Why Rwandan bikers got 22,000 electric bikes while Nigeria waits

Every morning in Kigali, thousands of motorcycle taxi riders silently slice through the hills, their bikes humming rather than roaring. They stop not at petrol stations, but at bright orange swapping cabinets, exchanging a depleted battery for a fully charged one in under a minute. It’s a routine so woven into the city’s rhythm that the technology has become almost invisible — a quiet, electric pulse beneath the daily rush.

In Abeokuta, Ogun State, the scene is different. A handful of riders navigate the city on Spiro’s electric bikes, pulling up to one of three battery-swapping stations the company deployed as a first phase of its Nigeria launch in 2024. The promise is the same — cleaner air, lower running costs, no more queuing for fuel. But the scale is a fraction of what’s humming on the streets of Rwanda. The numbers released by TechCabal frame a stark question: why 22,000 electric motorcycles in Rwanda, but only 5,000 in Nigeria?

The answer isn’t a simple one of neglect or preference, but a map of how infrastructure, policy, and market readiness can accelerate or choke the rollout of a hardware-plus-network business model across different African cities. Spiro, an African electric-mobility company with a battery-swapping network spanning multiple countries, has a product that lives or dies on the density and reliability of its swapping stations. A rider cannot buy the bike and hope to make a living if the next charged battery is a hundred kilometres away. The network is the product, and the network takes time.

Rwanda’s head start is no accident. The government’s aggressive push for green mobility, including tax incentives and a national electrification strategy, created a policy runway that Spiro could taxi down with confidence. The company didn’t just drop bikes there; it built an ecosystem of swap stations that turned the technology into a viable daily tool for commercial riders. By early 2024, Spiro had already deployed more than 13,000 electric motorbikes and 40,000 swappable batteries across Benin, Togo, Rwanda, and Kenya, according to reporting at the time. Rwanda was clearly an anchor, and the company has repeatedly described the country as one of its strongest markets.

Nigeria, by contrast, entered Spiro’s network later and in a more tentative fashion. The country’s launch in August 2024 began not in the dense commercial motorcycle corridors of Lagos, but in Ogun State, with an initial setup of just three swapping stations in Abeokuta. Even in a market of 200 million people where okada is a lifeline for millions, Spiro’s approach was to seed, test, and grow. “We’ll deploy a significant number of bikes in our first year in Nigeria, enabling a lifestyle shift towards cleaner, more sustainable transportation options,” the company said, a statement that hinted at ambition without promising overnight ubiquity. The slower start also reflects a familiar friction in Nigeria’s tech and energy sectors, where erratic electricity supply, fragmented regulatory environments across states, and the sheer logistical sprawl of its cities make any hardware rollout a serious endurance sport.

And yet, to read those two numbers — 22,000 in Rwanda, 5,000 in Nigeria — as a final scoreboard would be to miss the speed of what’s happening now. Spiro’s fleet across the continent crossed 80,000 electric motorcycles by February 2026, operating about 2,500 battery-swapping stations and completing more than 30 million battery swaps. By June that same year, the company had deployed around 95,000 electric motorcycles across seven African markets, including a fresh entry into Cameroon. The capital flooding in mirrors that acceleration — a $50 million debt financing round led by Afreximbank, followed by a colossal $215 million equity raise in 2026. As Kaushik Burman, a key figure at Spiro, put it bluntly: “We are expanding rapidly in these markets because there is huge demand and we want to be sure to meet it.”

The gap between Nigeria and Rwanda, then, is not a sign of failure so much as a photograph of a single moment inside a speeding train. Each market demands its own assembly line — literally, with Spiro assembling much of its equipment in China but running facilities in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Nigeria — and its own patience with mapping a city’s ride patterns before blanketing it with swap stations. For Nigerian riders watching from Abeokuta or beyond, the question is not whether the orange-swapping stations will multiply, but how quickly a market of chaotic, urgent transportation demand can be rewired to run on batteries. The quiet hum is coming. It’s just arriving at Nigerian speed.