🍞 Own the Asset, Not the Party

Bonjour!!

Demilade here. I’m writing from yet another city and trying to survive the heatwave in Europe.

Today’s edition is about a topic I come back to often: “value capture”. Much of Africa’s underdevelopment is a result of the mismatch between the natural resources we have (whether mineral resources like oil or human resources like talent and creativity), and our ability to increase the value of these resources domestically and keep the economic benefits within our countries.

I was in the US as the Knicks won their first NBA finals in 50+ years and “World Soccer Cup” fever took over the country. Almost every team includes players of African heritage, and it got me thinking about Natural resources again…but this time in terms of live entertainment in music and sports.

An earlier version of this edition was published without the full intro…blame the jet lag

Enjoy reading, and as usual…share any feedback/suggestions you have.

That gap is what the new Lagos Arena is built to close. In 2024, a consortium consisting of Persianas Group, the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority, Oak View Group, Live Nation, Adino Capital, MBO Capital and Yinka Folawiyo Group broke ground on a 12000-seat venue in Lekki at a $100 million project cost. The group brings much-needed expertise across Real Estate development, venue management, and finance. When completed, it will be Nigeria’s first purpose-built entertainment arena.  For scale: the largest indoor room the country had before it, the Eko Convention Centre, tops out at nearly 6,000. The National Theatre in Lagos (Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts) has a total standing capacity of 4600 guests. 

The arena roughly doubles the ceiling and is designed to run more than 200 events a year, including concerts, basketball, boxing, UFC, family shows, and conferences.

Two thoughts, one assuming an average ticket price of ₦25,000 per ticket, and 200 sold-out events, without including food, beverage and other concessions. The arena would make $45million in revenue, even when you assume 20% net income, it will likely pay back its development costs in about 10 years, which is pretty decent for real estate.  Secondly, that's only 2.4 million event goers, 10% of the proven demand and only in one city. So the question is, why isn’t there much more investment? 

PwC's most recent outlook names Nigeria the fastest-growing entertainment-and-media market in Africa, with growth concentrated exactly where you would expect from a young, mobile-first country: streaming, gaming, social, audio. The culture that over-indexes on the communal: think of massive faith gatherings, e.g redeemed camp, owambe, viewing centres, Detty December club hopping, anything that puts thousands of people in a shared space.

So demand for live experience has never been the constraint. And the consumption data makes the under-build almost absurd: a music economy compounding at thousands of percent, generating tens of billions of naira in streaming income, sitting on top of effectively zero domestic arena infrastructure. Because of this lack of infrastructure, the entire music industry is leaving so much money on the table, and the sports industry is handicapped. 

It helps to see what a fully catalyzed version looks like. In the United States, youth sports alone are a roughly $40 billion market, as in sports for non-professional children! That economy sits on a participation base, monetised through infrastructure, retail, media and data. For example, Dick's Sporting Goods turned that base into record sales of over $14 billion and a 30-million-member loyalty database; its GameChanger platform, a livestreaming and scoring app for amateur games, now does around $150 million in revenue at roughly 40% annual growth, and has been repositioned, tellingly, as a "live sports media platform." A single youth baseball complex in Cooperstown, NY adds an estimated $95 million to its local economy.

To drill down into sports, it helps to understand the business of entertainment a bit more, using the Indian Premier League (a Cricket League) as a case study.

In india Cricket has long been the most popular sport, what it lacked was a packaged, monetizable, made-for-broadcast product. And in 2008, the IPL invented one: a compact format, roughly 74 matches over two months, wrapped in city franchises, celebrity ownership, and a fusion of sport and entertainment. Then it stacked media rights on top of a billion-person fanbase that already cared. One of the things that made this possible was the fact that there was already a stock of underutilised stadiums across India, and so the innovation was around packaging and branding. 

