Kardinal Business Travel, a travel technology company with African and global focus, was among 60 startups that pitched at the 2nd edition of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Startup Awards, held at the ECOWAS Commission headquarters in Abuja recently.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Cornelius Ugwunwa, presented the company’s case at the three-day event. The awards was part of an ECOWAS initiative to help West African businesses and startups scale through digital transformation, regional integration and sustainable value chains, with the aim of widening access to global markets.

Temitope Kareem, founder of Nigerian healthtech firm HubPharm Africa, won the top prize of $30,000. Senegal’s Gaynako took home $20,000 as first runner-up, while Steve Bah Blesson’s MyOpinion from Côte d’Ivoire won $15,000 as second runner-up.

Speaking during his pitch, Ugwunwa said Africa needs a new system for business travel. He cited a market with $75 billion in inbound travel spending and a strong business travel component in 2025, while travel and tourism as a whole contributed $228 billion to the regional economy.

“When a company sends its employees across Africa for a business engagement, we at Kardinal noticed the challenges of countless inboxes, spreadsheets and emails, mostly after the trip.

Businesses keep asking: How much did we spend? Who did we spend it on? Was it above or below budget? Can we reconcile everything on one platform?” he said.

He described African business travel as a $30 billion market that is largely fragmented and overly dependent on manual processes.

According to him, many businesses lose over $1 billion to manual travel processing and cannot track spending in real time. “That is why Kardinal exists: to solve this entrenched problem,” he said.

Ugwunwa said GoKardinal is an artificial intelligence-driven platform built to track expenses for African businesses. It brings the entire business travel lifecycle (planning, budgeting, booking, financing and expense tracking) onto one platform, in real time.

“GoKardinal is not another travel platform. It is an infrastructure for business travel, powered by AI for expense management,” he said, adding that the idea is to help businesses move without delay from one location to another to do their best work, expand and make profit.

On the company’s performance, he said the platform serves over 51 businesses in Nigeria and across Africa, with estimated weekly profit of $10,000 and gross merchandise value of over $1 million, growing at 65 per cent annually. he added.

He noted that about 80 per cent of African businesses still run their business travel manually, without any form of expense tracking, in a market worth over $30 billion annually. “African business travel is not just travelling for the fun of it.

It is an ecosystem with the potential to generate over $70 billion when digitalised,” Ugwunwa said.

The President of Security Resources & Risk Management Academy, Lagos, Mr. Matthew Ibadin, has charged officers of the Nigerian Armed Forces and allied nations to practice emotional discipline, warning that unmanaged anger remains a greater threat to a Staff Officer than the enemy.

Ibadin, who is also a doctoral researcher at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) and University of Abuja, stated this on Monday while delivering a lecture on “Emotional Discipline Under Pressure and Anger Management for Staff Officers” to participants of Senior Course 48 at the Armed Forces Command and Staff College (AFCSC), Jaji, Kaduna.

The lecture was attended by 436 officers comprising the Nigerian Army, Nigerian Navy, Nigerian Air Force and officers from eight friendly nations.

Describing anger as “a temporary madness that leaves a permanent record,” Ibadin warned officers that “the line between a respected officer and an inmate is thinner than you can imagine.”

“Anger may enter the room, but must never take command,” he said.

The Lion Principle

Illustrating his point with the parable of the lions, Ibadin noted that while both male and female lions roar, the female roars only when necessary and lives 15-18 years compared to 10-12 years for the male.

“She lives longer not because she is weaker, but because she is more disciplined. Many of us have become male lions in uniform – fighting juniors, spouses, traffic, minor disagreements even when no real threat exists. That constant agitation slowly destroys what you have built,” he said.

He therefore charged officers to “be a female lion in strategy and a male lion only when tactically necessary.”

Five Battlefields Where Anger Destroys

Ibadin identified five battlefields where undisciplined anger destroys officers: Health, Home Front, Office and Command, Career and Prison, and Relationships.

On health, he described anger as a silent killer that triggers hypertension, stroke and cardiac arrest, noting that many officers survive the war front but do not survive peacetime.

“At Jaji, your rank commands respect, but at home your rank is irrelevant. If you win at the office and lose at home, you have lost. An officer whose home is under emotional fire cannot think clearly at the command post,” he cautioned.

He warned that signatures appended in anger to operational orders, procurement papers and personnel assessments could lead to Boards of Inquiry, career ruin and mission failure.

He added that 70 percent of inmates in correctional centres for murder never planned to kill, but acted in a moment of unmanaged anger.

Practical Tools

Ibadin introduced practical tools including the 90-Second Rule and the S.T.O.P Protocol – Stop, Take a Breath (4-4-4), Observe, and Proceed with Discipline – for decisions under pressure.

He adopted Aristotle’s five tests for disciplining anger: Right Person, Right Reason, Right Time, Right Degree, and Right Manner.