Choplife, the entertainment, media, technology, gaming, and intellectual property company founded by Nigerian musician Mr Eazi, has relocated its operations to Itana, Nigeria's first digital special economic zone.

The move shifts Choplife's corporate and regulatory base, with the company pointing to Itana's regulatory framework and its promise of streamlined cross-border operations as primary motivations.

Itana follows a model that several countries have used to attract globally oriented businesses through digital-first incorporation and regulatory infrastructure. Estonia's e-Residency programme and the United Arab Emirates' network of free zones have demonstrated how jurisdictions can compete for companies that operate across borders but seek a single administrative home. Itana's pitch is that businesses can achieve the same from within Africa.

Choplife becomes the latest company to establish a presence in Itana, which has hosted approximately 50 companies since it became operational in September 2023. The zone's appeal lies in its offer to businesses seeking to operate globally from Africa, providing multicurrency accounts, access to international markets, and a regulatory framework designed to minimize 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 next step for Choplife, which produces most of its content on the African continent for global consumption. The relocation comes at a time when African creative output, particularly music, has seen surging international demand, with Afrobeats artists routinely charting globally and streaming platforms investing heavily in African content libraries. Choplife joins other companies in Itana, including Reliance Infosystems, Circular Energy, and AI platforms MasteryHive, Udu Technologies, and Yamify.

"When I look at what Itana is building, the founders that are part of Itana and the spirit behind it, 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."

Nawigacja w rozdrobnionym systemie

Ajibade traced Choplife's origins to emPawa Africa, the music company he founded in 2019, which later expanded into events intellectual property (IP) with 'Detty Rave' and sports with 1v1 Africa. In 2020, Choplife launched as a brand, consolidating those ventures under one umbrella.

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.

Drawing a parallel to fragmentation in cross-border payments, Ajibade identified the fragmentation of running a pan-African business as a problem that Itana helps address.

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

Scaling a business across countries, he explained, involves collecting payments from customers in different markets while navigating varying licencing, banking, foreign exchange, and corporate regulations.

This fragmentation carries a cost. Africa's cross-border payments market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, yet businesses moving money across the continent still pay an average of 7.4% to 8.3% per transaction. Incorporating a business can also take considerable time: a Norebase report found that timelines vary widely across African markets, reaching up to 20 weeks in countries such as Angola. For Ajibade, this 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 reality made Choplife's decision to anchor itself in an African digital jurisdiction more consequential. Ajibade noted that the Itana move aligns with Choplife's commitment 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.

Co Choplife zyskuje dzięki Itana

According to Ajibade, Choplife sought a jurisdiction that could reduce know-your-customer (KYC) and know-your-business (KYB) friction, along with banking, foreign exchange, and corporate regulatory burdens. Itana's digital-first structure provided a way to manage these requirements through a single regulatory hub rather than navigating disparate systems in each market.

Companies operating in the zone can maintain multicurrency accounts, receive and hold revenue in foreign currencies, and move capital across borders. Itana also offers tax incentives and exemptions designed to lower operating costs, 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 approximately 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 collaborates with other jurisdictions and organisations on cross-border capital movement, including discussions with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the trade agreement spanning 54 of the 55 African Union member states that aims to create the world's largest single market by geographic area. Companies can incorporate remotely and, according to Itana, complete the process in as little as two weeks.

Itana is also developing a physical district around the digital zone in Alaro City, within Lagos State's Lekki Free Zone corridor. The concept 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 already begun putting that proposition into practice. Ajibade confirmed that operations within the zone have commenced, with local engineers working out of Nigeria. He also outlined plans for a shared physical campus at Itana where Choplife's team could work alongside other tenants, adding that Choplife intends to leverage its Itana base to invest in content production, including film and media.

Dlaczego gospodarka kreatywna ma znaczenie dla Itana

Choplife's relocation to Itana represents a test of whether the zone can serve businesses built around African intellectual property, rather than solely conventional technology companies. For Nigeria, where oil has historically dominated export earnings, the creative sector has emerged as a diversified growth engine, with the government increasingly promoting it as a pillar of economic policy alongside technology and agriculture.

Inya said the creative economy faces a structural challenge 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 views the creative economy as integral to its long-term vision for the Nigerian market, citing 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 approximately 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 successfully anchor the creative economy and resolve cross-border fragmentation challenges remains to be seen.