Very few global technology brands have enjoyed as steep and promising an ascent in Nigeria’s urban consumer economy as Glovo. Operating in a market defined by youthful demographics, rising digital payments adoption and a culture increasingly shaped by convenience, the on‑demand delivery platform has, in just a few years, embedded itself into the daily rituals of city life.
It is precisely because of this upward brand trajectory that Glovo’s recent spate of reputational crises has landed with such force. Indeed, when brands are still obscure, missteps may pass unnoticed (a brand like Erisco Tomato may disagree). But when a brand becomes a societal fixture, every failure is amplified, every silence interpreted, and every response scrutinised. In the closing weeks of 2025, Glovo Nigeria found itself at the very centre of a fast‑moving, emotionally charged public displeasure that has tested its crisis response capability and tested the very trust architecture upon which platform businesses are built.
It is this displeasure that has birthed the heading for which this writeup is based on. To borrow from a Hausa proverb deeply rooted in northern Nigerian consciousness, “Ga fili, ga doki” which transliterates to here is the field, and here is the horse, is an expression that signifies that the challenge is clear, the opportunity is present, and what remains is performance. For Glovo Nigeria, the ‘field’ has never looked more treacherous, and the ‘horse’ has never been more uncertain of its stride.
The Rise of a Yellow Giant
To understand the magnitude of Glovo’s current crisis, one must first appreciate the heights from which it now risks tumbling. When the Spanish delivery giant launched operations in Nigeria in July 2021, it arrived as a bold disruptor backed by years of global experience and the financial muscle of its parent company, Delivery Hero. The growth story has been nothing short of remarkable. Since launching in Nigeria in 2021, Glovo has generated over ₦71 billion in revenue for its local partners, supporting more than 6,000 shops and restaurants across 11 Nigerian cities. The platform’s quick commerce segment experienced a staggering 76% year-over-year growth in 2024, positioning Glovo as a cornerstone of Nigeria’s rapidly evolving digital economy.
The company’s impact extended beyond transactions. By mid-2025, Glovo Nigeria was employing approximately 2,400 riders, with many earning two to three times the national minimum wage. The platform had facilitated a remarkable shift in payment behavior, with cashless transactions rising by 55% between 2021 and 2024, from representing just 12% of orders to 61%.
In June 2025, as Glovo celebrated its 10th anniversary globally, its General Manager Lamide Akinola confidently declared Nigeria as “a vital engine for our next decade of impact.” But beneath the yellow branding and optimistic projections, cracks were forming in the platform’s operational integrity. By December 2025, those cracks would become chasms, threatening to swallow the brand’s carefully cultivated reputation whole.
The First Storm: Glovo Riders Snatching Wigs
The first crisis was as bizarre as it was damaging. Social media platforms, particularly TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, began to fill with allegations that motorcycle riders branded in Glovo’s distinctive gear were involved in snatching expensive wigs off women’s heads.
A woman on TikTok, Kemzrealtor, described how her wig was pulled off along Yabatech road, alleging that the person involved was riding a motorcycle with Glovo branding. In her video, she called on both the company and the Lagos State government to take action. The incidents were not isolated. Videos on social media captured the moment an alleged Glovo rider snatched a wig from a woman as she attempted to cross a road, with several users reporting similar incidents.
From a strictly operational standpoint, wig snatching has little to do with food delivery logistics. Yet brands are not judged in silos. To the public, Glovo riders are Glovo. Their uniforms, bags and helmets are moving brand assets. Any criminal behaviour associated with them, whether directly linked to official riders or opportunistic impersonators, inevitably reflects back on the platform. In the court of public opinion, perception is reality.
Yet, remarkably, Glovo remained silent. No statement. No investigation announcement. No effort to distance the brand from these allegations or to demonstrate concern for the victims. This silence would prove to be a costly miscalculation, setting a pattern of reactive rather than proactive crisis management that would haunt the company when an even bigger scandal erupted.
