Three-wheelers have been the last-mile replacement since the government banned commercial motorcycles across most of Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, in 2020. They ferry passengers through narrow roads buses cannot reach, and some cars would rather avoid. They also connect major roads and are affordable enough to remain an option for Lagosians.

There are now just over 300 converted kekes in Lagos, according to Swap, and the company says more than 100,000 tricycles are on a waitlist. There are many reasons for the gap between those two numbers, and that is what this story is about. Moses and the other drivers who have already switched, alongside the long waitlist, show the demand is real. What holds Swap back is the cost and difficulty of keeping batteries charged and the capital needed to meet the demand.

Different stations, different realities

When I visited Swap’s station in Ikorodu, a fast-growing town on Lagos’s northeastern outskirts, in June, it had been without electricity since January 2026. To charge batteries, the station runs two generators that barely stop. As soon as a round of batteries is charged, the next batch goes on, and the generators keep burning diesel so that drivers keep working. 

The station serves 150 drivers and charges between 90 and 100 batteries, according to Victor Oguare, the station manager. Only two diesel generators carry that load. 

“If one generator runs for four hours, we shut one down and let it rest for one hour,” Oguare said. “Then we turn on the other one and shut that one down to rest for another hour. There’s a way we normally shuffle it so that it will not cause any overworking.”

To keep batteries available, Swap buys diesel in bulk. “We purchase 1,000 litres for our drums, which serves us for three to four days,” he said. At the current retail price of ₦1,750 ($1.28) per litre, that comes to ₦1.95 million ($1,450) every three to four days—roughly ₦487,500 ($363) a day just to keep the batteries charged. 

Over a 30-day month, buying at that rate runs about ₦14.6 million to ₦19.5 million ($10,900 to $14,500). Swap declined to comment on how much it spends on diesel. 

On generators, the station’s capacity to charge batteries drops sharply. The grid delivers far more power, so instead of 90 batteries at a time, the station manages 40 to 50, and each charge cycle stretches from 90 minutes to nearly two and a half hours. A generator-powered station runs at roughly a third of the output of a grid-connected one.

Oguare told TechCabal the shortages caused by the reduced output are rare. But the drivers tell a different story.

“We used to be there for some hours waiting for batteries,” said Paul, an Ikorodu-based keke driver who operates on a hire-purchase arrangement and asked to be identified by his first name. 

Paul did not choose to go electric. His keke belongs to a fleet owner, and he was handed the key and told where to swap. He pays ₦7,500 ($5.61) daily to the owner, plus the cost of each battery swap: ₦2,800 ($2.09) for the first, ₦2,800 ($2.09) for the second, and ₦2,200 ($1.65) for the third if he can get one.

He told me he makes around ₦20,000 ($14.96) on a four-battery day. Subtract the ₦7,500 ($5.61) higher-purchase fee and roughly ₦10,000 ($7.48) in swap costs, and he takes home somewhere between ₦2,500 ($1.87) and ₦5,000 ($3.74).

On days when batteries run short, when the generators cannot charge fast enough to meet demand, Paul gets two or three batteries instead of four. His earning window shrinks to a few hours. The ₦7,500 ($5.61) delivery fee does not shrink with it.

“If I pay ₦7,500 [$5.61] for delivery, with the ticket money, everything that I paid, I will not take anything home,” Paul said. “It’s not easy.”

He has run out of battery mid-route. When that happens, he pushes the keke. There is no jerrycan equivalent for an electric vehicle, no roadside solution. You either push or you ask someone to help you push. When I visited Swap’s Magodo station in June 2026, I saw drivers arriving on foot, carrying their dead batteries because the kekes could not move. 

Despite the frustrations of an occasional battery shortage or a pack dying mid-trip, drivers still prefer Swap’s engines to petrol. “It’s better than fuel,” Paul said. When batteries are available, the economics work. He doesn’t need a mechanic. The ride is smoother. A petrol keke driver on a similar route spends over ₦10,000 ($7.26) daily on fuel alone, he estimated, before repairs.

Anthony Adiku has driven the same keke since 2022. He converted it in December 2025, after the engine started costing him more than it earned. “I swapped it to Swap because the engine then was giving me issues,” he told TechCabal at Swap’s Magodo station. 

He uses two Swap batteries on a regular day, at ₦6,000 ($4.36) per pair, and makes around ₦15,000 ($10.89) working 12 hours daily. Three batteries, he said, cost him ₦10,000 to ₦11,000 ($7.26 to $7.99) and cover for any day he wants to run longer hours.

For him, the biggest change Swap brought is not really about money. It is the ease it brings to his day. Before, a breakdown could take two hours out of his morning, and he would come back to the route already exhausted and behind his target.

“Once I got into Swap, I woke up at my own convenient time because I know that I don’t have any problem,” he said. “The only problem I have is to face my customers. So once I wake up around nine, I close around seven; I’m okay.”

Inside Swap

Launched in May 2024, Swap is an early-stage Nigerian startup that removes petrol engines from Lagos’s commercial tricycles and replaces them with electric motors powered by swappable lithium batteries at no upfront cost to the driver. 

