintech, food imports, fuel — without understanding the specific regulatory risks in that category is operating with a blind spot the government will eventually find.
Most Nigerian businesses cannot predict what the government will do next. Nobody can. What they can control is how much damage a single policy change can do to the business. That is a structural question — how many ways does the business have to receive payment, source its inputs, serve its customers, and generate revenue? The more of those that depend on a single regulatory condition remaining stable, the more exposed the business is to a policy environment that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that stability is not guaranteed.
Build the business to survive what you cannot predict. In Nigeria, that is not a precaution. It is a requirement.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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