Nigeria has spent decades competing for investment through familiar levers of economic policy. Tax incentives. Market reforms. Infrastructure spending. Regulatory changes.
Those fundamentals remain important.
But in the digital economy, another source of competitive advantage is quietly emerging. It is not built with concrete, fibre-optic cables or data centres. It is built through institutions that can work together.
That is why President Bola Tinubu’s Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026 deserves attention beyond the headlines. Much of the public discussion has centred on cryptocurrency, Bitcoin and the creation of a Central Bank-led Virtual Asset Council. Those are important developments.
Yet they are not, in my view, the most important story.
The Executive Order is better understood as an attempt to answer a much larger question: How should governments organise themselves when technology evolves faster than the institutions responsible for governing it? Whether the initiative succeeds remains to be seen. But the question it seeks to address is one that every modern economy is increasingly confronting.
Institutions are becoming economic infrastructure
When economists discuss infrastructure, they usually think of roads, ports, airports, power stations and broadband networks.
These remain indispensable.
But another form of infrastructure has become equally important.
Institutional infrastructure.
These are the governance arrangements that enable markets to function with confidence. They define responsibilities, coordinate decision-making, reduce uncertainty and establish the predictability upon which investment depends.
A country may have world-class digital connectivity, abundant entrepreneurial talent and access to capital. Yet if investors cannot determine which regulator has jurisdiction, agencies issue conflicting directives or compliance becomes unpredictable, innovation slows and capital looks elsewhere.
Technology creates opportunity.
Institutions determine whether societies capture it.
The problem is no longer regulation. It is fragmentation.
Public debate often assumes that regulation is the enemy of innovation.
That is an oversimplification.
Most serious businesses are not seeking the absence of regulation. They are seeking clarity.
The entrepreneur deciding whether to establish a company in Lagos, Dubai, Singapore or London is not asking only about tax rates or market size.
They are asking different questions.
Who regulates this activity?
Which licence is required?
How long will approvals take?
If regulations change, will they change transparently and predictably?
Markets adapt remarkably well to clear rules.
They struggle with fragmented ones.
That is why the most consequential feature of Nigeria’s new Executive Order may not be the establishment of another government body. According to the Presidency, its primary purpose is to improve coordination among existing institutions while preserving their respective statutory mandates.
Whether that coordination ultimately delivers better outcomes is another matter.
But the diagnosis appears sound.
This extends far beyond cryptocurrency
Bitcoin dominates public attention because it is familiar.
Yet digital assets today encompass far more than cryptocurrencies. They increasingly intersect with payments, securities, taxation, financial markets, digital identity, trade documentation and cross-border commerce.
The traditional boundaries between these sectors are becoming less distinct.
The same convergence is occurring across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and data governance.
Technology is integrating.
Government institutions, however, often remain organised in separate bureaucratic silos.
That mismatch is becoming one of the defining governance challenges of the digital age.
Nigeria is confronting that reality.
So are governments across the world.
The countries that will lead
History offers an important lesson.
The countries that benefited most from previous industrial revolutions were not always those that invented the breakthrough technologies.
More often, they were the countries that built institutions capable of supporting those technologies at scale.
The digital economy is unlikely to be different.
Tomorrow’s competitive advantage will increasingly belong to countries whose regulatory institutions can work together with speed, consistency and credibility.
Institutional coordination is therefore more than administrative reform.
It is becoming an economic strategy.
Investors do not invest only in markets.
They invest in the quality of governance that surrounds those markets.
A necessary note of caution
None of this should be interpreted as declaring success.
Executive Orders express intent.
Institutions produce outcomes.
The effectiveness of Nigeria’s new framework will ultimately depend on implementation.
Will agencies genuinely collaborate?
Will regulatory decisions become faster and more predictable?
Will legitimate innovators experience greater clarity without compromising financial integrity, consumer protection or national security?
These questions remain unanswered.
And they should remain unanswered until experience provides credible evidence.
Good policy analysis distinguishes between announced ambition and demonstrated performance.
The larger story
Perhaps that is why this conversation should not begin and end with cryptocurrency.
The Executive Order matters.
But it matters less because it concerns virtual assets than because it reflects a broader evolution in public administration.
For generations, governments competed by building physical infrastructure.
Today, they must also compete by building institutional infrastructure.
Roads connect cities.
Ports connect markets.
Digital networks connect people.
Institutional coordination connects government itself.
That may prove to be one of the defining competitive advantages of the twenty-first century.
Nigeria’s new Executive Order should therefore be judged not simply by the councils it establishes or the regulations that follow.
It should be judged by whether it helps create a regulatory environment that is more coherent, more predictable and more capable of supporting innovation while safeguarding the public interest.
Because in the end, technology does not determine national prosperity on its own.
Technology creates possibilities.
Institutions determine whether those possibilities become lasting economic progress.
