Adaeze Okonkwo stood at the edge of the observation deck, arms folded, eyes fixed on the feed streaming from the Akure uplink array. The orbital platform’s skeletal frame drifted in perfect silence against the curve of the Earth, golden solar vanes catching the sun like unfolding wings. The image was still. Clean. Controlled. Just the way she liked it.   It wasn’t much—not yet. But it was ours.   For too long, her country had exported brilliance and bought back dependency. Data centers powered by Nigerian minerals ran social networks that would never list Lagos as a tech capital. Launch vehicles rose from equatorial pads paid for by foreign contracts. But those days were ending. Quietly, deliberately, and on her watch.   The LEO Infrastructure Sovereignty Initiative — LISI, as the bureaucrats had started calling it — was no longer theory. It was orbital steel and realignment thrusters, ground-side contracts and open-source guidance systems written by students from Zaria and Accra. The drydock would be operational within eighteen months. The satellite mesh before year’s end. And the first orbital freight platform, if they kept the timelines tight, might beat the next Chinese modular relay to L4.   She had heard the laughter, of course. The smirking editorials. The questions about infrastructure back home — as if ambition and electricity couldn’t coexist. But it didn’t matter. She hadn’t studied aerospace engineering at MIT just to draft budgets for weather balloons. She hadn’t come back to Nigeria to wait for someone else’s invitation.   Other nations were rushing to stake flags. Nigeria was staking presence.   And while diplomats bickered over orbital accords that had been outdated before they were signed, her teams were quietly rewriting the rulebook — in code, contracts, and carbon alloys.   Let the old powers try to regulate from below. Nigeria had already arrived above.