Eko Atlantic City — the man-made peninsula rising from reclaimed land off Victoria Island in Lagos — did not arrive at its scale through improvisation. According to Nairametrics, Olawale Opayinka, founder and Managing Director of Makaya Consult FZE, was brought in as far back as 2011 to design the financial architecture that would make the project viable — placing the conceptual groundwork for Lagos's most watched real estate development well over a decade in the past.
Opayinka's involvement predates most of the international coverage that has since surrounded Eko Atlantic, which is developed by South Energyx Nigeria Limited, a subsidiary of the Lebanese-Nigerian Chagoury Group. The Chagoury family's bet on Lagos's coastline was always premised on the idea that private capital, rather than public funding, could finance a new city district from scratch — and it fell to financial modellers like Opayinka to stress-test whether that premise could survive contact with Nigerian macroeconomic realities.
Building a financial model for a project of this nature in 2011 meant working with a Nigeria where the naira traded at roughly ₦160 to the dollar, oil revenues were still buoyant, and Lagos's GDP was already being compared to that of mid-sized African economies. The model would have needed to project land sales revenue, infrastructure debt serviceability, phased construction timelines, and returns to equity holders across a horizon of decades — all while pricing in Nigeria-specific risks: currency devaluation, regulatory uncertainty, and utilities infrastructure that the developers would largely have to build themselves.
Eko Atlantic spans approximately 10 square kilometres and is designed to eventually house an estimated 250,000 residents and provide workspace for a further 150,000 daily commuters. The Great Wall of Lagos — the 8.5-kilometre barrier protecting the development from Atlantic erosion — alone cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct, financed through a combination of developer equity and land-sale proceeds. Structuring the sequencing of those cash flows, so that early land sales could fund ongoing sea-wall construction without the project running illiquid, is precisely the kind of financial engineering Opayinka reportedly contributed.
Makaya Consult FZE, which Opayinka leads, operates as a specialist financial and investment advisory firm. His 2011 mandate speaks to a broader but underappreciated dynamic in African megaproject finance: the substantive technical work — modelling, structuring, risk-layering — is frequently done by African professionals and boutique African advisory firms whose names rarely appear in the press releases that credit global banks and multilateral lenders.
The disclosure also carries timing significance. Eko Atlantic has in recent years attracted renewed scrutiny over plot pricing, the pace of occupancy, and whether the city-within-a-city model is actually delivering affordable commercial density or producing a high-end enclave disconnected from Lagos's working economy. Land prices in Eko Atlantic have been quoted at between $1,000 and $2,000 per square metre for commercial plots in recent years, putting the development in direct competition with established markets in Nairobi's Westlands or Johannesburg's Sandton for multinational tenants with a West Africa footprint.
For investors and developers watching the project as a template, what Opayinka's account underscores is the long gestation required to make the numbers work. A 2011 financial model being referenced publicly in 2026 means the project's financial architecture has had to remain directionally sound through at least three major naira devaluations, a COVID-19-induced construction slowdown, and a post-2023 currency unification shock that effectively doubled the dollar cost of naira-denominated obligations overnight. Any model that survived those inflection points with the project still advancing is itself a case study in scenario planning under African macroeconomic volatility.
Opayinka's public account of his role, as reported by Nairametrics, also points to a maturing advisory ecosystem in Nigeria. That a Lagos-rooted consultant was structuring the financials of a multi-billion-dollar land reclamation project in 2011 — rather than a Johannesburg or London firm — reflects the depth of financial talent that has long existed in Nigeria's private sector, even when that talent has gone unacknowledged in official project narratives.
Why it matters: Eko Atlantic is often cited as the benchmark for private-led urban development in sub-Saharan Africa; understanding that its financial viability was modelled from 2011 onward by an African advisory firm — navigating naira volatility, infrastructure self-funding, and multi-decade cash-flow sequencing — gives developers and investors a more grounded picture of what replicating the model elsewhere on the continent would actually require.