Every week, Naijaonpoint seeks to understand how people move the Naira in and out of their lives. Some stories will be struggle-ish, others will be bougie. All the time, it’ll be revealing.
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When I was 8 years old, a teacher in my primary school taught my class how to make greeting cards, and I made three Easter cards and “sold” them to our neighbours. They weren’t exactly valuable and had no fixed price; I just went up to my neighbours and said, “Oh, I made this. Do you want to buy?”
My neighbours were mostly amused. Like, what does this child want to do with money? They eventually gave me whatever they had. One person gave me a big bowl of ice cream, another ₦1,000, and the third ₦200.
I took the cash straight to a store and bought a big BMW toy car that my dad had refused to buy me. He only bought us gifts when we achieved specific academic goals, so that money came at the right time.
We were comfortable. My dad was a computer engineer who worked for an oil company. He also ran a chain of cybercafés and business centres. My mum was a stay-at-home wife until I was about 10, when my dad brought her in to manage the cybercafés because his employees were ripping him off.
My siblings and I attended great schools, and my family took vacations to different states across the country once a year. My favourite was attending the Calabar Carnivals. I really enjoyed those.
Secondary school. I just liked doing cool, creative stuff and ended up making some money from it.
First, I made replica board games. We weren’t allowed to bring board games to school (I attended a boarding school), so I drew a Monopoly board on cardboard, cut out replica currency notes from paper, and made dice out of a Cabin biscuits box. I charged people ₦50 per game during evening prep. It wasn’t a very scalable business, since only a few people could play at once. Also, when other students saw what I was doing, they copied the idea and started making their own.
By the time I got into SS 1, I switched to writing short stories and comic books, charging classmates to read them. I even started a handwritten classroom “newspaper” and tried to convince people to pay for ad space. That didn’t do well either. The only real money I made in secondary school was in SS 3.
I wanted to make money to buy a phone that I could bring to school. Of course, my parents would never buy one for me since it was illegal to bring a phone to school. So, I had to take matters into my own hands.
I had a school guardian whom my parents gave my pocket money to. He would give me ₦200/day. Besides the pocket money, I had provisions, so I reasoned I could survive entirely on them and save the daily ₦200 cash.
By the end of the term, I had saved up about ₦8k. My younger sister supported me with an extra ₦2k, and I used the entire sum to buy three cartons of custard cream biscuits during the holiday.
Other students sold biscuits too, but they started mid-term when everyone’s resources were running low. I targeted the very first day of resumption when students had fresh pocket money and were eager to spend it. I sold out instantly, made about ₦18k and bought my phone.
The ₦18k included both capital and profit, but I didn’t mind spending it all since I didn’t plan to do the business again. The phone was my goal.
After I graduated in 2019, my dad introduced me to website building using WordPress. He would regularly give me a bunch of WordPress tutorial videos, and I learned quickly. I actually enjoyed it because I loved seeing something tangible come to life from my work.
By then, my dad had left paid employment to focus on building his own company. Soon, he started handing me real client projects. I built about four websites for his clients. I’m sure the clients paid good money, but my dad took everything. It was basically unpaid labour. I couldn’t ask about payment because he’d say, “Well, who pays your school fees? Who buys your shoes and clothes?” So I kept my mouth shut and took it as a learning opportunity.
Later that year, I was admitted to the university to study electrical engineering.
My uni wasn’t far from our house, so I commuted to school every day. I had barely completed my first semester when COVID-19 hit, and the world went into lockdown.
For the first two months, I stayed at home playing video games. But I got bored out of my mind and started googling “how to make money online.” I tried everything. I created a YouTube channel and was posting music lyric videos, but that went nowhere. Then I designed T-shirts on a platform called Teespring, so people could order, and I’d only print on demand. That also didn’t go anywhere.
Frustrated, I decided to take web development seriously. I spent the rest of the lockdown teaching myself how to code.
By the time my school reopened in 2021, I was already really good at coding and no longer cared about university. I completed my first semester and went, “Yeah, I’m not doing this again.” So, I just stopped going.
I didn’t tell them. I’d just get dressed each day and pretend to leave for campus. Then I’d hang out somewhere until I was certain everyone had left the house for work before sneaking back inside to code all day.
I also opened an Upwork account. But I was underage at 17 and couldn’t legally verify my account. I had to use my dad’s ID card, convincing him it was just for a project.
Eventually, I landed my first client on Upwork. It was a brutal, high-volume project for $500, which was roughly ₦400k. It was horrible work, but it was proof that coding could actually pay my bills. I used the money to upgrade my laptop and kept applying for more gigs.
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Not at all. For months, it was just that single $500 gig. My income dropped back to zero, and then my parents found out I hadn’t been going to school.
My dad was furious. He dragged me to the university campus, demanding my first-semester results. I hadn’t even bothered to check them because I knew I wasn’t going back. So, I went online, found the official admission list for my department, copied everyone’s names into a spreadsheet, and fabricated a full results page. I gave everyone random grades, but gave myself three A’s, four B’s, and a C. I slapped the university logo on top and showed it to them.
I told them, “See? It’s not like I’m failing. I just genuinely don’t want to go anymore.” They didn’t buy it. They cried, saying I was throwing my life away. My dad actually hit me. They insisted I must go back, arguing that a degree guarantees job security.
I didn’t. I genuinely hated school. They were teaching us completely useless things. Around that time, I was reading biographies of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. In my head, dropping out felt like the mandatory first step to achieving their levels of success.
I didn’t even mind that the Upwork gigs seemed to have dried up. It never occurred to me to think, “What if I never get another gig?” I just had this absolute, unwavering conviction that things would only go upward.
To keep the peace at home, I changed tactics. I would go to school daily, sit in an empty classroom, and spend the entire day applying for gigs. The breakthrough finally came in late 2022.
I landed a contract to build a website for a law firm. It paid $40/hour. I maxed out the 40-hour weekly limit, which brought in around $1,600 a week. Even after Upwork took its 10% commission, it was life-changing money. In two months, I made $10,000.
I framed the gig as a full-time corporate job to my parents, which put them at ease and helped them accept my decision to drop out. I think their biggest fear was that I’d end up jobless and wandering the streets. Once they saw a path to financial stability, they backed off completely. Today, they are very chill about it.
That law firm project also earned me a Top Rated badge on Upwork, which completely unlocked the algorithm for me. Immediately after it ended, I landed another long-term client in March 2023. That single gig lasted until December 2023, and I made $48,000 from it that year.
I was still living with my parents, so my expenses were virtually non-existent; just data and occasional eating out. I saved almost 90% of everything I earned.
With a steady weekly income of $1,600, I started setting up my life for adulthood. I upgraded my laptop, bought an extra monitor, set up a solar inverter system, and bought a dog.
In November 2023, I decided it was time to move out. My parents are incredibly religious, and I’m not. The constant friction of being forced to go to church and being told what to do wasn’t working for me. I decided the best way to solve it was to just not live with them.
One afternoon, I hopped on a property website, found a serviced, fully furnished one-bedroom apartment with 24/7 guaranteed electricity, paid the ₦4.7 million annual rent the next day, and moved in 24 hours later with my clothes, laptop, monitor, and dog.
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