Nothing was wasted.
Every job, every qualification, every country taught me something I needed for what came next. From a rail line in Ogun State to a fintech desk across seventeen African markets to a classroom in Kingston, Ontario, the work reached South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and much of the continent, all of it run from a base in Lagos until the one move that changed home, Nigeria to Canada. One accumulating story. I build systems that last, for businesses, for classrooms, and for countries. This page is the ledger.
The ledger
In nine chapters
The Railroad and the Classroom
June 1997. The month I finished secondary school in Arigbajo, Ogun State, I started work as a labourer renovating the Lagos to Ibadan to Kano rail line, on the stretch between Ifo Junction and Abeokuta Junction. The subcontractor mismanaged the contract and the wages stopped. Owed six to eight weeks of pay, we tracked him to his house near Agbado Station and found it swept clean.
About seventeen of us were stranded with nothing in our pockets; that night we trekked the rail line back to Ifo Junction. On that walk I asked myself one question: what is my strength? The answer was intellectual work. Nigeria had a chronic shortage of teachers, so within weeks I was standing in front of a primary school classroom, age 17. Teaching stuck. It has never left.
The Alternative Route
By 18 I was running my strength like a business. Two friends and I co-founded Eversure Coaching Centre, an exam-prep operation for students retaking the GCE. I chose to teach Mathematics precisely because it had been my weakest subject; I mastered it deliberately, then taught it, and our first cohort passed brilliantly. Private after-school coaching soon paid four times my teaching salary.
But the arithmetic of university was against me: roughly two million JAMB applicants each year competing for well under a million spaces, and no family money to survive four uncertain years. So I took the alternative route: a National Diploma, then a Higher National Diploma in Accounting at Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, from 2000 to 2005, with a mandatory work year built in. Nigeria caps HND careers three grade levels below BSc careers, same competence. I made myself a vow: no missing bachelor’s degree would ever limit my career.
Foundation
National service placed me on the audit floor of Rebo Usman & Co, a firm of chartered accountants: statutory audits, financial statement reviews, internal control evaluations. From there, retail banking business development at Intercontinental Bank in Kano. The rigour and the revenue instinct arrived together, and they have never separated since: I learned to verify numbers and to grow them in the same two years. In 2006 I registered for ACCA, the UK professional qualification, with three paper exemptions earned by the HND. The ladder had its first rung.
Banking, 7am to 9pm
Intercontinental Bank made me an executive trainee in 2007. My seat became performance management and MIS at the head office in Lagos: an Oracle FLEXCUBE core-banking implementation, IFRS conversion, and management reporting for a bank that grew to operate across 12 countries with more than US$12.5 billion in assets. When Intercontinental was merged into Access Bank in 2011, I served on the technical integration team that stitched the two institutions together.
The workday ran 7am to 9pm most days. In the margins of those days I sat and passed ACCA papers and completed the Oxford Brookes BSc (Hons) in Applied Accounting, finishing in December 2011. In 2012, I resigned.
Forty-Seven Million Subscribers
MTN Nigeria hired me in June 2012 into a company of 47.4 million subscribers and a 47.8% market share, the largest operator in the market. I built pricing analytics, geospatial analysis, and business planning models inside the marketing division’s engine room. Banking had taught me to measure; telecom taught me scale. When tens of millions of people sit behind a pricing model, the model is not a spreadsheet exercise: a small error compounds into something a whole country notices. Everything I now teach about data discipline traces back to those three years in Lagos.
Nine Countries, One Turnaround
In November 2015, I joined MTN Group to manage regional operations and performance across nine West and Central African countries. The group headquarters was in Johannesburg, but I ran the region from Nigeria, where I stayed resident, travelling constantly to the operating companies. Seven of the nine operations were losing money when I arrived. Within two years, all nine were profitable and customer NPS had risen in every market.
That turnaround was led by the regional vice-president, Karl Toriola; I built the performance analysis and planning underneath it, and it was the work with him that moved the numbers. This is the chapter where the analyst became an operator: strategic planning, performance turnarounds, and P&L discipline across nine countries at once. In the same tenure I completed the MSc in Professional Accountancy from the University of London, with academic direction from UCL School of Management, finishing in December 2018. The ladder that began at a polytechnic in Ilaro now reached a UK Master’s degree.
Fintech Across Seventeen Markets
In July 2019 I moved to MTN Group Fintech as a senior manager for decision support and analytics. I stayed resident in Nigeria, with the group office in Johannesburg that I visited often, functions run out of a hub in the United Arab Emirates, and regular travel to the operating companies. The remit covered the seventeen African markets running mobile financial services. My work sat across the full customer base there, more than two hundred million people, not the mobile-money users alone: the analysis asked which customers used data but not mobile money, who carried a feature phone rather than a smartphone, and who could be brought into the financial system next.
Over those four years, mobile-money users grew from about 35 million to 72.5 million. The receipts: BI adoption driven to 97% across the organization, 21.4% subscriber growth, and US$45 million in revenue optimized. I left in July 2023 with a conviction that has not moved since: the discipline that keeps a system honest at that scale is exactly what small businesses deserve and almost never get.
