I have been wondering why most communities of Nigerians that have any financial goals or crowdfunding element always end up with someone stealing money?

This started from my departmental association in school as far back as in the 80s. The President embezzled and was sacked. My estate association in Lagos had the same problem and the man ran away. Someone with a house that he owns in the estate escaped to Canada to avoid paying the money he stole. I have observed this in so many forms. Someone has to try to become too smart in the group.

How many African freelancers do we have in tech? Is there any real way to figure out the size of the African freelancer market?Most people I know trying to build products for them seem to be discovering that the market is not as large as we imagine. Plus many get jobs and churn. There is a theory that most freelancers don’t survive doing freelancing long enough as most do not have experience and provide a lot of substandard services or products. This was very true in the early days but now, they are part of properly structured online teams quite early.

People avoid asking me to come to panels in Ghana because I always say what they don't want to hear but they know that it is true. People want me to talk in Nigeria because they know I will say the truth and they will only pretend to listen and do nothing different. There is a cultural difference of denial in both countries that doesn't help either country. We all know that things are fucked up in Ghana but we pretend it is all good as things will somehow be great in the future. Indefinite optimism.

Apathy is contagious. You can easily catch it from friends and relatives, but neighbors and colleagues at work are the biggest spreaders of apathy. This is why the greatest factor determining your success in life is where you live. Sometimes, that is all it takes. Influence. Many people do not have the willpower to be different. Very few have the willpower to lead others to change, even when they are different. This is why people seek tribes and gravitate toward others who share similar standards or are more tolerant of their habits.

Why do we all want to live longer?
It is because as humans we are iteration machines. We always want to do what we have done before even better. Improvement is at the core of our existence. Even when we can’t do it ourselves, we learn to use others to help us achieve progress. All of evolution is about iteration and improvement. One secret that we don’t immediately realize about ourselves is that we innately want to be better for, or do better things for others. Even on his deathbed, Steve Jobs was still churning out ideas to make our lives better.

I read Paul Grahams recent long essay on “Wokeness” halfway and was overloaded. I kept thinking cultural and identity wars come from too much boredom and focus on things that don’t matter until I was held at Millbrae for 4 hours on suspicion of laptop theft at a Starbucks. That experience changed me as I became more empathetic to the cause of those fighting racism and bigotry. There are real life daily effects and some of it deadly. 200 meters from were I was held that day, a friend’s brother was killed by the same police some months later.

Many people glamorize tech jobs, but they are one of the highest-risk spaces with very limited professional longevity and upside. A doctor can still treat patients at 90, and lawyers or accountants hired at 80, but very few people will employ a 40-year-old coder. Apart from being much more expensive, they can't put in the number of hours the younger and less expensive coder without a life will put into the job. This is why you see so many people becoming successful founders in their 40s working for themselves—another very risky move.

After the UBA takeover in the '90s, I asked my uncle how they planned to respond to GTBank, which was growing very rapidly and dominating the middle market at the time. He said they would create many regional GTBanks inside UBA instead of going head-to-head. They did just that. The regional directors were the MDs of their region, and they adapted to the needs of each region's market. This allowed them to grow tremendously until internal crises changed everything. I was thinking of that strategy when looking at GTbank and others that have now become old.

No "publicly known" habit of the billionaire that you copy will ever make you a billionaire. If it worked, we would have had far more billionaires.

The things that make most people rich are the things you should fear the most about them. They rarely share those things. This tweet came about because of a recent interaction that sparked a memory. Many rich people use other people and throw them under the bus. At a certain level of wealth, this becomes an unconscious habit, yet it still attracts sycophants who rationalize actions of the wealthy.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” - Henry David Thoreau

I remembered this quote while I was in Lagos. It was evident all around. Both the rich and the poor in Lagos are desperate, and I finally discovered why. Limited options and constraints lead to desperation. Nigeria is full of constraints. Many people make excuses for and rationalize those constraints, but they are still constraints. Imagine going to a bank and not being sure that you will get the money that you want. Imagine not being sure if you will be arrested for nothing.

