In the early 2000s, when most Nigerian businesses were still debating whether they needed a website, Obadare Peter Adewale was already thinking about who was trying to break into it. In 2003, he co-founded Digital Encode Limited, an indigenous cybersecurity, governance, risk, and compliance firm built on the conviction that Africa’s digital economy would need protecting long before the continent fully understood the threats it faced. That conviction, held early and acted upon decisively, is the defining characteristic of a man who has spent the past two decades being right about things before everyone else knew they needed to be worried about them.
Today, Prof. OPA, as he is known across the continent, is Nigeria’s first Professor of Practice in Cybersecurity, appointed by Miva Open University in Abuja in July 2024. He is the Forbes Best of Africa Outstanding Digital Trust Leader. He holds over 62 international professional certifications, a Master of Science in Cybersecurity from Liverpool University, an Honorary Doctorate from Trinity International University of Ambassadors in Atlanta, and executive education credentials from Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Oxford University’s Said Business School. He is, by any honest accounting, the most credentialed Pan-African cybersecurity leader alive.
But the number that matters most is not the certifications. It is this: Digital Encode today serves over 90 percent of financial institutions and 80 percent of telecoms companies in Nigeria, and operates as a Technical Partner to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Electronic Fraud Forum. That is not a portfolio. That is critical national infrastructure.
Africa’s First, Nigeria’s First, and What That Costs
The list of firsts attached to Prof. OPA’s name is long enough to be uncomfortable for lesser men. Africa’s first EC-Council Licensed Penetration Tester. Africa’s first EC-Council Certified Blockchain professional. Nigeria’s first PECB Certified Data Protection Officer. Nigeria’s first PECB Lead Penetration Testing Professional. The first Forbes Technology Council Member in Nigeria. The first Forbes Best of Africa Outstanding Digital Trust Leader. Nigeria’s first Professor of Practice in Cybersecurity and the first certified chief artificial intelligence officer in Nigeria.
Each of those firsts represents a gap that existed, a standard that was absent, a qualification that nobody in this country or on this continent had yet achieved. Prof. OPA’s response to every gap was the same: become the person who fills it. Not once, not twice, but consistently, over two decades, across every frontier cybersecurity presented.
That kind of pioneer work is unglamorous in the doing and only celebrated in the retrospect. You are first because you ventured where no one else had gone, which means you ventured without the comfort of a roadmap, without peers who had navigated the same terrain, without institutional backing for credentials that local systems did not yet recognise. You are first because you refused the comfort of arriving second, when the path was already cleared and the risk already absorbed by someone else.
Prof. OPA has been first, again and again, because he understood something that Nigeria’s digital economy is only now beginning to fully grasp: that the value of a secure digital infrastructure is not apparent until it fails. The most important work in cybersecurity is invisible when it succeeds. Prof. OPA has spent 23 years making sure it succeeds.
Professor Obadare at work in his home office with hundreds of awards around him.
Before Prof. OPA built Digital Encode, before the certifications, before the CBN partnership, there was a book. The Bible was not decoration in his life. It was operating architecture. The same discipline required to study scripture with rigour, to return to it consistently even when results are not immediately visible, to trust in a framework you cannot always see the edges of, is the same discipline that cybersecurity demands at its highest level. Faith taught him how to do hard things quietly, how to remain committed to standards that nobody around you yet recognises, and how to hold a long-term conviction in an environment that offers constant short-term discouragement.
Cybersecurity Is Not For the Lazy
This is perhaps Prof. OPA’s most direct message to a generation that has grown up in the age of shortcuts. You cannot social engineer your way into competence. You cannot prompt your way into expertise. Cybersecurity is one of the few remaining fields where the work genuinely cannot be faked, because the adversary is real, adaptive, and relentless. If you are lazy, the breach finds you.