The Second Storm: Corporate Ewa Agoyin Scandal
If the wig-snatching brouhaha caused a stir, the Corporate Ewa scandal caused a storm. December 29, Adeola Ademola, owner of the Lagos-based food brand “Corporate Ewa Agoyin,” went public, posting a series of videos and statements on social media, detailing her year-long nightmare with Glovo, alleging complicity through inaction when she found out and confronted the company on an alleged impersonation of her business on their platform, and worse, what she described as the systematic poisoning of customers who order for food through the platform. The response was immediate and explosive.
The claims which went straight to the heart of Glovo’s value proposition quickly spread rapidly across social media. In simple terms, the accusation was that customers ordering food from what they believed were known and trusted vendors were receiving meals prepared elsewhere, sometimes in unverified, potentially unsafe conditions, and complaints had allegedly been ignored until the issue went public.
For any marketplace business, this is existential. The core promise of platforms like Glovo is trust. Customers trust that listed vendors are who they claim to be. Merchants trust that their brand equity will not be diluted or exploited. When that trust is questioned, the entire business model wobbles.
Had Glovo been a publicly traded company with local market exposure, analysts would likely have flagged this as a material risk. Consumer trust is both a reputational asset and a revenue driver. Once customers begin to doubt authenticity and safety, usage declines are almost inevitable. The case also revealed that Corporate Ewa was far from alone. Social media was soon flooded with reports from other vendors and customers who had experienced similar issues.
A Statement Too Little, Too Late
Under mounting public pressure, Glovo Nigeria finally broke its silence. On December 31, 2025, the last day of the year, as if hoping the scandal might disappear with the calendar, the company issued what it called a “holding statement.”
The statement read: “Glovo is aware of a recent social media post about our organisation. Pending a full investigation, we have immediately delisted the vendor from our platform.
“As a company, we have built a technology platform that connects customers with independent, third-party restaurants, merchants and riders. We take issues related to brand misuse, customer trust, and platform integrity very seriously. Our core mission is to provide a marketplace built on trust and authenticity.
“We remain committed to protecting both our users and the hardworking merchants who make our ecosystem thrive.”
On the surface, the statement appeared to hit the key notes of crisis communication: acknowledgment, action, and reassurance. But to communications experts and careful observers, it revealed more by what it left unsaid than by what it included.
The statement contained no signature, no attribution to a specific department or officer. This absence was immediately seized upon by critics as evidence of institutional cowardice or, worse, implicit acknowledgment of systemic culpability that no one wanted to personally own.
More fundamentally, while the statement addressed the immediate controversy, it failed to engage with the deeper concerns that had turned this from a vendor dispute into a crisis of trust. There was no apology to Corporate Ewa for the damage to her business. No explanation of how such extensive impersonation could occur. No acknowledgment that the platform had ignored the vendor’s complaints for months before social media pressure forced action. No comprehensive plan to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Expert Voices Dissect the Response
The inadequacy of Glovo’s response did not go unnoticed by communications and business strategy experts, who quickly took to professional networks to analyze what had gone wrong and what needed to happen next.
Chinwendu Ohakpougwu, a communications expert, provided perhaps the most comprehensive and damning assessment in a LinkedIn post that quickly gained traction. Titled “When a Marketplace Crisis Isn’t About PR—But Platform Trust,” her analysis cut to the heart of the matter.
“Every platform eventually faces a crisis; but not every crisis is actually about the incident,” Chinwendu wrote. She identified what made this crisis particularly dangerous: “What unfolded on social media wasn’t just anger. It was something deeper and more dangerous for any marketplace business: a rupture in perceived platform integrity.”
While acknowledging that Glovo’s holding statement achieved certain risk management objectives like avoiding premature liability, demonstrating swift action, clarifying platform structure, she argued that these legal wins came at the cost of trust-building.
“From a trust-building standpoint, however, it left gaps,” she wrote. “The statement did not directly engage the core anxieties driving public reaction: safety, impersonation, and recurrence risk. In crises involving safety or deception, stakeholders are not only evaluating facts. They are assessing whether the platform understands the human impact; whether controls are sufficient at scale; whether accountability is proactive or reactive. Generic language may reduce legal exposure, but it often increases perceived distance. And distance is costly in trust-based businesses.”