The Educator
The teaching never stopped. It ran under every corporate chapter the way the rail line ran under my school commute. Home coaching through the polytechnic years. Eversure at 18. GGA Centre for Professional and Business Training in Nigeria, where I prepared ICAN and ACCA candidates from roughly 2005 to 2021, in parallel with the banking and telecom careers.
Since 2023, faculty at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario, teaching 200+ students a year across accounting, finance, business strategy, and information systems. Teaching is not what I do after the work; it is how the work compounds. The classroom keeps my explanations honest, and the field keeps my classroom current. I have been doing both at once since 1997.
The Founder
In November 2024, in Kingston, Ontario, I incorporated Stratborne: an advisory, automation, and education firm built for small and medium enterprises. It is not a first attempt. I have built and run small enterprises in parallel with every corporate role since 1998, so I come to this firm from the owner’s chair, not only the boardroom. The product I am building now is 1Carton, whose production code I write myself.
And the same method now runs in a fourth arena: civic systems work for Nigeria, where I follow the money to the operational and process failures underneath it, not just the financial ones. Nigeria is not a rich country. A nation of some 250 million people whose main resource is under two million barrels of oil a day, on a joint venture where the government holds about half, is poor on the arithmetic, and mismanagement compounds it, most of all at the sub-national level that few people ever audit.
That work is nonpartisan by design, which is not the same as naive: I have studied a governing party from the inside, close enough to learn how it works and where it fails, and I carry no party card now. The civic work is arithmetic, not allegiance: frameworks costed, pilots budgeted, evidence before ideology. Everything on this page now operates at once. The accountant diagnoses, the analyst models, the operator ships, the educator transfers. Nothing was wasted.
Beliefs
Four convictions run under all of it. None of them is a slogan; each has been tested against nearly three decades of evidence.
Education is the greatest legacy.
I formed that conviction young, in a childhood of family labour and hard scarcity, and the school-trouser year sealed it: frying gari to fund the uniform that kept me in class. Every decision since has compounded it: the HND, the ACCA, the BSc, the MSc, and 200+ students a year at St. Lawrence College. Education is the one transfer of value that appreciates in the hands of the receiver.
Countries grow on the back of their small, micro, and medium enterprises.
That is not a market thesis; it is lived arithmetic. I have co-founded ventures continuously since 1998 and watched what happens when the SME layer gets, or does not get, real financial systems. Stratborne exists because that layer deserves the same rigour the multinationals can afford.
No serious system is built alone.
Every venture I have built since Eversure in 1998 has been built with partners. If a plan fits entirely inside one person’s hands, it is scoped too small. Partnership is a structural requirement of anything designed to outlast its founder.
Food security is national security.
A country that cannot feed its people is open to manipulation by anyone who can. That is a sovereignty calculation, not an ESG position, and it is where I put my own money: I hold investments in three Nigerian firms working on food security, agro-processing, and cutting the waste a fragile supply chain bleeds. The conviction was earned earlier still, running farms and a farm-to-table supply chain inside Choicematrix, not read in a report.
The method
Across every chapter, one four-step pattern repeats. It ran through a core-banking implementation in Lagos, BI platforms across 17 African markets, a SaaS product in Kingston, and governance frameworks for Nigeria. It is both how I consult and what I teach.
Diagnose from the money.
Follow the numbers to the root cause, which is almost always operational or in the process, not in the ledger itself.
Architect technically.
Design the system that removes the cause, not the symptom.
Build operationally.
Ship it, run it, measure it in production.
Transfer through teaching.
Leave people able to run it without me.
The fourth step is the test of the first three. A system its owners cannot operate is a symptom with better formatting.
What this is not
I do not run a traditional CPA practice. No audit opinions, no tax filings, no attest services. The designation is one of four lenses, not a storefront.
I do not do deck-and-disappear consulting. If I diagnose it, I build it, and I teach someone to run it.
I hold no party card and endorse none. I have studied a governing party from the inside to be able to criticise it with evidence, not slogans; the civic work stays arithmetic, not allegiance, with no ethnic or religious signalling, in any country.
I do not make motivational content for its own sake: no posters, no borrowed quotes, no hot takes. If the work happens to move someone to put their house in order, good, but I lead with evidence, and a claim without a receipt does not get published.
Today the layers run concurrently. Stratborne advises and builds for small and medium enterprises from Kingston, Ontario, and its Nigerian practice, dormant for a stretch, is coming back into operation. 1Carton is in build. 200+ students a year pass through my classrooms at St. Lawrence College. And the civic work for Nigeria advances in budgets and frameworks, not opinions. Nearly three decades of building separate a rail line in Ogun State from this page, and every year of it is still load-bearing. If you are carrying a problem that keeps getting treated instead of fixed, the method above is how I would approach it.
RESUME · The full resume lives on LinkedIn.