Well, the idea is less financial gain and more punishment/retribution. You don't disappear/kill people in such a manner unless you want to send a message of some sort.

It's possible that he might have taken an investment from someone that does not take failure/underdelivery as an answer. Or that Gokada's continued existence pissed off someone that intended the company to go under. It could also possibly be much more personal than that - there are many people who are wealthy enough to order such a hit with relative impunity (as long as they remain in Nigeria - our justice system and infrastructure is frankly not the greatest). It could also have nothing to do with Nigeria at all; he had business ventures and personal affairs elsewhere.

It's all speculation at this point and I just hope whatever it is doesn't crush the company. Gokada employs a thousand riders but beyond that it's helped so many small businesses grow and thrive especially during this period; there's a huge informal vendor culture in Lagos that's enabled by companies like this.

Please don't bad mouth Nigeria. This case is not yet fully understood and we can't make any conclusions yet.

My intention is not to bad mouth Nigeria - I did, quite literally, say that it's entirely speculation and that the case might very well have nothing whatsoever to do with the country (and even if it involves Gokada, the aggrieved party is not necessarily Nigerian).

Regarding infrastructure, my point is that it's far easier for someone to disappear from the eye of law enforcement here than in many other countries.

Please check global number of missing people and kidnapping cases, use it to rightly place your country. That you have weak institutions don't mean that your country is world theater of crime.

Those countries routinely underreport crimes.

Sure of course.

> if his previous business was gutted by regulatory changes?

There are some people you just don't want to owe money to. I'm not speculating on if that was the case here, just that in the US, that sort of thing is the realm of movies. Elsewhere in the world (and also parts of the US) that still the reality of borrowing large sums of money.

Given the local environment they operate in I wonder if someone was on the take for them to operate originally. Maybe the regulation changes cause Gokada to not want to pay but that wasn't copacetic with the demands of the "shaker"?

As you pointed out, business in these countries isn't clean and clear as it is in most countries HN'ers live in.

I saw crazy shakedowns in Northern Africa when I briefly lived there. I wouldn't doubt the same to be seen in other countries.

>that'd be geopolitical suicide

Saudi Arabia seems to be doing fine last I checked.

One interesting fact linked to this country is that he was born in Saudi Arabia as well.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/nyregion/dismembered-body...

Operating mode sounds much like it happened with Jamal Khashoggi, could he be another victim of MBS or some other Saudi prince?

Why would that be the case? Khashogi was clearly speaking up and was wanted killed, even he knew it

Money and/or power tend to be the causes for these things, unless it's personal.

Saudi Arabia carried out an extrajudicial killing in a small, neighboring state. This was carried out in the US. And for all intents and purposes could be considered an act of war against a state that has an unlimited war chest.

Turkey isn’t small in any way. It’s a regional powerhouse.

Not to mention and I guess a lot of people dont know this but Turkey was one of the main allies of the USA not too long ago for quite a while at that. It was quite a strategic alliance too. Just look at Turkeys neighboring countries sometime.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey%E2%80%93United_States...

Turkey has the second largest military in NATO (after US) and by quite a margin

Turkey leadership may well be sympathetic to the Saudis to some extent. Freedom of press doesn't exactly seem like their biggest concern, and they have an authoritarian Muslim ruler.

They 'may be', but they're not. They are on opposing sides of a huge regional political divide, and pretty much in cold war against eachother.

I would argue that in the ME everyone is and is not in cold war with everyone else, at any given time. Erdogan and the Saudis, for example, both helped ISIS... until they didn't.

There isn't a fundamental ideological divide, everyone is just jockeying for a few more square-meters of this or that.

The jockeying isn't for some square meter of land. It's for influence over the muslim world.

It was a figure of speech. Influence is what gives you control, of course.

They might be, no doubt. I was mainly objecting (unrelated to the article) to the 'smallness' of the neighboring state and to the fact that if something could be considered an act of war doesn't mean it will be one. Bottomless oil well is a good counter to an unlimited war chest.

Turkey is totally not friends with Saudi Arabia right now.

Turkey has gone downhill in the last five years due to the actions of Turkish leadership. I no longer see them returning to the path of democracy sadly. The Trump administration are saints in comparison.

A superpower doesn't go to war over an isolated assassination of (with all due respect to the victim and his family) some random rich kid. Casus belli is invoked only where there was a pre-existing ambition. I don't think the US have any ambition to take over Saudi Arabia, when they couldn't even run Iraq.

You don't need to go to war. But you certainly also don't need to defend them. See how the UK responded to the Skripal case or Litivenko.

If only the President had Susan Rice on his team, they could claim a video caused it.

> small, neighboring state

That "small, neighboring state" is a №2 state in NATO

That was my thought: Us foreign policy is such a mess that its territory is now open to international hitmen.

I look at one possibility as he raised/borrowed money from the wrong people and then when things went pear shaped, he couldn't get them their promised profit, got chopped up to set an example.

Either that or sex

He was followed by a man he did not invite to his apartment, doesn’t look like he knew his killer

I think they meant sex with the wrong person, not the killer.

Jilted lover etc

> What is there to gain financially from killing him, if his previous business was gutted by regulatory changes?

Devil's devil's advocate - the motivation for the killing doesn't need to be "rational" or make sense from our perspective. It could be pathological, it could be revenge, who knows?

> nobody would've been the wiser.

Except they would have footage of two people going into the apartment (one person apparently wearing a ninja outfit), and only one person leaving.

That could have been a tipoff that something was askew.

Are you inferring "ninja outfit" from the article description? Because it vaguely mentions a black suit and face mask. And I'm not entirely sure "face mask" doesn't just mean a now-standard-in-a-pandemic mask type.

In some parts of the world, for some people, it was enough to want to kill him to actually do it. And in such a brutal way.

It doesn't have to be that complicated.

"The killer was evidently belonging to a highly capable skillset," - no, it's not skill, it's just the diabolical will to actually do such a thing. Depending on circumstances, there can be a lack of evidence ... and that's that.

> What is there to gain financially from killing him, if his previous business was gutted by regulatory changes?

It may be as simple as being the member of the board another member is displeased with. Not suggesting that, just saying sometimes your very existence is a liability to others.

> If it was a state agent of Nigeria that is responsible, idk, that'd be geopolitical suicide, putting hits out on private entrepreneurs across national borders

When in Rome....

First thing that comes to mind: What was the financial or other motivation behind Mohammed bin Salman killing Khashoggi?

It's a power move. Putin does it too.

The degree to which the American president praises the dictators of this world makes you wonder if he wishes he could do it too.

I think he might if he thought he could get himself out of it someway. Look at how callous the administration has been about allowing covid to go wild without even blinking until lately. Tens of thousands of people dead for no reason, soon to be hundreds of thousands. It's a nightmare.