Poverty can make you look disciplined.
I remember a conversation about fitness with a friend. He silently gloated about walking 20,000 steps daily. I smiled and acknowledged his walking prowess. 😃
But I thought to myself: if you walk 20,000 steps every day because you can’t afford a car, let’s wait till you get one. Let’s see if you’d still be getting that exercise. Because a lot of people mistake necessity for discipline.
The Discipline You Didn’t Choose
There are two kinds of fitness. The one imposed by circumstance. And the one chosen through discipline. The test only arrives when you finally have a choice. Abundance is the only honest examiner.
Companies work the same way.
Many look financially disciplined when they’re broke. They negotiate every supplier invoice. Delay every hire. Stretch every naira. Suddenly everyone becomes a brilliant allocator of capital.
I’ve seen founders run lean when cash was scarce — every hire justified, every expense questioned, every customer mattered — and then raise capital. The discipline disappeared. Teams doubled before revenue did. Fancy offices replaced customer conversations. Problems that needed better thinking got solved with bigger budgets.
The business wasn’t disciplined. It was constrained. Scarcity forces discipline. It doesn’t prove it.
Here’s the mechanism, not just the pattern: under scarcity, the survival constraint does the disciplining for you — every naira is monitored because the runway is the enforcer. Abundance removes that enforcer. Unless a business has already written its capital priorities down before the money arrives — in what order growth, returns, and reinvestment get funded, and who has to say no — spending expands to fill the vacuum the constraint used to occupy. Governance, in other words, doesn’t erode because people become careless. It erodes because the thing that used to do the governing quietly leaves the room.
Capital Has Conditions
Ellah Lakes is a live illustration of the first half of that story — capital’s conditions, not its corrosion. In November 2025, the agro-industrial company launched a ₦235 billion Offer for Subscription on the NGX — 18.8 billion shares at ₦12.50 each, led by Rand Merchant Bank. By February 2026, the offer had failed to meet its minimum subscription threshold, was cancelled, and Ellah Lakes began refunding applicants — a combination of “valuation friction,” as ₦12.50 a share looked aggressive against a company reporting a ₦2.27 billion loss, and a market whose appetite for fresh equity was already being absorbed by the banking sector’s ongoing recapitalisation exercise.
Nathaniel Disu, an investment research analyst at Afrinvest West Africa, put it more bluntly to Arbiterz at the time: “Investors aren’t stupid.” At its 2026 AGM in May (Nairametrics, May 6, 2026), CEO Chuka Mordi disclosed that the company still absorbed roughly ₦1.7 billion in “aborted public offer costs” — advisory, legal, SEC and CAC fees — despite the raise never closing. It wasn’t a morality play. It was a reminder that ambition, pricing, timing and market appetite all have to align before capital shows up — and that the bill for trying arrives whether or not the money does.
Abundance Is the Real Test
Now the second half — what abundance reveals once it does show up. I like Nucor. Most people couldn’t tell you what they do. They make steel. In its FY2024 Form 10-K filed with the SEC, Nucor states its capital allocation priorities in a fixed order: invest in the business for long-term profitable growth first, then return capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Nucor has run this same ranked order for years — through weak steel cycles and strong ones alike, regardless of how flush the balance sheet happened to be. They had the capacity to chase excitement. They chose a sequence instead — and published it.
That’s the difference. One company was reminded that capital has conditions. The other has spent decades behaving as though capital is always scarce — even in the years it clearly wasn’t — because the discipline was never left to memory or mood. It was codified.
So I don’t judge a company’s capital strategy by what it does when cash is running out. Scarcity creates caution on its own. I judge it by what management does after they finally have options — and whether that behaviour was decided in advance or improvised in the moment. The businesses that endure aren’t the ones that finally got money. They’re the ones that kept behaving as though capital was precious, on paper, before they had any.
Because capital doesn’t create discipline. It exposes it.