Today, the league is now valued at around $18.5 billion. The most recent media rights deal for over $6 billion is above the per-match rights for the English Premier League, putting each match second globally to only the NFL on a per-game basis, at roughly $13.4 million. Franchises that once sold for tens of millions now trade north of $1.6 billion. The IPL mirrored India’s rise, it rode the same demographic and digital wave the whole country was riding.

Now hold that against Nigeria's own homegrown league. The Nigeria Premier Football League only returned to consistent television around 2022. Its most ambitious recent commercial move, a five-year broadcast-and-data deal signed in late 2025, is worth about ₦2.14 billion in total ($1.6 million across five years), or about $285,000 a year. 

Read that again. The NPFL's entire five-year media deal is worth less than a tenth of a single IPL match. This is the asymmetry at the heart of Nigerian sport and entertainment: the talent and the passion are world-class, and the capital and infrastructure beneath them are almost nonexistent. 

Globally, recorded music’s (mostly streaming) revenue was about $28.6 billion in 2025. But add live, publishing, sync and merchandise, and total music-industry revenue climbs past $60 billion. Live is by far the largest revenue stream for artists around the world. The world's top 100 tours grossed over $9 billion in 2023; Live Nation alone did more than $22 billion. Streaming, for all its scale, is the discovery layer. Live is where the money lives. 

And its a similar story in sports media rights, typically accounting for 30-50% of revenue, whilst live and commercial partnerships account for the rest.

And there is a live-to-online flywheel too: live events manufacture the moments;  social media clips, fomo, the sold-out optics, the cultural proof all of this fuels online consumption. Online scale, in turn, builds the fanbase that ultimately increases the value of the media rights for broadcasting these events. Not too mention all the ancillary revenue from live events, hotels, transport, merch, food and beverage etc. 

The Detty December is this dynamic made visible. In December 2024, Lagos generated ₦111.5 billion (about $83 million)  across tourism, hospitality and entertainment in a single month. Hotels took ₦54 billion; short-lets ₦21 billion; the top nightlife venues ₦4.3 billion; event centres ₦1.2 billion; luxury car hire ₦1.5 billion. Around 1.2 million visitors came, including some 550,000 inbound passengers. All of this revenue is in the ancillary services. The biggest artists did not perform at home, as there are no venues to accommodate their scale. So very little of the revenue is pooled in ticketing, artist guarantees, venue ownership or IP. 

Basically, Nigeria has been running this flywheel with one half missing. The online half is spinning at extraordinary speed; the thousands-of-per cent streaming gains. The live half, the part that anchors value at home and converts global attention into domestic economics, has had no permanent fixture to spin around. 

If Detty December shows Nigeria capturing only the diffuse, ancillary layer, the New York Knicks show where the durable money actually sits, and the lesson is more useful precisely because it cuts both ways.

The Knicks won the 2026 NBA title; in the most-watched NBA finals since Michael Jordan. New York City's Economic Development Corporation put the playoff run's economic activity at around $380 million, with each Finals home game worth roughly $90 million. Off the back of this,  the franchise itself repriced to nearly $9.85 billion, up 30% in a single year; the holding company's stock jumped 40%+ YTD.

Underneath it all sits the NBA’s roughly $76 billion, 11-year league media rights deal.  The value that compounds didn't flow to the streets. It flowed to the owner, the broadcaster and the league; to the people who own the franchise, the venue and the rights. The ancillary layer is real but thin and unownable. The concentrated layer (venues, teams, festivals, media rights, IP)  is where value accrues and compounds. The opportunity is not to throw a better party. It is to own the assets that the party runs through.

