From the Desk of the Group CEO
Deola Art Alade
October 1, 2026
Making the Case for the Nigeria We Need to Build
In 1960, Nigeria became an independent country.
The challenge back then was enormous and fairly straightforward to describe: take a newly independent nation and build the foundational institutions, industries, and systems required to make that independence meaningful.
Sixty-six years of independence later, our circumstances are radically different.
We have a much larger population. We are entirely connected to the global stage. Technology has shifted how we work, communicate, create, and trade. Entire industries now exist that could not have been imagined at the dawn of our sovereignty.
The creative economy is chief among them.
But as our culture continues its unprecedented global expansion, I find myself thinking less about how far Nigerian creativity has traveled and more about a foundational question:
What did we build then that we still need today? And what does this generation have to build that did not exist then?
That feels like a much more useful Independence Day conversation.
The Nigeria of 1960 did not have streaming platforms, social media, digital distribution, or global audiences available at the tap of a screen. It did not have the technology to turn one person’s idea into something that could reach millions of people instantly.
It did, however, have something we should not overlook: an instinct to build institutions around national ambition.
Culture had intentional structures. Broadcasting, publishing, theater, and the arts had deliberate institutions. Even as film developed its own independent footprint, formal infrastructure followed to back the ecosystem. The technology back then was limited, but the institutional ambition was not.
Today, our creative possibilities are unrecognizable by comparison. A creator can build a massive audience without owning a television station. A filmmaker can reach an international market without a cinema chain. A musician can distribute a song globally without manufacturing a single physical record.
We have gained extraordinary freedom in how we create and distribute.
But freedom to create is not the same thing as the capacity to scale.
That distinction matters.
Because we now have a creative sector that is heavily celebrated on world stages, while the basic domestic systems required for it to function sustainably at scale remain works in progress.
A recent data-driven look at Nigeria’s creative economy shows that talent is not our central constraint. The barriers remain structural: formal funding models, distribution network gaps, regulatory clarity, and reliable intellectual property protection.
That should change the conversation.
We should stop asking if Nigerians are creative enough. We have answered that question decisively. We should ask instead if our systems are designed to make that creativity systematically productive.
Can a young filmmaker easily finance a production, protect the work, distribute it, collect the revenue, and build a lasting company around it?
Can a designer move fluidly from making beautiful things to building a scalable commercial business?
Can an exceptional live experience become a repeatable, exportable intellectual property format?
These questions point to a critical discipline our generation must master: building the second thing.
The first thing is often brilliant. We excel at the initial spark.
We can create the song, but can we build the publishing company?
We can produce the film, but can we build the distribution engine?
We can stage the experience, but can we develop the format, the venue, and the infrastructure around it?
We can design the fashion brand, but can we build the manufacturing, retail, and financing systems that allow it to scale?
This is where the conversation about independence becomes interesting to me as a builder.
Independence gave us the responsibility to determine our own direction.
Our generation has a subsequent responsibility: to build the industrial machinery that can carry that direction forward.
This is not a call to recreate the past.
It is a call to recover the instinct to build strong systems around our global ambitions.
And we have an advantage that earlier generations did not have. We can see the global market while we are building for it. Digital tools make collaboration seamless, and global capital is paying closer attention to African enterprises.
The opportunity is enormous, and so is the responsibility.
The next phase of Nigeria’s creative economy cannot be sustained by individual brilliance alone. It will require robust corporate structures, institutional infrastructure, intentional policy, and long-term capital from builders who are prepared to stay with the work long enough to make it durable.
Our goal cannot just be to prove that Nigerians can do extraordinary things. We already know that we can.
The real work is turning extraordinary individual capacity into extraordinary collective capacity. It means turning ideas into institutions, talent into enterprises, and creative success into repeatable systems that the next generation can inherit, improve, and build upon.
That is what carrying independence forward looks like.
It means not simply asking what Nigeria can produce, but asking what we can build that will still be working long after we are gone.
Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.
Deola Art Alade
Founder & Group CEO, 360CO