UBER AND THE COST OF OUR TRUST DEFICIT
After 12 years, the ride-hailing operator exits Nigeria, writes JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
This morning I would have opened Uber and switched the payment method to cash before ordering a ride. If you are like me, that is how it works in Nigeria, unless you prefer to have that ‘cash or card?’ conversation. Or the one where the driver says nothing until the trip ends, then explains that the app price does not work for him.
After twelve years, Uber has wound down its Nigerian operations, effective 2 September. It cited a review of its investment focus across Africa. It left Uganda the same day, Tanzania in January after a standoff with regulators over fixed fares, and Côte d’Ivoire in 2025, surrendering Abidjan to Yango. Half the African footprint gone in under two years. On the same Wednesday it announced 3,300 job cuts, a tenth of its workforce, with the savings redirected towards driverless cars. Some of this week is not about us at all. But it is still worth asking why the numbers stopped working here so completely, and that question is about trust.
We blame them, but sometimes drivers have a strong case. Fuel subsidy removal in 2023 raised costs. They spent years contesting commissions of up to 25 per cent. They protested in 2017, in 2023, in 2025, and in July the Public Complaints Commission had to direct the FCT Administration to intervene. When they ask for cash, it is not so much an expression of suspicion of the passenger as arithmetic.
That is precisely the point. It was a pricing dispute, and pricing disputes are ordinary in economies that have somewhere to settle them. They could not renegotiate with the platform, so they renegotiated with the passengers, at the kerb, where neither party had recourse worth the name. That grievance is what produces the ‘cash or card?’ question that was never meant to exist, and the argument over a price the app had already settled.
Consider what Uber actually sold. Vetting, a trace, a pool of cars, someone to complain to. All real. But the load-bearing piece was a settled price. Neither party had to trust the other, because a third party had fixed the terms and removed the argument. Notice which layer survived. Riders paying cash still opened the app, because the matching still worked. What died was the pricing authority. Once the number on the screen is understood to be a suggestion, the platform is no longer setting terms. It is generating leads, and lead generation is a commodity. No margin, no pricing power, because the moment a cheaper app appears, both parties move, having already agreed the app was never in charge. That is how you get a price war brutal enough that a company with Uber’s balance sheet decides Lagos is not worth the trouble. Competition killed the product because the product had already been hollowed out from the inside.
What thrives instead is no surprise. InDrive lets the passenger name a fare and lets the driver accept or counter. The negotiation is not a bug there. It is the feature. The model was not built for us, though. It was born in Yakutsk in 2012 out of frustration with surge pricing and now runs in 48 countries. The bid is an import. What is ours is how comfortably it fits.
Run that small daily irritation through everything else. Ask a Nigerian with capital why he has not opened the second branch, the poultry farm, the logistics outfit he talks about every time someone asks. He will not tell you the market is bad. He will tell you the moment he turns his back the business will suffer. So the money stays where he can watch it. The business that dies is not the one that failed. It is the one never started because it could not be supervised.
This is why so many of our enterprises are capped at exactly the size of one man’s eyes, and why the trusted staff member is a cousin. We read that pragmatism as nepotism. It probably is, but it is also risk management. The cousin may not be competent. But he is harder to disappear, because he has a village, a mother and a name that can be dragged. Where contracts cannot be enforced, family becomes collateral.
The Central Bank tells a version of the same story. As at June, N4.92 trillion sat outside the banking system, 89.1 per cent of all physical cash in circulation, down from 91.3 per cent in May. That figure describes banknotes, not the whole of our money. What it measures is the part of the economy that still insists on settling in hand, and the Central Bank wants it below 40 per cent by 2028, which tells you it does not consider 89 per cent normal either.
Pew found last year that 83 per cent of Swedish adults say most people can be trusted. The median across the sixteen high-income countries surveyed was 59 per cent. Across the nine middle-income countries, 27 per cent. In Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, large majorities said most people cannot be trusted. Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow observed decades ago that virtually every commercial transaction contains an element of trust. Societies short of it pay for the shortfall elsewhere, in guarantors, in two years of rent upfront, in deals that never happen.
We can build the alternative, because we already built one. The instant transfer works. A stranger sends money, the alert lands in seconds, and nobody has to trust anybody. Cash outside the banking system fell by N485.8 billion in the first half of this year, and the Central Bank credits the shift to electronic payments. We did not become more honest between January and June. We built something that made honesty unnecessary.
Uber sold us a settled price, and we would not let it hold because finding another way has been built into our economic culture. Trust at scale is infrastructure, not just morality. Until we can enforce a promise, we will keep engineering our way around ever making one.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing