Nigeria’s digital transformation and financial sector modernization over the past five years. He was a former Senior Associate at Olaniwun Ajayi LP (ranked Nigeria’s leading law firm consistently by global legal directories such as Chambers Global, IFLR 1000, and Legal 500). He rose to this position in record time and has served as one of the youngest primary architects for some of Nigeria’s most critical digital and economic laws.
His work sits at the intersection of legal framework reform and advisory of DFIs and government agencies on operationalisation of entities that can achieve sovereign objectives. He has drafted regulatory frameworks governing data protection, digital identity, consumer credit, and banking sector modernization for the federal government and has advised government agencies and multilateral institutions including the World Bank and United Nations, on the establishment of institutions catalysing the Nigerian economy. His career demonstrates how young professionals can accelerate institutional transformation in emerging markets.
After receiving admission offers from Harvard Law School, Georgetown Law, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Georgia School of Law, he chose Harvard Law School and is currently pursuing an LL.M. at Harvard.
In this interview Alufa spoke on abounding opportunities in tech and need for regulations amongst other things
Questuon: You became one of the primary drafters of major national laws in your 20s—roles traditionally dominated by senior technocrats. What does this say about the gaps and urgent opportunities in Nigeria’s tech and public policy ecosystem, especially for young professionals?
Response: To be honest, I think it says less about me and more about a specific moment of necessity in Nigeria’s development. In the last 5 – 6 years, Nigeria has been making active efforts in strengthening its digital economy especially with tech innovations which were springing up, already serving millions of Nigerians.
It seemed like the innovations were happening faster than the regulations and at the time, it became clear to me that crafting regulatory frameworks for this type of development meant a slight shift in what “expertise” looked like. Traditionally, legislative drafting was the preserve of senior policymakers, and for good reason; it requires deep understanding of existing institutions and how they interact. This expertise is still extremely fundamental today. But the laws we are writing today on data protection, digital identity, consumer credit, govern technologies that didn’t even exist ten years ago. There’s no institutional memory to draw from because the institutions themselves are being built in real time.
The gap I see is an interpretation gap. You have brilliant senior policymakers who understand governance, and you have young innovators who understand the code and the culture of the digital economy. The urgent opportunity for young professionals in this space is to be the bridge between those two worlds.
My experience is an example of this. I was fortunate to work at Olaniwun Ajayi LP, a firm that actively practices meritocracy. I had mentors like Muyiwa Balogun (Partner, Government Business Practice), Celestina Nwabueze, Babatunde Ige, and Mitchell Aghatise who cared more about my grasp of the subject matter than my age. They gave me the opportunity to be part of a stellar team that worked on historic mandates.
So, for young professionals, I genuinely think if you can master the technical details that seem abstract to older folks (and even your peers), you can earn a seat at the highest tables very early in your career. But you need to actually know the material because the older and experienced folks always come prepared and you’d be surprised that they’ll outclass you on what you think is right up your alley.
Q: You have worked on institutional and regulatory reforms ranging from NNPC’s corporatisation, National Credit Guarantee Company Limited establishment, to data protection, digital identity, and consumer credit architecture modernisation. How do you personally navigate the technical complexity and political sensitivities of reforms that impact millions of citizens and billions of naira in economic value?
Response: The first thing I learned is not to treat these reforms purely as “legal” excercises. They really go beyond law to actual social engineering. A provision or structure that seems purely technical, immediately becomes political when you realize it affects whether a small business can access loans or how a citizen’s personal data crosses borders.
My approach has been to start with the stakeholders who will live with the consequences. So, you have to spend an enormous amount of time understanding exactly how the technical details work because if you don’t understand, you will either grossly misunderstand how they affect citizens or worse, be ignorant of the impact on their lives all together. So, the technicalities in the reforms must actually account for the realities people face and should not just be theoretical best practices from other jurisdictions.
On political sensitivity, I think understanding the boundaries of my role has been an important skill for me. On the mandates I worked on, I knew my job was to make sure that whatever policy direction had been chosen, could be implemented through effective legal structures and methodologies.
The hardest part is knowing when to push back on technical grounds and when to defer. I’ve learned that if a chosen approach will genuinely not work based on your professional assessment, you have a professional obligation to say so clearly. But if it’s simply a matter of preferring a specific approach over the the chosen one, and the chosen one is still workable, that’s where you defer. My job is to make the vision of the decision-makers work, not substitute my policy preferences for theirs. At best, I may offer my thoughts on strengthening the chosen policy.
What you quickly learn from working with experienced professionals is that the job isn’t about trying to appear as the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the most useful. You’re there to help decision makers translate their vision into something that truly works.
Q: Your experience spans collaboration with institutions like the World Bank and UN agencies like UNICEF. In practical terms, how do global development standards get reshaped to fit Nigeria’s legal, cultural and institutional realities without losing their core intent?
Response: The short answer is: you don’t start with the global standard and try to fit Nigeria into it. You start with the Nigerian problem and then see what’s useful from international frameworks. Fully appreciating the uniqueness of the problem in the Nigerian context is crucial because it determines what you’re looking for in international frameworks.
You also need to understand the limitations of our existing laws in dealing with the problem. You need to know what we are lacking to know exactly what we should be adding. All these must be done before you start assessing international frameworks and using them as benchmarks to distill principles and recommendations that can be adapted to the Nigerian context.
This is where creative thinking is essential. You may see a standard that looks good on paper in the US or Europe but simply won’t work in the Nigerian context. Instead of discarding it completely, you have to think of creative structures that can achieve the same objective. It is these approaches that make international partners and organisations value our collaboration because we aren’t just copying and pasting their model laws or standards.
Q: Many young Nigerians aspire to influence policy but feel locked out of government processes. From your journey, what skills, ethical discipline and strategic exposure are truly necessary for young Africans to move from advocacy to actual institutional reform?
Response: Personally, I hold the view that advocacy and institutional reform sometimes require different skill sets. Advocating for a reform is not exactly the same thing as thinking through structures to actualise the reform, and the complete policy maker must respect both.
It is tempting, and quite frankly easy, to say what we need as a nation. It is much harder to think through how to achieve them in practical terms especially in a country as complex as Nigeria. I was clear in my mind that the skills that mattered most for me were technical mastery and credibility because those are the currencies you spend to be invited into the room where actual reforms are crafted.
Strategic exposure matters, but it’s not only about networking events. It’s about positioning yourself where the work is actually happening. For me, that meant joining a firm like Olaniwun Ajayi which works on mandates that directly shape Nigeria’s socio-economic development. If those direct pathways aren’t available, look for adjacent spaces – civil society organizations working on technical policy, think tanks doing rigorous research, regulatory agencies looking for young talent.
On ethics: the work requires integrity because you’re often crafting regulatory frameworks or corporate structures that will affect millions of people, and the temptation to serve narrow interests is real. You have to be clear about who you’re serving and why.
But I’ll say this – not everyone needs to be in the reform room. We also desperately need people doing rigorous advocacy, investigative journalism, academic research. Institutional reform isn’t better than those things; it’s just different. Find where your skills and temperament fit best.
Q: As a Harvard student deeply involved in Nigeria’s nation-building efforts, how do you see the role of next-generation leadership in strengthening public trust, modernising governance and ensuring that technology-driven reforms serve the ordinary Nigerian, not just elite interests?
Response: For me, next-generation leadership matters less because we’re younger and more because we will have to live with the consequences of what we are building for longer. That creates a different kind of accountability.
Public trust isn’t something you restore through messaging. You restore it by building things that work and building in safeguards against abuse.
I also understand that the elite capture risk is real, but I think the antidote is deliberate inclusion of diverse perspectives in the design process and regulatory frameworks strong enough to prevent exploitation.
But honestly, I’m skeptical of grand narratives about generational change. What matters more is whether the specific people working on these reforms – regardless of age – are technically competent, ethically grounded, and accountable to the citizens they’re meant to serve.
If we must focus on a grand narrative, it should be this: the goal of next-generation leadership shouldn’t just be to occupy positions of power, but to make those positions actually deliver value for the people who are counting on us. My time at Harvard is helping me see this even more clearly.
Q: With your exposure at the international level, how do you see the prevalent attitude of your generation in Nigeria who tend to be pre-occupied with gossips, insults, celebrity worship and other frivolous engagements on social media? How can such tendencies be oriented towards self-development, poverty reduction and national progress – any hope at all for such?
Response: I think we have to be careful not to mistake visibility for reality. Social media amplifies certain behaviors, but it doesn’t represent the full picture of what young Nigerians are actually doing. For every viral celebrity gossip thread, there are young Nigerians doing awesome work in startups, small businesses, top organisations, academic instutions, civil service, and communities. They’re just less loud about it.
That said, I do think there’s a real challenge around where we direct our collective attention and energy. Part of it is economic – when opportunities feel scarce, escapism becomes attractive. Part of it is structural – our systems sometimes punish critical thinking or genuine civic engagement.
But I’ve also seen how quickly things can shift when young people see tangible pathways to impact, and you realise the energy was always there; it just needed direction.
The hope I have is this: Nigeria’s challenges are so urgent that they create opportunities for people who are willing to do serious work and the truth is the old gatekeeping structures won’t hold forever.
So I think that we should be creating more visible pathways for young people to see that their skills and energy can translate into actual impact, and then trusting that enough of them will choose substance over noise.