About author: Sola Adebawo is an energy industry executive and strategic advisor with nearly three decades of experience across Africa’s oil and gas sector. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Hyphen Partners Limited, a specialist advisory firm focused on policy and regulatory intelligence, market entry, stakeholder strategy, and executive positioning in complex and highly regulated industries. His writing explores reform, political economy, leadership, the relationship between institutions and public life as well as the institutional forces shaping Africa’s development. He is an author, scholar and ordained minister.
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OpenAI said Friday it has suspended work on some aspects of its upcoming model Astra after an internal review found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity — enough to warrant concern over its capabilities.
OpenAI said in a blog post Friday that this model, which is still in development, reached its “critical cybersecurity threshold,” meaning it could independently identify and carry out cyberattacks against traditionally well-protected real-world systems. Under the company’s “Preparedness Framework,” which it created in 2023, this triggered additional safeguards.
“While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time,” OpenAI wrote. “Astra is an upcoming model, and was not involved in exploiting Hugging Face.”
The disclosure highlights an unusual moment in the topsy-turvy and still nascent frontier AI labs sector. Companies across every industry hold back products over potential risks, including for safety and cybersecurity concerns. But they rarely announce those decisions publicly when it’s a product that is still under development.
In this case, OpenAI is already under scrutiny after a different unreleased model breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing — the first verifiable incident of an AI lab losing control of its model. Since then, OpenAI and AI labs such as Anthropic have disclosed other incidents in which AI models breached their sandboxes and posed threats during cybersecurity tests.
The string of cases — seems like a new disclosure every day now — has triggered varying reactions from cybersecurity experts, lawmakers, and the AI labs themselves. Some express fear and call for stricter oversight. But there’s also a bit of flexing. In certain circles, any AI lab with a model that has that kind of capability will be seen as an impressive advancement.
OpenAI said it was sharing this information because it believes “it’s important to be transparent with the public and the safety and security communities about this potential shift in capabilities.”
The AI lab said it’s also taking action, including enacting stricter security controls and pausing internal activities involving Astra that don’t meet these beefed guardrails. OpenAI said it is working with relevant government agencies and “select AI safety organizations” to test the capabilities for this model.
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The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has accused the administration of President Bola Tinubu of turning Nigeria into a “full authoritarian state,” citing alleged erosion of democratic institutions, suppression of dissent and weakening of checks and balances.
The PDP made the allegation in a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Interim National Working Committee, Ini Ememobong, on Saturday.
The statement reads in full, “The report by the Human Rights Foundation, in its latest global assessment, classifying Nigeria as a fully authoritarian regime is a mere global confirmation of the local reality that Nigerians have been facing under the APC-led Federal Government. The report confirms the faulty electoral process, absence of protection for dissent, erosion of democratic safeguards and the obvious collapse of checks and balances on the executive by critical national institutions.
“The report published on the foundation’s Tyranny Tracker platform, tyrannytracker.org, shows that the country performed abysmally low on all the critical pillars of its assessment, indicating a full descent into authoritarianism, which is incompatible with democratic tenets.
“It is worthy of note that the assessment parameters of the foundation align with the theoretical frameworks that have identified, analysed and condemned authoritarian regimes-being the rule by a dictator and a small group, or a single party; the absence of institutional checks and balances; loss or apprehension of freedom of speech; opposition targeting; and weak and fake elections.
“It does not take any high degree of intelligence for anybody to agree with the report, because all the indicators of authoritarianism are present in Nigeria, under this Tinubu regime.
“A few examples from the numerous anomalies experienced by Nigerians will suffice here-the recent deployment of uncivilised and uncouth media attacks by officials of the administration to attack Cardinal Onaiyekan, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, the Catholic Church and Christianity generally.
“This incident is one of many which eloquently attest to the absence of freedom of speech under this administration. What did the cleric say that is not the lived experience of Nigerians, except, of course, the few who are isolated from reality and their paid human megaphones?
“The complete failure of the National Assembly to offer any form of meaningful checks to the executive is not a secret-else how could an administration fail to execute the Appropriation Act for three years, and yet that administration gets commendation, instead of condemnation, from the legislature? A parliament that ignores or blatantly disrespects the country’s constitution and its own standing rules during critical legislative activities cannot offer credible oversight of the executive.
“What is left, which the administration has doubled down on, is the fact that the 2027 elections are designed as a mere formality, far from reflecting the people’s wishes through the ballot.
“We call on the Tinubu APC administration to immediately take critical steps to de-escalate the political tensions emanating from actions traceable to their officials and their proxies, in the interest of the survival of democracy.
“The continuous asphyxiation of the opposition, clear weaponisation of security agencies against real and perceived opponents, increasing signs of partisanship by the electoral umpire, and reckless deployment of combustible political rhetoric by the President and his handlers should cease.
“The President must realise that there are two contests embedded in the 2027 Presidential elections-the presidency and the country. An attempt to focus on winning the former at all costs may result in the loss of the latter; and only a free, fair, credible and peaceful contest can guarantee a win for both coveted prizes.
“We urge Nigerians to continue to demand accountability from their leaders at all levels, as this is the irreducible minimum that democracy provides.”
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