Meet Joseph Eshio Oghanyan: The Founder Powering Africa's EV Race

Ask most people when Africa will join the electric vehicle race and they will answer with a date. Joseph Eshio Oghanyan, founder of The Everlasting EV, answers with a system. In his view the continent is not late to the EV era — it has simply been sold the wrong entry point: expensive cars, no financing, no charging, no education, and no one accountable after the sale.

The Everlasting EV was founded to close exactly that gap. Not as a dealership, but as the connective infrastructure between the people who want to drive electric, the manufacturers who build the vehicles, the banks that finance them, the insurers who protect them and the energy partners who keep them moving.

Who is Joseph Eshio Oghanyan?

Joseph Eshio Oghanyan is a Nigerian entrepreneur and the founder of The Everlasting EV, an electric mobility ecosystem serving Nigeria and West Africa. He works at the intersection of mobility, consumer finance and clean energy, and his central conviction is simple: adoption is an infrastructure problem before it is a product problem.

That conviction shapes everything the company builds. Where others sell a vehicle and move on, he insists on owning the whole journey — from the first question a buyer asks, through bank approval and delivery, to charging, maintenance, insurance renewal and resale years later.

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"Africa does not need permission to lead the electric era. It needs charging, financing, service and honest education — in that order."

The vision

To build Africa's most trusted electric mobility ecosystem, making it possible for every individual, business and institution to confidently transition into the future of transportation.

The mission

To make electric mobility accessible, trusted and practical for millions of people by building the digital infrastructure that connects every part of the mobility ecosystem.

The core promise

No one who buys an electric vehicle through The Everlasting EV is ever left alone with it. Financing is transparent, charging is solved before delivery, service is accountable, and the answer to every question is one message away.

The four-part plan powering the EV race in Africa

1. Charging stations

Range anxiety in Nigeria is not about batteries — it is about certainty. The roadmap prioritises home charging as the default, workplace and estate charging as the multiplier, and a growing network of partner fast-charge points along the corridors people actually drive. Alongside it sits Bring Charging To You, a mobile response service that takes power to a driver instead of towing the car.

2. Battery as a Service

The battery is the single largest cost inside an EV. Separating it from the purchase price — leasing capacity rather than buying it outright, with swap and health-guarantee options for commercial operators — is how the entry price for African drivers falls fastest without compromising quality.

3. Maintenance and aftercare

An EV market without certified technicians is a market that stalls in year three. The Everlasting EV invests in trained service partners, genuine parts channels, transparent service pricing and warranty-backed workmanship so ownership stays predictable long after delivery.

4. Massive EV education

Most Nigerians have never sat in an electric car. The company treats education as infrastructure: plain-language guides, cost-of-ownership breakdowns, test drives, community events, dealer and technician training, and content that answers the real questions — what it costs, how you charge it, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Why ownership, not just awareness

The founder's sharpest argument is financial. With petrol subsidies gone, the running-cost gap between electric and combustion has widened into the millions of naira over a five-year hold. What was missing was not desire — it was a credible route to ownership. That is why the platform pairs vehicles with bank-backed EasyPay financing: 10% to 20% equity, tenors from 6 to 60 months, and one profile that banks, manufacturers and insurers can all act on.

• One verified profile, shared securely with partner banks
• Equity from 10%, tenors up to 60 months
• Charging, insurance and servicing arranged before delivery
• A named human accountable for every application

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What working with the vision looks like

The Everlasting EV works with manufacturers entering Africa, banks building green loan books, insurers designing EV cover, fleet operators cutting fuel exposure, estates and employers installing charging, and individuals who simply want a car that costs less to run. If you are building any part of that future, there is a seat at the table.

The problem he set out to fix

The Nigerian mobility market has never lacked demand. It has lacked a route. A buyer who wanted an electric car in Lagos in 2023 faced five separate problems at once: no clear pricing, no financing product designed for the asset, no charging plan, no insurer with an EV motor policy, and no workshop able to service the vehicle after the warranty. Any one of those was enough to stop a purchase. Together they made the market look like it did not exist.

Joseph's read was that these were not five markets — they were one broken sequence. Solve them in order and the demand that was always there becomes visible. That is why The Everlasting EV was built as a platform rather than a showroom: a single verified customer profile that a manufacturer, a bank, an insurer and a service partner can all act on without the buyer repeating themselves five times.

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How he thinks about affordability

The founder is blunt about the arithmetic. Nigerians do not buy cars from savings — they buy them from cash flow. So the question was never 'can someone afford ₦25 million?' but 'can someone afford a monthly payment that is smaller than what they already lose to fuel, generator diesel and repairs?' EasyPay was designed backwards from that question: 10% to 20% equity, tenors from 6 to 60 months, and bank pricing set against the applicant's own risk classification rather than a blanket EV premium.

• Deposit from 10% of the vehicle price, not the full ticket
• Repayment spread across up to 60 months
• Partner banks — Stanbic IBTC, Access Bank and UBA — compete on the same application
• A free EV Readiness Score that shows the numbers before anyone applies

Leadership style: build the boring infrastructure first

Most founders in emerging mobility start with the vehicle because the vehicle is photogenic. Joseph starts with the unglamorous layer underneath it — charger installation partners, technician training curricula, parts channels, document workflows, insurer clauses, bank credit criteria. His argument is that the first thousand EV owners in a market decide whether the next hundred thousand ever arrive; if that first cohort is stranded, uninsured or unserviced, the category stalls for a decade.

"The first thousand owners write the story for the next hundred thousand. We refuse to let that story be a bad one."

Education as strategy, not marketing

The company publishes cost breakdowns, charging guides, battery-health explainers and city-by-city ownership guides in plain language — and it does so before a customer ever sees a price. The founder treats this as strategy: in a market where most people have never sat in an electric car, the fastest way to grow demand is to remove uncertainty, not to raise the volume on advertising. Every guide answers the three questions that actually block a decision — what it costs, how you charge it, and what happens when something goes wrong.

What comes next

The roadmap he is executing runs on four tracks in parallel: expanding home and estate charging into a visible national footprint, launching Battery as a Service to cut entry prices further, certifying an EV service network across Nigeria's major cities, and scaling financing volume so banks treat electric vehicles as a normal asset class rather than an experiment. Success, in his framing, is the day owning an electric car in Nigeria stops being a story worth writing.