Founded by family friends Timilehin Odusina, Seyi Oguntunde, and Emmanuel Marchie, Swap describes itself as a battery-as-a-service provider. Drivers get the battery for free and pay per swap, often three times a day. A charged battery lasts two and a half to four and a half hours, depending on the battery’s generation and how it was charged.

Swap’s batteries power some of the last-mile routes that connect Lagos’s 17 million residents from bus stops and junctions to their front gates. Only recently digitised by ride-hailing giant Bolt, it is the segment of the city’s transport network that kekes have largely controlled for the past five years.

The tricycle first gained national prominence in 2002, when President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration distributed 2,000 units through the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP), a scheme designed to give unemployed youth a source of income. The name stuck, and Keke NAPEP was born.

Swap is betting that this vast, fragmented fleet can be converted, vehicle by vehicle, from petrol to electric. It now operates swap stations in parts of Lagos such as Magodo, Ikorodu, Ketu, and Ogba. The company claims drivers can save up to ₦100,000 ($72.6) monthly, a figure it derives from fuel and engine repairs they no longer pay for.

Price is what moves people

The Swap founding team did not always work on electrifying three-wheelers. Oguntunde’s first startup, Intellectric, sold inverters at a time when fuel prices were around ₦65 ($0.047) a litre, but they found out that very few Nigerians saw the point of alternative power when fuel was cheap. 

“People in Africa do not care as much about the climate,” Oguntunde, Swap’s chief executive, told TechCabal in an interview. “What they care about is how much it costs them to use power, whether it is for their fridge or car.”

The experience from their previous startup taught the founders the lesson that now shapes everything Swap does: in Nigeria, price is what moves people.

“We knew that power was going to get more expensive,” Oguntunde said. “We had various ideas, but it became clear to us that selling (inverter) batteries was not the way to solve this infrastructure problem.”

The past three years have vindicated Swap’s decision, as the price of petrol in Nigeria has risen sixfold, from ₦185 ($0.13) on May 29, 2023 to today’s ₦1,310 ($0.95).  For a keke driver, the daily cost of using Swap’s batteries, which are free to install, is lower than petrol costs. 

Still, the keke was not the founders’ first option. Their first attempt was with motorbikes, but creating a battery that could power their engines and still balance on the two-wheelers posed a problem they could not afford to solve on a thin research budget.

“Three-wheelers solved the balancing problem,” Oguntunde said. “I did not need to innovate around balance, which gave me enough room to innovate on the things that mattered.” The Lagos ban on commercial two-wheelers also reduced the market’s appeal. 

The prototype was built during the COVID years, between 2020 and 2021, and the founders deliberately chose the worst keke they could find: a rusted, dilapidated unit that had spent its life hauling cement. 

If the conversion worked on that vehicle, it would work on anything. “A few batteries exploded in the house or the garage while we were working,” Oguntunde said. By 2022, the tricycle ran at the speed and mileage they wanted, and the conversion kit worked.

The Swap battery

The battery is where Swap believes its real advantage lives. Swap had to work with its battery manufacturing partner on materials suited to Nigerian conditions while building the battery management system, the software that controls how the battery charges, discharges, and protects itself, in-house.

In our conversation, Oguntunde declined to speak extensively on the battery or its manufacturing partner, as the company treats its battery’s power rating as a trade secret out of concern that competitors would reverse-engineer it. 

What he did share was that Swap’s financial model assumes each battery lasts about five years. While its oldest battery in the field is roughly three years old, Oguntunde said it has shown no significant degradation.

The batteries charge in roughly one and a half to two hours on grid electricity. A station with power can charge up to 90 batteries simultaneously on grid power, as the stations are designed for volume and speed. When drivers arrive, the attendant pulls the depleted battery out, slots a charged one in, and the driver is gone in two minutes. 

What a Swap driver pays

The prices drivers pay turned out to be one of the small mysteries of my reporting. 

Anthony pays ₦3,000 ($2.20) to charge a battery at Magodo. A driver in Swap’s station in Ikorodu pays ₦2,800 ($2); a technician told me ₦2,000 ($1.45). When I put the discrepancy to Oguntunde, the answer was capacity. 

Swap’s standard swap price is ₦3,000 ($2.18). But at stations still running an older generation of battery with less capacity, riders get a discount to reflect the difference. And at its highest-mileage location, where drivers swap most often, the pricing is tiered. Full price for the first swap, discounted rates once a driver crosses two swaps in a day, and a volume discount built for the people who use the most batteries. 

The company also offers loans to drivers with repayment folded into the swap fees. Every time a driver swaps a battery, an extra ₦1,000 ($0.73) is deducted until the loan is repaid.  There is no additional paperwork required beyond the initial application. Oguntunde declined to discuss the details of the credit arrangement, describing the system as still maturing.

From petrol to batteries

When I visited Swap’s Magodo station in March, Emmanuel, a technician who asked to be identified only by his first name, was preparing to convert two kekes in a single session. He told TechCabal he has converted over 50 kekes since he started in September 2025. 

Two years ago, almost no one in Lagos knew how to wire an electric keke. Now there are several like Emmanuel who are building a career around electric kekes. 

