Nigerian musician and entrepreneur Oluwatosin “Mr Eazi” Ajibade has moved his entertainment and technology venture, Choplife, into Itana. Itana is the country’s first digital special economic zone. The move mainly shifts Choplife’s corporate and regulatory base. The company says Itana’s regulatory framework and the promise of smoother cross-border operations pushed the decision.
Choplife is the latest company to set up inside Itana. The zone now hosts roughly 50 businesses since it began operations in September 2023. Itana has built its pitch around helping companies operate globally from Africa. It offers multicurrency accounts, access to international markets and a regulatory structure that cuts down cross-border friction.
Chinyere Inya, Itana’s chief executive officer, welcomed the move. She said Choplife’s expansion reflects a growing number of companies choosing to build from within the zone for a global audience. She added that Itana is building the infrastructure to help such companies scale with ease.
Ajibade traced Choplife’s roots back to emPawa Africa, the music company he started in 2019. It later grew into events through Detty Rave and sports through 1v1 Africa. Choplife itself launched as a unifying brand in 2020, bringing those ventures together. Today, the company sits at the crossroads of entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property. Its operations span Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Mali and Liberia.
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For Ajibade, Itana solves a real problem: the fragmentation that comes with running a business across so many African markets at once. He compared it to the fragmentation seen in cross-border payments. Scaling across countries means dealing with different licensing rules, banking systems, foreign exchange regulations and corporate requirements in every market. That fragmentation carries a real cost. Africa’s cross-border payments market is projected to reach a trillion dollars by 2035. Even so, businesses still pay between 7.4 and 8.3 percent per transaction to move money across the continent. Incorporating a business in some African countries can also drag on for weeks. In places like Angola, the process can stretch to 20 weeks.
Choplife now joins other Itana tenants such as Reliance Infosystems, Circular Energy, and AI platforms MasteryHive, Udu Technologies and Yamify. Companies operating within the zone can run multicurrency accounts, hold revenue in foreign currencies and move capital across borders more freely. Itana also offers tax breaks to lower operating costs. These include exemptions from the standard 30 percent companies income tax, the 7.5 percent value added tax, withholding tax of roughly 2.5 to 10 percent, and the 10 percent capital gains tax on asset disposals. Businesses can incorporate remotely, and the process can take as little as two weeks.
Meanwhile, Itana is developing a physical district around its digital operations inside Alaro City, within Lagos State’s Lekki Free Zone corridor. The goal is to bring companies and talent together in one place. Ajibade said operations have already begun within the zone, with local engineers working out of Nigeria. He also floated plans for Choplife to eventually share a physical campus with other tenants there. Beyond that, he said the company plans to use its Itana base to invest further in content production, including film and media.
For Itana, signing a creative and entertainment company like Choplife marks an attempt to broaden its appeal beyond conventional tech startups. Inya said the creative economy has long struggled to find a stable jurisdiction to anchor its talent and intellectual property. She believes Itana can offer that stability. According to Nigeria’s Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musa Musawa, the country’s creative sector already contributes about 2.3 percent of GDP. It is also expected to create an additional two million jobs by 2030. Still, whether Itana can successfully anchor that sector while easing Africa’s cross-border headaches remains to be seen.
