Olatunde Success, CEO of SAW Technologies Limited, on choosing Ibadan over Lagos to build a Nigerian software company: talent, cost, focus, and what the rise of second-city tech means for the ecosystem.
Every few months someone asks when SAW Technologies is moving to Lagos, as if a Nigerian tech company in Ibadan is a rehearsal for the real thing. We build Dbrij, Cirva, and Resikonet from Ibadan on purpose, and the reasons say something about where Nigerian tech is heading.
The practical case
Cost discipline: an Ibadan cost base means our runway stretches further and our pricing can stay in naira without panic. A company selling affordable software to Nigerian businesses should not carry Lagos overheads.
Talent is here: the universities around the southwest produce excellent engineers every year, and most of them would rather not feed their salary to Third Mainland traffic and Lagos rent.
Focus: fewer events, fewer distractions, more shipped software. Deep work is Ibadan’s unfair advantage.
Remote killed the geography excuse
My own career proves the point: I have led engineering for a Canadian company, shipped for remote Nigerian startups, and served banks, all from Ibadan. Customers care whether the escrow releases correctly and the ledger balances, not which city the commit came from. The infrastructure that matters is fibre, power planning, and discipline, and all three are solvable here.
What second-city tech needs to become real
Ibadan does not need to imitate Lagos. It needs anchor companies that stay, hire, and train: proof that a serious engineering career does not require relocation. That is part of how I think about SAW Technologies’ responsibility. Every engineer we grow here makes the next Ibadan company easier to start, and every product we ship from here makes the postcode argument weaker.
Lagos will remain Nigeria’s commercial capital, and we will keep showing up there for partners and banks. But the software gets built where the builders can think. For us, that is Ibadan.