The conversion process requires three people working in sequence. First, the old petrol engine is removed, and the keke‘s body is stripped down to its frame. Then the electrician wires in the new electric motor and installs a digital monitor that displays battery percentage and diagnostics. Finally, a welder secures the motor housing, and a mechanic sets the engine in place. If all three are present and ready, two kekes can be converted in about 90 minutes, Emmanuel said. 

“The hardest part is the welder. Because even if the mechanic is here, if the welder is not there, there’s no need.” Emmanuel earns between ₦80,000 ($58) and ₦100,000 ($72.6) a month as a technician still learning on the job. 

Building the infrastructure 

At its core, Swap’s business model is asset financing. The company absorbs the cost of converting each keke, then recovers it over time as drivers swap batteries. “Every time a rider comes to swap their battery, they are paying for the kit,” Oguntunde said. A driver averages about 2.5 swaps a day, while some now do up to 4.

The savings pitch, according to Oguntunde, was never really about petrol. When the company spoke with drivers, fuel was a pain point, but maintenance costs were the main issue. Drivers told Swap they were spending between ₦50,000 ($36) and ₦90,000 ($65) a month keeping their engines alive before any major breakdown, he said. 

Swap says its conversion delivered around 50% savings per rider when petrol and maintenance were counted together, and with petrol at today’s prices, the gap has only widened. The startup added that it has converted just over 300 tricycles across its locations, with another 1,000 conversion kits ordered and expected around the middle of the year.

One man travelled from Borno to tell the company he controlled a fleet of over 20,000 tricycles he wanted converted, Oguntunde said.

Against a waitlist of 100,000, just 300 conversions are a rounding error. The reason for this wide gap, Oguntunde said, is capital, specifically debt capital, since every conversion is an asset that must be financed before it earns.

The company’s plan for scale rests on a hub-and-spoke design. Some locations, like its Ikorodu station, will be depots, where batteries are recharged at scale; from there, charged batteries are distributed to smaller spoke stations, where only swapping happens. Swap wants 10 depots by the end of 2026, with a constellation of spokes around each one. 

Crucially, the spokes do not have to belong to Swap. Anyone can own one in the startup’s franchising model. Oguntunde compares the model to the early rollout of petrol stations: the infrastructure had to exist before the business could work, and only once operators saw it working did franchising and capital follow.

“We think the real game-changer will be the infrastructure that allows everything to connect,” he told me. 

Why Swap matters

Swap is not the only company trying to electrify Lagos’s last-mile transport. In April 2025, Bolt launched 25 electric kekes with a lease-to-own model and battery swap stations, with plans to scale to 1,000. Electric vehicle startups like MAX, Spiro, Qoray, and Siltech are all building battery swap infrastructure in Nigeria. In 2020, the Nigerian government’s National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) developed its own electric keke prototype.

Most players in Nigeria’s electric keke race sell or lease brand-new vehicles: Bolt at ₦3.2 million ($2,324) on an 18-to-24-month lease and Ecowaka, an indigenous Nigerian electric vehicle company, from ₦2.6 million ($1,945). 

A few will convert a driver’s existing petrol keke, among them Ecowaka, Qore, and Mataji Express, which holds a National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC) licence to import and assemble electric vehicles. But those conversions are still a purchase. Of the operators TechCabal reviewed, only Swap asks for nothing upfront and recovers the cost through the swap itself.

When the founders were designing their prototype, they priced brand-new electric tricycles and found them roughly twice the cost of a comparable petrol vehicle. Most keke drivers in Lagos cannot afford a new vehicle at that price point. 

They often buy imported secondhand kekes from other drivers or from whoever is selling. The machines are already old when they get them, carrying years of wear before the first day of ownership. Swap meet drivers where they are: ‘bring your ageing keke, and we will make it new in a different way.’

The drivers have even given Swap’s kekes a name of their own. They call it a “robot”—a robot keke, as in something out of the future.

The reason this small company matters is beyond its 300 conversions. When Swap strips the petrol engine out of a keke, the driver crosses a threshold he cannot easily cross back. His vehicle no longer runs on fuel. It runs on Swap’s batteries, charged at Swap’s stations and paid for through Swap’s wallet. If the station has no batteries, he does not work that day. If the company stumbles, his keke, often his only asset, often bought secondhand with borrowed money, becomes a shell with wheels.

Each of those 300 kekes is a household. A keke driver in Lagos rarely feeds only himself. He pays school fees and rent and funds his siblings and parents. Moses has driven his converted keke for two years. Paul hands over ₦7,500 ($5.45) daily to a fleet owner before he earns a naira for his own family. 

The waitlist represents, by any conservative multiple, hundreds of thousands of people whose daily bread would come to depend on one startup’s battery logistics.

This is the weight Swap carries, and it is a different kind of weight from what most startups bear. A fintech app that fails inconveniences its users, and they can download a competitor. A battery network that fails strands its drivers with vehicles that can no longer move. The drivers understood this before I did. 

It is why Paul, for all his frustration on scarcity days, still would not go back and why his frustration matters so much. He is describing what it feels like when the system you depend on for survival runs on two generators that must never stop.

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