Lagos Sells Itself to Investors at Victoria Island Expo

Nearly 1,000 active startups. That's the number Deputy Governor Kadri Obafemi Hamzat reached for when he stood up at the opening of GITEX Nigeria 2026 on Victoria Island, representing Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and told a room of officials, investors and diplomats that Lagos is a "consequential city." The state, he said, wants to move beyond its identity as Nigeria's commercial capital and become Africa's innovation capital.

The pitch was the point. Over two days at the Landmark Centre, the Lagos State Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology (MIST), led by Commissioner Olatunbosun Alake, used a tech expo, a conference and a startup festival to put the state on display for capital. It opened with a Welcome Dinner for state government representatives, founders, investors and diplomatic guests. Government as salesman. Citizens as inventory.

Who Has the Power

The real business happened on day two, at the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) Pitch Programme, run with TechQuest STEM Academy and MIST. Selected founders presented their businesses and growth plans directly to investors. The base article is candid about what this was: "a direct link between Lagos' innovation pipeline and the capital required to scale it." Founders pitch. Money decides. A state fund and a ministry stand in the doorway holding the guest list.

Ganiyu Oseni, MIST's Special Adviser to the Governor on Innovation, Technology and Broadband Development and chairman of the Local Organising Committee, made the case that Nigeria should stop consuming imported technology and start producing it. He also admitted what the whole spectacle rests on: connectivity, power, digital identity and talent "remain critical foundations for a functioning digital economy." Power, as in electricity, still counts as a foundation that has to be built. He then challenged investors to stop treating Lagos as merely a large market and to set up operations inside it.

What They're Calling "Digital Transformation"

Behind closed doors, MIST hosted its Commissioners' Roundtable on Digital Transformation and Innovation for the second consecutive time. Commissioners, directors-general and technology chiefs from Katsina, Ogun, Jigawa, Ondo, Kwara, Delta and Borno sat down with representatives of the Nigeria Governors' Forum and senior Lagos officials. Closed-door. Nobody outside the apparatus got a seat.

The agenda: moving digital government past isolated pilot projects toward what the article calls "sustainable, citizen-centred systems." Participants named their requirements: political will, digital literacy, standardised data, cybersecurity, strategic infrastructure and stronger inter-state collaboration. Alake pointed to Lagos's enterprise architecture, an audit of systems holding state information, an Oracle-based Applicant Resourcing Platform and a fully digital payroll system. Katsina brought its Resident ID and iKatsina platform. Delta brought an ICT youth training programme. Kwara reported technology delivery challenges, and representatives from Jigawa, Ondo, Borno and Ogun laid out their infrastructure and digital-government gaps.

Read that list again. The people who run these states are building standardised databases of residents, digital identity systems and digitised payrolls, and they're doing it while admitting that pilots keep stalling and infrastructure gaps persist. The article never says who audits the auditors, or what residents get to say about the data held on them.

Who Gets Left Out

More than two dozen startups filled the exhibition floor, among them Sidebrief, DawnAI, RollaPay, Hyperspace Technologies, Sowota and Climatrix AI, working the room for investors, government representatives and international partners. FDX Nigeria examined digital payments, banking, financial inclusion, digital assets and cross-border finance, and MINT Africa by GITEX launched with a focus on tokenisation. Financial inclusion appeared on the agenda. The people supposedly being included did not appear in the base article's list of attendees.

The base article names who was in the room: government officials, technology companies, startups, investors, international ecosystem players. Ordinary Lagosians, the ones living with the power and connectivity gaps Oseni described, get no quote and no seat. The state wants capital to build, operate and grow from within. Whether anyone else gets to grow with it is a question the gathering left unasked.

That's the model on offer: a ministry, a trust fund and a governors' forum brokering access between founders and money, with the rest of the city invited to be a market.