He entered cybersecurity when there was no roadmap for an African professional in the space. No mentor who had navigated exactly this terrain. No institutional recognition for the credentials he was pursuing. He pursued them anyway, one by one, year by year, because the work required it. The generation he is igniting needs to understand that the standard is not set by what is comfortable or what is achievable in a weekend. It is set by what the threat environment demands. And the threat environment never relaxes.
Build for the World, Not Just Your Street
Nigeria has 220 million people. That is a market. But it is not the ceiling. Prof. OPA built Digital Encode to the standards that would satisfy the Central Bank of Nigeria, yes, but also to the standards that would satisfy any financial regulator anywhere in the world. That is a deliberate choice. It would have been easier, faster, and commercially sufficient to build to local standards only. He did not. Because he understood that building to local standards produces a local company, and a local company cannot ignite a generation that the world is watching.
The Professor Who Teaches What the Classroom Cannot
His appointment as Professor of Practice at Miva Open University is not an honorary gesture. It is a structural intervention in how Nigeria trains the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. The Professor of Practice model exists precisely because some knowledge cannot be taught from textbooks alone. It requires the presence of someone who has been inside the systems, who has managed the incidents, who has sat across the table from regulators and boards and hostile state actors and understood what is actually at stake when digital trust fails.
Prof. OPA brings 62 certifications, 23 years of active practice, and a company that secures the financial backbone of Nigeria to that classroom. The students at Miva do not simply learn cybersecurity theory. They learn it from the man who helped write the standards it is based on, who sits on the Lagos State Cybersecurity Advisory Board, who is a Platinum Team Member of the Open-Source Security Testing Methodology Manual, and whose firm is the reason millions of Nigerians can trust that their digital transactions are protected.
“I am truly honoured to join Miva Open University as a Professor of Practice in Cybersecurity, the first in Nigeria,” he said upon his appointment. “I am thrilled to work with the University in deepening the town and gown relationship.” That phrase, town and gown, is the key. The gap between what African universities teach and what African industries need has been one of the continent’s most stubborn structural problems. Prof. OPA is one of the few people positioned to close it from both sides simultaneously.
The Quiet War and Why It Matters
Africa’s digital economy is growing faster than its defences. Every new fintech platform, every mobile money wallet, every digital identity system, every government database that moves online represents both an opportunity and an attack surface. The continent is building at speed and, in too many places, building without adequate protection. The consequences of that gap are not abstract. They are measured in stolen funds, compromised identities, collapsed institutions, and eroded trust in the very digital systems that are supposed to lift millions out of poverty.
Prof. OPA has been fighting this war quietly and consistently for 23 years. Not with weapons but with global standards. With certifications that force rigour. With a company that has made the financial system of Nigeria’s most important institutions harder to breach. With a professorship that is training the next generation of defenders before the next generation of threats arrives.
What has been built is extraordinary. A company that now touches the financial lives of virtually every Nigerian who uses a bank or a telecommunications service. A body of credentials that has no parallel on this continent. A professorship that will shape how Nigeria defends itself in the digital age for generations to come. A career of firsts that were not firsts for the glory of the title but because the work demanded someone go first and he refused to wait.
The most important battles are the ones the public never sees. The breach that did not happen. The fraud that was stopped before it spread. The system that held because someone, years earlier, built it right. That invisible work is Prof. OPA’s life’s contribution. And in a continent that is only beginning to understand what is at stake in its digital future, there is no more important man in the room.
Professor Obadare Peter Adewale is the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Digital Encode Limited, Nigeria’s first Professor of Practice in Cybersecurity, and Forbes Best of Africa Outstanding Digital Trust Leader. He serves on the Lagos State Cybersecurity Advisory Board and holds fellowship with the British Computer Society, among numerous other professional bodies.
About Men of March: Igniting a Generation
“Men of March:Igniting A Generation” is a landmark editorial series running from 20th March to 20th April 2026. The series profiles Nigerian and African men whose contributions have shaped industries, built institutions, and defined what is possible on this continent. From real estate to technology, finance to manufacturing, media to public service. To find out more or to follow the series, visit menofmarch.com