Reacting to the post, Efe Obiomah, another communications expert, noted: “Issuing a holding statement is usually the first step in crisis management; it is not crisis management in its entirety. I like to believe that their PR team/consultants know this and are working on restoring trust.”
Evelyn Temitope Isioye, a Policy Research Consultant and Sustainability Reporting Advisor, offered a more nuanced defense of Glovo’s initial response, arguing that the holding statement achieved important initial objectives.
“While I completely agree with this boiling down to a ‘trust issue,’ their first response appears to be doing exactly what a first step in managing crisis strategically should be…proactively assuring all stakeholders, while being transparent about the existence of the issue and firmly stating their commitment to address it,” Evelyn wrote.
She emphasized the importance of investigation before response: “It clearly stated an ongoing investigation, which is such a critical and often downplayed step in identifying where and how exactly trust was broken, enabling a proper RACI analysis for the needed action to rebuild it. What many describe as ’empathy’ sometimes is unfortunately a premature response to social media sentiments about who has been wronged. For brands, even empathy must be strategic, giving consideration to the true position of a broad range of involved stakeholders.”
This view, however, was challenged by those who believed Glovo had already missed a critical opportunity.
Abayomi Benson, MD/CEO of Culture Communications Limited, saw the crisis not primarily as a challenge but as a missed opportunity for brand elevation. “At a deeper level, I believe Glovo missed a powerful positive PR opportunity,” he argued. “With genuine empathy, they could have reverified and reactivated the merchant, delivered outstanding support, and turned the experience into a story of redemption. That gratitude, amplified through word of mouth, could have elevated the brand to true reverence. Instead, they chose the easier but predictable path.”
Chinwendu’s response to Abayomi’s suggestion revealed the tension between ideal crisis response and practical risk management. “This is an interesting way to look at it, and I agree that moments like this can become brand-defining if handled exceptionally well,” she acknowledged. “That said, redemption narratives require certainty. When allegations touch safety, impersonation, or potential consumer harm, platforms often have to prioritise containment and verification before storytelling. Reinstatement without full clarity could just as easily amplify risk.”
She conceded, however, that “once facts are established, how a platform supports affected merchants, and whether it turns remediation into learning, becomes the true trust signal. That opportunity still exists, but it sits firmly in what Glovo does after the investigation, not in the first response.”
Joshua Chukwu, a Digital Transformation Consultant, elevated the discussion beyond communications strategy to fundamental business architecture. “The line, ‘Whether or not that responsibility is formally assumed, it is publicly assigned,’ is the fundamental truth every platform business in Africa must grapple with,” Joshua wrote. “In high-growth, low-trust environments, the platform is the validator. It’s an implicit part of the business model.”He also argued that Glovo’s crisis wasn’t just a policy failure but reflected a deeper structural problem.
Abigail Olupese, an HR Business Partner and Education Advocate, focused on the failure to address the most important stakeholder: the legitimate business owner. “Just putting out a statement is not enough; people are genuinely concerned about what they eat,” she wrote. “Glovo needs to apologize to the public and the business that was misrepresented because the vendor wrote to them not once, complaining about the misrepresentation but nothing was done until she spoke out to the internet. That action was what triggered customers.”
She emphasized a detail that made Glovo’s inaction particularly inexcusable: “The vendor NEVER listed on Glovo. Imagine!”
Abigail also noted a troubling discrepancy: “The press statement only admits to one vendor whereas there are countless others. This I would interpret as them likely making a shadow act under crisis management.” Her final assessment was damning: “The gravity of this crime of theirs is enough to ground their operations for life in a sane country.”
A Pattern of bigger Problems
The Corporate Ewa scandal and wig-snatching allegations didn’t occur in a vacuum. They are part of the most visible manifestations of longer-standing operational challenges that had been building beneath the surface of Glovo’s growth narrative.
A 2025 sentiment analysis of Nigerian food delivery apps by researcher Anselem Kadiri found that Glovo Nigeria generated 169 negative reviews on Google Play Store, with app experience problems mentioned 51 times, payment issues in 41 reviews, and delivery time complaints appearing in 38 mentions.
