UK-based technology lead Kayode Jaiyeola, who helped rebuild the IT backbone of MedPlus, Nigeria’s largest pharmacy chain, says the costliest habit in African organisations is not what they pay for technology, but what they fail to do after paying.

Ask Kayode Jaiyeola where Nigerian organisations lose the most money on technology, and he does not start with the exchange rate or the price of diesel. He points to a habit.

“The biggest wasteful mistake is treating technology as something to purchase rather than something to manage,” he says. “Organisations spend money on servers and licensed software, but they don’t regularly check how efficiently they are running them. You have bought a product. What value are you getting out of it?”

It is a view shaped by over 15 years in the field, from retail networks across Nigeria to the regulated corners of Britain’s financial services, healthcare and public sectors, where he now works as a technology lead across cloud, cyber security and artificial intelligence.

He is not alone in that diagnosis. Kashifu Inuwa, Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has warned that 56 per cent of government-funded IT projects in Nigeria have failed to meet their objectives. Ministries and agencies, he has said, often adopt new technology without a clear grasp of the problem it should solve, and build in silos: one agency develops a payroll system while another builds a similar one from scratch, both paid for with public money. “We must stop designing in silos,” Inuwa said. “If systems don’t work together, they fail together.”

The waste rarely ends at the purchase. Few organisations, public or private, go back to ask whether a system is still earning its keep: whether it should be scaled down, merged with another tool, or stripped of licences nobody uses.

Early lessons in discipline
Jaiyeola learned this early in his career. After graduating in Computer Science from Covenant University, he spent two years as an infrastructure specialist with Etisalat Nigeria (now 9mobile), supporting technology across about 120 retail shops, kiosks and regional offices nationwide. Workdays ran 12 to 14 hours, but the lessons outlasted the fatigue.

One came from a manager who insisted every laptop the company bought came with a three- or five-year warranty. “If anything goes wrong, the vendor resolves it. They come and replace the parts,” Jaiyeola recalls. “And once the warranty expires, there’s no point keeping those laptops. Give them to the user or sell them within the business.”

He contrasts that discipline with what he still sees. “You buy very expensive server infrastructure, but did you buy a warranty with the vendor? Something goes down, and now you have to go back and seek approval to spend that money all over again.”

His next role tested those principles at scale. At MedPlus, he was one of two people brought in to redo the company’s entire IT infrastructure, from the data centre to the network linking more than 100 branches. The design they put in place, he says, still supports the 24-hour stores and the warehouse supply chain the business relies on today.

Where the waste hides
Since moving to the United Kingdom at the end of 2018, Jaiyeola has found that waste is not only a Nigerian problem. It turns up everywhere.

At one charity, he found the organisation paying for Microsoft 365 licences no one was monitoring. Some belonged to staff who had long left. “I pulled the report, sat with each team and asked: is this person still here? Does this person need a licence?” he says. “Then we worked through it and cut it down.”

In financial services, the waste was time. Requests took two to three weeks just to reach his team, slowed by manual handoffs. He replaced the process with an AI agent that asks the requester a few questions, sends standard requests straight through and routes complex ones for closer attention. The wait fell from about three weeks to three or four days.

“Once a human being is involved in a repetitive process, there’s a loophole,” he says. “There can be tiredness, mistakes, even manipulation. An AI assistant won’t forget to put something in your calendar.”

Cutting the waste
His advice to Nigerian businesses is practical. Know what problem a technology solves, and how you will measure its value, before you buy it. Buy support and warranty alongside hardware. Review licences and subscriptions regularly, not only when the renewal invoice lands. Automate repetitive processes where a human step adds delay rather than judgement. And plan every project to the end.

“That’s something we struggle with in Nigeria,” he says. “Have a start and end plan, so you know the components that are coming. Don’t do a one-off purchase here and another there without thinking it through.”

For all his criticism of wasteful habits, Jaiyeola refuses to talk the country down. As a young professional, he worked around unreliable power by studying when electricity came on, sleeping when it went off, and keeping his laptop charged for long sessions in libraries. With the right information, he believes, Nigerian businesses can make the same kind of adjustments and cut the waste out of their technology spending.

“When people ask me to talk about Nigeria, I’m not the right person to speak negatively about it, because I made it work,” he says. “Whatever problem you face, you can always explore a solution.”