Rwanda has shown what a deliberate strategy looks like. A country with none of Nigeria's cultural firepower and a fraction of its population has spent a decade turning sport into an economic engine. Its sports ministry is targeting a thirtyfold rise in sports-tourism revenue by 2029,  under an explicit national strategy. It built the venues: the 45,000-seat Amahoro Stadium, the 10,000-seat BK Arena, cricket and golf facilities, and it also lured investors, including former NBA GMs multi-use Zaria Court. It bought global attention through the Visit Rwanda brand, sponsoring Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Atlético Madrid and the LA Clippers. And it won the events: the first African hosting of the UCI Road World Championships in 2025, repeated Basketball Africa League finals at BK Arena,  where a Rwandan club took the 2026 title,  and an open and serious pursuit of a Formula 1 race

To be fair, Rwanda's entire 2029 sports-tourism target of about $20.6 million is less than a third of what Lagos already books in a single Detty December month. However, the lesson is that Rwanda has a deliberate, compounding, infrastructure-and-ownership strategy, while Nigeria has a bigger but accidental, seasonal, uncaptured windfall. Nigeria has twenty times the population and immeasurably more cultural reach — and, so far, much less of the plan.

The institutional capital is also starting to notice. Helios Investment Partners; one of Africa's largest private-equity firms, has built a dedicated vehicle, Helios Sports & Entertainment Group, precisely to capitalize this gap. In 2025, it took $50 million from the IFC and Proparco as part of a $75 million raise, explicitly targeting media rights, live events and physical infrastructure. Its platform already holds stakes in NBA Africa (a deal that valued the league's African arm at around $1 billion and houses the Basketball Africa League), PFL Africa in mixed martial arts, the Zaria Court venue in Kigali, and The Malachite Group (which owns Afro Nation, the world's largest African music festival, and the Amapiano live brand Piano People). In other words, the festival layer, the league layer and the venue layer already sit inside a single, governed, institutional platform. 

And the global operators are committing, not dabbling. Live Nation isn't a casual presence: beyond the Lagos Arena consortium, it runs a joint venture built for touring African artists, operates a 10,500-capacity arena in South Africa, and in 2026 wired ticketing directly into Spotify, discovery and purchase in one motion. And bolstering the sub-Saharan Africa team. 

Beyond Lagos Arena, the Mefa group is building a concert arena in Abuja designed for 250 events a year; the first of six planned across major cities in Nigeria.

An arena is horizontal infrastructure. Once the hard problem is solved gathering, ticketing and securing thousands of people reliably, on a schedule,  the building becomes a venue for almost anything that wants an audience. Comedy, which Nigeria exports nearly as well as music. Faith events, formalising the mass-gathering muscle the country already has. Think esports and gaming, aimed straight at a demographic that already lives online. Festivals, theatre, family entertainment, brand activations, awards. 

Each new building is less a destination than a piece of connective tissue: the beginning of a domestic touring circuit, the thing that lets an artist, a league, a comedian, a conference or a championship move from city to city inside Nigeria the way they already do across Europe or the US.

The opportunity is not the party. It is the asset the party runs through.

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🛢️ Aradel's record profit, mostly on paper: Aradel Holdings posted its biggest-ever profit, with after-tax earnings jumping 192% to N757.3 billion in 2025, per its audited accounts. Most of that gain was on paper, though: N393.2 billion came from a translation gain tied to taking a majority stake in oil firm ND Western, plus a N217.1 billion benefit from buying the asset below its fair value. Actual revenue grew a more modest 20.4% to N699.4 billion, driven by crude exports and refined product sales. The board proposed a total dividend of N33 per share, 10% higher than 2024.

💰 Money supply keeps growing, Government pays more to borrow
There is more money moving through Nigeria's economy, even with interest rates still high. CBN data shows the total money supply rose to N129.21 trillion in May, up 3.38% from April, while the benchmark rate stayed at 26.50%. So while the Central Bank is trying to cool things down with high rates, the amount of cash in the system is still climbing.
The government is now paying more to raise money. At the Debt Management Office's June bond auction, investors offered N1.41 trillion against the N1.2 trillion on sale, so demand was strong. But they only lent at higher rates: the 2035 bond rose to 18.34% from 17.00% in May, and the 2037 bond to 18.35%. In short, plenty of buyers turned up, but they wanted a bigger return to hand over their cash.