Again, the company’s challenges aren’t limited to Nigeria. In June 2025, the European Commission fined Glovo and its parent company Delivery Hero a combined €329 million for antitrust violations. In Morocco, the company settled with competition regulators after allegations of abusing market dominance through exclusivity clauses and predatory pricing.
Perhaps most tellingly, Glovo had exited Ghana in May 2024, citing a “reassessment of investment priorities.” Industry observers noted that this euphemism likely masked profitability challenges and operational difficulties, the same issues that appeared to be driving corner-cutting and inadequate oversight in Nigeria.
From the pattern above, it appears that Glovo’s rapid expansion strategy, entering 23 markets and 1,800 cities since its 2015 founding, had outpaced its ability to maintain consistent quality control and platform integrity. The promise of connecting customers to verified, quality merchants was being undermined by verification processes that appeared perfunctory at best and dangerously lax at worst.
What Glovo Must Do Now
Taking from much of what Chinwendu had outlined in her post on LinkedIn and aggregating some of the comments on her posts, the path forward requires more than statements and investigations. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how trust is designed into platform architecture.
First, the company must complete its investigation swiftly and communicate findings transparently. This means not just addressing the Corporate Ewa case but revealing the scope of the impersonation problem across the platform. How many fake listings existed? For how long? How much revenue did they generate? Only by acknowledging the full extent of the problem can Glovo begin to rebuild credibility.
Second, Glovo must implement visible, systematic changes to vendor verification. This could include requiring business registration documents, conducting physical location verifications, implementing more robust intellectual property checks, and creating verification badges for confirmed authentic merchants. Customers need to see literally, in the app interface which vendors have been properly vetted.
Third, the company must establish clear, responsive channels for merchant complaints. For months, Corporate Ewa’s formal complaints went effectively unaddressed. This is unacceptable. Glovo needs dedicated teams to handle brand protection issues, with clear escalation paths and defined response timelines.
Fourth, Glovo should consider implementing a merchant protection programme, offering support to small and medium businesses whose brands might be vulnerable to impersonation. This could include monitoring services, legal support for intellectual property protection, and fast-track response when issues are identified.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Glovo must shift its operational philosophy from growth-first to trust-first. This doesn’t mean abandoning growthnbut it means recognizing that sustainable growth in marketplace businesses depends on trust infrastructure that scales with transaction volume. Cutting corners on verification to onboard vendors faster creates technical debt that eventually becomes trust debt. And trust debt, as Glovo is learning, can become unpayable.
‘Ga fili, ga doki’
So, from the headline, ‘ga fili, ga doki’, it is easy to see that crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. For Glovo, this moment of maximum vulnerability is also a moment of maximum potential impact.
If the company responds with genuine actions rather than performative statements, if it builds the trust infrastructure that its market position demands, if it turns this crisis into a case study in how platforms can earn and maintain public confidence, it can emerge stronger than before.
The alternative is a slow erosion of market position as trust-conscious consumers migrate to competitors, as merchants become reluctant to list on a platform associated with impersonation and inadequacy, as regulators take notice of a company that seems unable or unwilling to police its own marketplace.
Glovo built its brand on convenience and speed. But trust operates on a different timeline. It accumulates slowly, through countless successful transactions and positive experiences. And it can evaporate instantly, through a single high-profile failure or a pattern of neglect.
It must depart from the path of cosmetic changes, legal posturing, and the hope that social media storms eventually blow over. This path leads to slow irrelevance as trust-depleted brands discover that in marketplace businesses, trust is the product.
The company must toe the path that requires humility, investment, and fundamental change. It means acknowledging that Glovo’s rapid growth in Nigeria has been built on an unstable foundation, that verification shortcuts and complaint neglect have created systemic vulnerabilities, that the company must earn rather than assume the trust it needs to operate.
This path is harder, more expensive, and less immediately gratifying. But it’s the only path to sustainable success in a market where customers have choices and expectations have been raised by Glovo’s own promises.
‘Ga fili, ga doki.’ Here is the field, a crisis of trust, a rupture in platform integrity, a defining moment for brand survival. Here is the horse, a company with resources, technology, and market position.
The question now is whether Glovo has the courage to ride.