If Lagos were a poem, being a businessman with a taste for motion, precision, and the fine print of possibility, Taiwo Afolabi would be one of its most lyrical lines. Now, with the stroke of strategic foresight, his SIFAX Group has unveiled something quietly revolutionary: a direct Less-than-Container Load (LCL) export service from Nigeria to the United Kingdom.
It may not sound like poetry at first. But for thousands of Nigerian exporters, especially small and medium-sized enterprises long shackled by convoluted shipping routes and container-filling logistics, it is a sonnet to progress. Thanks to a newly minted partnership between SIFAX Shipping Company and Netcargo UK Limited, the era of third-party transshipments and unpredictable delays may finally be drawing to a close.
“This is more than just a logistics upgrade,” says Adekunle Owobamirin, General Manager of Groupage and Export Services at SIFAX. “It’s a reimagining of what trade can look like for the Nigerian entrepreneur.” In plainer terms: your goods now go straight to London without unnecessary detours.
The first trial shipments set sail in June. By July, full operations began in earnest, with cargo already moving through SIFAX’s upgraded bonded warehouses; spaces once known for bottlenecks, now retooled for speed.
And it doesn’t stop there. Through strategic import partnerships with WSC Logistics and Shotto Logistics Limited, the SIFAX ecosystem now offers a two-way street: goods from China and India arrive cleaner, faster, and more efficiently than before, providing third-party logistics firms access to the group’s robust infrastructure.
Behind this orchestration stands Afolabi himself: lawyer, industrialist, and logistics maestro. Since founding SIFAX in 1988, he’s spun a web of services that crisscrosses the continent and touches nearly every port of consequence. Maritime, aviation, hospitality, oil and gas—he’s danced with them all.
With this latest move, Afolabi isn’t just polishing his legacy. He’s extending a lifeline to Nigeria’s business class, exporting not just goods but also the quiet confidence that yes, things can work and, sometimes, even beautifully so.
Governor Dikko Radda of Katsina State Cheats Death
Fate, it seems, has a peculiar sense of drama. One month, you’re weeping at the burial of a giant. The next, you’re pulled from the wreckage of your own brush with mortality.
On Sunday afternoon, somewhere along the Daura–Katsina highway, an old stretch of road now pulsing with new symbolism, Governor Dikko Radda narrowly escaped a car accident. The official statement, terse and composed, called it a “minor road accident.” But in Nigeria, where the margins between ordinary and fatal are wafer-thin, survival is never casual.
The Governor was on official duty when the incident occurred. His convoy slowed. The road, slick or sun-beaten, did what roads sometimes do: turned unfriendly. While details remain scarce, the essence is clear. Something happened. But nothing irreversible.
In a video posted not long after, Radda spoke softly in Hausa, flanked by concern and surrounded by reassurance. He thanked the Almighty, thanked the people, and assured them, with a tired smile, that he remained hale, hearty, and in good spirits. It was the kind of message one expects from a man who has seen enough to know that public service is never without its jolts.
If anything, the accident adds another layer to the mystique building around Katsina’s 54-year-old leader. Radda, a former SMEDAN chief and technocrat-turned-governor, has built his reputation not on flair, but quiet urgency: battling insecurity, youth unemployment, and a lagging local economy. He prefers boots on the ground to speeches in a ballroom. When he cried at Buhari’s funeral, it wasn’t a performance. It was kinship, raw and unrehearsed.
Now, he continues, slightly bruised, perhaps, but very much alive.
Nigeria does not run short of governors. But it rarely gets one so human, so visibly tethered to the people’s fears and dreams. The road may curve, but for Governor Radda, the mission stays straight.
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