CivicTech in Africa: The Transmission Line Is Broken

What Oluseun Onigbinde’s 15 years at BudgIT reveals about the limits of civic tech and what comes next

I’m typing this on my way back from a meeting with one of the founders in my portfolio, thinking about the extent to which Civic Tech has been used as a catalyst for change in Africa.

There is a theory at the heart of civic technology across the world. Give citizens verified facts. When they are informed, they will demand better. When they demand better, institutions will respond. Government will improve. Society will change.

It is a clean theory. Logical. Moral. And it is the theory on which BudgIT Nigeria was built.

Oluseun Onigbinde co-founded BudgIT in Lagos in 2011 with exactly that conviction. Fifteen years later, he runs Africa’s most recognised fiscal transparency organisation across six countries, backed by some of the world’s most credible philanthropic institutions, and is arguably Africa’s most recognised fiscal transparency organisation. — and he’ll tell you the theory may need rewriting.

And when I asked him on The Grinders Table podcast whether the theory still holds, his answer was the most honest thing I’ve heard from a civic founder:

“Maybe the transmission line itself is broken. Maybe the work that has to be done is to empower government to do much more better.”

I don’t think this is a small admission. This is a 15-year reckoning.

Factivism’s honest limits

Oluseun coined the term “factivism”; the use of verified facts to drive civic action. It is a compelling idea, and BudgIT has built its entire communications philosophy around it.

But he was clear-eyed about what it cannot do. Humans are emotional first, he argues. Facts compete not against other facts but against cultural memory, tribal loyalty, and confirmation bias. Some people have decided what is true, and no infographic, however well-designed, will move them.

“Factivism is not going to cure misinformation. We just have to keep up. There’s a group of people that wants to be educated. We just need to keep at it.”

The insight is significant. Most civic technology organisations are built on the implicit assumption that the problem is access to correct information. If citizens knew, they would act. What Oluseun is describing is something harder: a segment of the population that does not want to know, and cannot be reached by facts alone.

The post-COVID pivot

The conversation shifted when I pressed him on whether awareness, even when it lands, is enough to force implementation. Because an item is in the budget does not mean the money moves. Somebody has to keep advocating.

His answer traced Nigeria’s civic theory of change across three decades: the 1999-2007 era of institution-strengthening, the accountability phase that BudgIT entered at exactly the right time, the energised citizen anger that drove pressure on the Jonathan administration, and then EndSARS, which changed everything.

What came out of EndSARS, in Oluseun’s telling, was not just tragedy. It was a question that the ecosystem has been quietly wrestling with since: if citizen anger is strategically organised, gets to the streets, and still ends in violence and rollback, what exactly does the citizen-pressure model achieve?

That transmission between the citizens, changing the society directly with their voices; can we really say that continuously holds in our society as of now? Or is it very, very selective? Highly unpredictable?

The honest answer, he suggests, is that the ecosystem has already started pivoting. Investment is moving toward building government capacity directly, rather than hoping that only citizen pressure forces change from outside. It is a quieter, slower strategy. And it is a significant departure from the founding logic of civic tech.

The 10-15 year anger cycle

One of the more striking frameworks Oluseun offered is what he calls the generational anger cycle in Nigerian civic life. Every 10-15 years, a generation reaches a point of collective fury, organises, and pushes. Occupy Nigeria. EndSARS. And then fatigue sets in.

The millennial generation that powered those movements has aged into midlife. Three children, aing parents, the urgent fight for economic survival. Their anger is still there, but it is latent, it is no longer actionable in the street. The next wave will come from Generation Z mixed with Generation Alpha. But it has not arrived yet.

For civic founders, the implication is uncomfortable: you may be building between cycles. The audience you need is exhausted. And the window for the next surge of energy is uncertain.

What BudgIT would do differently

I closed by asking what Oluseun would do differently if he were starting BudgIT today. His answer was structural, not strategic:

“I would be more mindful of investing in a trust for BudgIT. We at civic tech don’t do enough of this. We collect the money, we want to use the money to make change now. So before you know it, we are just locked into this continuous cycle of fundraising.”

The organisations that outlast their founding generation, Transparency International is his example, have financial independence. An endowment. A base that keeps the mission alive even when donor priorities shift, media cycles move on, and the generation that cared most has moved to survival mode.

It is a lesson that applies well beyond civic tech. Any founder building in a space that requires multi-decade commitment needs to ask: what is the financial structure that outlasts my current funding relationship?

The verdict

Oluseun Onigbinde has spent 15 years doing the hard, slow, unglamorous work of making government spending legible and accountable. What I took from this conversation is not pessimism about civic tech, it is a clearer-eyed picture of what it actually demands.

Democracy is designed to be slow. Corruption is a human behaviour problem, not a technology problem. The transmission line between citizen knowledge and institutional change is more fragile than the founding theory assumed. And the organisations that last are the ones that plan for their own financial independence from the start.

None of that makes the work less necessary. It makes it harder. And it makes the people who do it, for 15 years, across six countries, without walking away, more worth paying attention to.

Listen to the full episode here - https://pod.link/the-grinders-table/episode/NmRmY2RiYzQtNjVhMy00N2M2LTk2OTktYjgyOTA4Zjc2NmU1