Nigeria's petroleum haulage sector moves millions of litres of fuel daily. Yet, the logistics chain connecting truck owners to fuel marketers remains largely manual, opaque and financially risky for all parties involved. Product diversion, unverified drivers, and a lack of real-time visibility are structural problems that the sector has carried for years. Marketers bear full liability for losses in transit.
Asiwaju Ridwan Akande, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Truckified.ng, a Nigerian petroleum haulage logistics platform, spoke to PetroleumPrice.ng about building a digital solution for a sector he has worked in for over a decade, and why he believes the industry's core problem was never a shortage of trucks. Akande is joined in the venture by Agboola Ridwan Olalekan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Atria Analytics and Atria Logistics, who serves as Managing Director of Truckified.ng, and Daniel Adeyemi Adeyinka, who serves as Executive Secretary of the company.
What problem in Nigeria's petroleum haulage sector pushed you to build Truckified.ng?
I have been in the oil and gas sector for about 11 years and for much of that time, everything ran on manual processes and the cracks were visible everywhere you looked. Money was being lost, there were persistent issues on the road, and on the logistics side, there was no structured way to connect truck owners with the businesses that needed them. About four years ago I started working seriously on solving that, trying to understand how far we could push the connections and how far we could lift the process. What I kept coming back to was the same root problem, which is that the digitalisation of the connection between the truck owner and the buyer simply did not exist, and that absence was costing the entire industry in ways most people had simply accepted as normal.
Can you share the moment that crystallised it for you personally?
It happened during my time at Mea Energy Trading Limited, where I worked as Head of Depot Operations and Logistics Manager. We had an urgent loading requirement and needed about 40 trucks, and I spent five days searching without finding a single one. What made it worse was discovering afterwards that a truck owner was sitting with 60 idle vehicles and no customers to move them for. He had the trucks we desperately needed and we had the business he was looking for, but because there was no digital system connecting both sides of that transaction, neither of us ever found the other until it was too late. That single experience made the problem undeniable to me, and it is exactly what Truckified.ng was built to solve.
Walk us through what happens from the moment a marketer funds their wallet to when the escrow code is entered at delivery.
The marketer deposits funds into their dashboard wallet and from there requests a trip by selecting the depot, destination and product, with the price calculated automatically at that point so there is no negotiation and no broker sitting in the middle taking an undisclosed margin. Once loading is confirmed, the transporter receives a mobilisation fee of between 50 and 70 per cent of their total pay, which allows them to cover immediate operational costs before the trip is completed. The remaining balance is held in escrow and is only released when the consignee enters a security code upon delivery to confirm that the product has arrived in full. That final escrow code step is the heart of the model because it means a transporter cannot receive their full payment unless delivery is confirmed, which shifts accountability entirely and ensures the marketer's money is protected until the job is done to standard.
Who owns the trucks on the platform, and how does that differ across your package tiers?
The answer depends on which tier we are talking about. For our Premium package, the trucks are either owned by Truckified.ng or operate under our direct control, which means we carry full responsibility for the asset and the standard of service delivered. For our Commercial and Basic packages, we operate as a connector, matching independent truck owners and transporters with businesses that need secure fuel haulage and providing the verification, insurance and tracking infrastructure that makes those independent operators trustworthy to marketers. Every driver on the platform regardless of tier goes through a verification process, because what we are building is a system where trust is not assumed but structurally guaranteed.
Driver welfare does not come up often in conversations about petroleum logistics. How did it shape the way you built Truckified.ng?
It should come up far more than it does, because the gap is serious and the industry has largely looked away from it. How many drivers in this sector actually have insurance, and if an accident happens that claims properties, lives or the health of a driver, what provision genuinely exists for them? We put all of that into consideration when designing the packages, which is why every trip on Truckified.ng carries protection not just for the cargo but for the people physically moving it. We partnered with Heirs Insurance Holdings to provide that cover, and both our Commercial and Premium packages include driver and motor-boy insurance alongside goods-in-transit and comprehensive cover, because we believe you cannot claim to be reforming an industry while leaving the most vulnerable people in the chain entirely unprotected.
What was the thinking behind structuring the offering into package tiers?
The thinking was to establish a floor that every trip on the platform must meet regardless of which truck owner is involved or which corridor a trip runs on, because we did not want a situation where the quality of a delivery depended entirely on the individual practices of a particular transporter. That defined standard covers insurance, real-time tracking and safety equipment for the crew, and it applies universally so that a marketer booking through Truckified.ng knows exactly what level of protection and visibility they are getting before the truck leaves the depot. The Premium tier goes further with higher-grade personal protective equipment and trucks under our direct control, but even at the Commercial and Basic levels the baseline is meaningfully higher than what most of the traditional market currently provides.
How does the platform compare to how things have traditionally worked through brokers?
The traditional model is built on opacity and cash risk, where a broker takes a margin that is rarely disclosed upfront, cash changes hands without protection and if something goes wrong with the product in transit the marketer absorbs the loss with very little recourse. Truckified.ng changes all of that by making the price visible before the trip begins, releasing a mobilisation fee to the transporter upon confirmed loading and holding the balance in escrow until delivery is verified at the other end. I always use this comparison: look at what InDrive, Bolt and Uber did for passenger transport, where at the comfort of your phone you can order, track and know exactly where the vehicle is and when it stops. Truckified.ng is that model applied to petroleum haulage, and that kind of visibility and financial protection has simply not existed in this sector before now.
Certain operational details including active depots and corridors were not disclosed at the time of this interview. What can you share about who the platform is currently built to serve?
The platform is designed for any business that needs secure fuel transportation, with independent marketers and mid-size distributors as our primary focus, particularly operators who want to move away from the broker model and protect their working capital through the escrow system. Larger operators also benefit from the traceability the platform generates, particularly as regulatory expectations around documentation and audit trails continue to tighten across the downstream sector and operators increasingly need a digital record of every movement to satisfy compliance requirements.
Where do you see Truckified.ng in the downstream sector two to three years from now?
We are coming into this industry to revolutionise it and to digitalise it, and I say that with full confidence because the infrastructure, the insurance partnership and the tracking systems are already in place. Many companies have attempted pieces of this with websites and partial solutions, but Truckified.ng is being built as a core, niche truck business where someone in this industry can wake up thinking about loading and reach for the platform the way they reach for their phone. The vision is to become the default digital rail for downstream petroleum haulage in Nigeria, and we are very definite about that.