Mr Eazi’s Choplife is the latest startup to move to Itana

Choplife, the entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property company founded by Nigerian musician Mr Eazi, has moved its operations into Itana, the country’s first digital special economic zone.

The move primarily changes Choplife’s corporate and regulatory base, with the company citing Itana’s regulatory environment and its promise of simpler cross-border operations as key reasons for the decision.

Choplife is the latest company to move into Itana, which now hosts roughly 50 companies since becoming operational in September 2023. The growing interest reflects Itana’s pitch to businesses looking to operate globally from Africa, offering multicurrency accounts, access to international markets and a regulatory framework designed to reduce the friction of running cross-border operations from Nigeria.

“We’re excited to welcome Mr Eazi and the team at Choplife. Their expansion reflects a growing wave of innovative companies choosing to build from Itana for a global audience,” said Chinyere Inya, Itana’s chief executive officer. “At Itana, we’re creating the infrastructure that allows companies like Choplife to scale seamlessly. This milestone reinforces our vision of making it easier than ever to start and grow a business serving Africa from anywhere in the world.”

Mr Eazi, whose real name is Oluwatosin Ajibade, described Itana as the logical step for Choplife, which generates the majority of its content on the continent, even as it is consumed globally. Choplife joins companies such as Reliance Infosystems, Circular Energy, and AI platforms MasteryHive, Udu Technologies and Yamify in Itana. 

“When I look at what Itana is building, the founders that are part of Itana and the spirit behind it is, it is an opportunity for us to leverage and centralise our operations,” Ajibade told TechCabal in an interview on Wednesday. “It is very important to us that it is on the continent.”

Navigating a fragmented system

Ajibade traced Choplife’s origins to emPawa Africa, the music company he founded in 2019, and then expanded into events intellectual property (IP) with ‘Detty Rave’ and sports with 1v1 Africa. In 2020, Choplife itself launched as a brand, bringing those ventures together. 

The company now describes itself as operating at the intersection of entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property, with a portfolio spanning music, film, sports and gaming IP. Choplife operates across Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Mali and Liberia.

Like the fragmentation in cross-border payments, Ajibade pointed to the fragmentation of running a pan-African business as a problem Itana helps to solve. 

“In setting up businesses across the world, one of the things that always attracts you to a jurisdiction is like the amount of administrative friction it takes to even start your business,” he said.

He explained that scaling a business across countries meant collecting payment from customers across markets while navigating different licencing, banking, foreign exchange and corporate rules. 

That fragmentation comes with a cost. Africa’s cross-border payments market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, but businesses moving money across the continent still pay an average of 7.4% to 8.3% per transaction. Incorporating a business can also take weeks: a Norebase report found that timelines vary widely across African markets, reaching up to 20 weeks in countries such as Angola. For Ajibade, that administrative and financial friction can become a bottleneck to growth.

“I can count how many times with some of the businesses I’m involved in, that we had to go through the same process from scratch every time,” he said. “If I want to do my tech business in both countries, it’s an entirely different process, and I have to do it every time. Sometimes you’re not able to take advantage of an opportunity because by that time, maybe it takes two years, the opportunity you saw is gone.”

This made Choplife’s decision to anchor itself in an African digital jurisdiction more consequential. Ajibade noted the Itana move is part of Choplife’s focus on staying close to what he calls its founding ethos.

“The ethos is to build an African company, just like those who have gone before me have done, or to build a pan-African company that, in its operation, in its registration, in its composition, is truly African from top to bottom, but is world-class,” he said.

What Choplife gets from Itana

According to Ajibade, in response to that fragmentation, Choplife sought a jurisdiction that could reduce know-your-customer (KYC) and know-your-business (KYB) frictions, banking, foreign exchange, and corporate rules. 

Itana’s digital-first structure offered a way to handle these requirements through a single regulatory hub rather than navigating different systems in each market.

Companies operating in the zone can operate multicurrency accounts, receive and hold revenue in foreign currencies, and move capital across borders. Itana also offers tax incentives and exemptions designed to lower the cost of operating from the zone, including waivers on the standard 30% Companies Income Tax (CIT), the 7.5% Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods and services, withholding tax (WHT) of about 2.5–10% on payments such as services, rent, interest, and dividends, and the 10% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on asset disposals and federal stamp duties.

Inya noted that Itana works with other jurisdictions and organisations on cross-border capital movement, including discussions with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Companies can incorporate remotely and, according to Itana, complete the process in as little as two weeks. 

Itana is also building a physical district around the digital zone in Alaro City within Lagos State’s Lekki Free Zone corridor. The idea is to create a concentration of companies and talent that can work alongside the digital regulatory infrastructure.  

“We want to be able to show proof that this is possible,” Inya said. “That companies that belong to that creative sector can actually build, grow, and scale even from Nigeria.”

Choplife has begun putting that proposition into practice. Ajibade noted that operations within the zone have begun, with local engineers working out of Nigeria. He also floated plans for a shared physical campus at Itana where Choplife’s team could work alongside other tenants, adding that Choplife intends to use its Itana base to invest in content production, including film and media.

Why the creative economy matters to Itana

Choplife’s move to Itana is a test of whether the zone can serve businesses built around African intellectual property, rather than only conventional technology companies.

Inya said the creative economy faces a structural problem in finding a jurisdiction stable enough to anchor talent, ideas, products and services in one place.

“That sort of aligns with our own strategy,” she said. “For the creative economy, one thing is they want a place that gives them that assurance, that stability, where they can access a one-stop shop facility that not just enables incorporation, but extends that incorporation to other post-incorporation areas that are critical to operating within their choice of jurisdiction.”

She added that Itana sees the creative economy as part of how it wants to shape the Nigerian market long-term, pointing to the sector’s existing economic contribution as evidence of its potential. 

According to the Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy (FMACTCE), Barr. Hannatu Musa Musawa, Nigeria’s creative sector contributes about 2.3% to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is expected to create an additional 2 million jobs by 2030. Whether Itana can anchor the creative economy and solve cross-border fragmentation problems remains to be seen.

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