In my software testing days, I met a company that wanted me to recruit educated Africans as testers and they wanted to pay $200 a month. The Naira and Cedi weren’t so devalued at the time and it was ridiculous. I told the guys that nobody would accept that. They argued that Indians took even less and I should find people who would accept the amount. It was stupid because I was expected to make some profit on the $200 as well. It came to roughly $10 a day. I passed on the contract and decided to find testing deals by myself.

When I see pitches from people who don't know me and are just trying their luck, I feel a pang of sadness, but I do what I have to do and tell them the truth. Try to make good friends, and those friends will be the people who help you to move forward. Strangers rarely help. Don't make friends with people when you need help. Don't reach out to people only when you need help. Some of the people I do business with today have been my friends for decades. I met them at school or through other friends. That is how trust is strengthened.

20 years after university, I found a classmate working as a security guard in a bank. I took his number, and we discussed what happened to him. He had traveled to Germany for work, and all the money he was sending home was squandered by a relative until he got deported. I also met a classmate from primary school who was my barber in Ikeja at Class Night Club those days. He was in tears as he was cutting my hair. We discussed the past and the future.

Both guys found their feet and are now doing much better than they were at the lowest point.

Finance is about ecosystems.

I learned so much from my uncle by just watching how he used leverage to build wealth. The first and most important thing is a personal balance sheet. Know the value of your assets before you take on liabilities. That valuation came from insurance. All his assets were insured and had value placed on them. It made it easy for him to use them as collateral to get leverage for other assets, which were again insured. His father-in-law was one of the biggest insurance brokers in Nigeria at the time, so he used them a lot.

There is old money, new money, and wannabe rich money.

I was traveling on Emirates to Uganda once, and they upgraded me to First from Economy. As I was going from Economy to Business and First, I was looking at the differences in how people dressed and carried themselves. A lot of the guys in Economy Class were traders. Some had money but didn't spend it lavishly on a short flight between Dubai and Entebbe. They were mostly dressed informally and were respectful. Business Class was full of people dressed up and uppity. Most likely company people.

Jay's (not his real name) father was a well known religious figure. The family is wealthy and he married into another wealthy family. His wife was gorgeous and accomplished but he had one weakness. He slept with maids and househelps in our estate. I was shocked when I found out. It was a perversion and he was a sex predator but he didn't see it that way. He genuinely felt that it was some form of benevolence. He would argue with the bible and show how Abraham and others were truly polygamous and I later discovered that his father had secret families.

I have been laughing at the clowns trying to humiliate someone for buying a house on mortgage because they are ignorant AF!!

A small story, when my best man got to the UK, he needed a car and he decided to buy a Mercedes for £8k cash and was proud of himself. He later regretted Why? He told his Indian colleague and the guy was quiet for a while and decided to help him do some Math. That money could have been down payment (or part of it) for a mortgage of a house that he could have rented out to pay the mortgage of the same house and a car loan.

Racism sadly works in America and that is why Homelander is using it on his last stretch. Going full racist will divide the country and it helps him.

A lot of people are quietly racist and he is sending them a signal to vote or act with extreme prejudice. The fires have started Going full Proud Boys is not a mistake, it is very deliberate. He uses everyone including the racists.

After my son was born, we went visiting my wife's cousin in Atlanta but I had a meeting back in North Carolina and I drove back alone. A trucker I overtook stalked me.

Someone I know reached out to me for help but didn't specify what he needed help with and wanted to call me first. I had already concluded that he would ask me for money and formed my response in my mind. He called, and it wasn't money. He had to make a health-related decision. I felt very bad about my initial assumptions, and I would have given all I had now to help him overcome his problems. I have been calling him daily to follow up, and he keeps thanking me and telling me it is okay. He has enough money to solve the issue. He only needed advice.

"Nigeria's biggest trick is convincing you that nothing is happening. Meanwhile everything is happening." - @YarKafanchan as revealed by @DavidHundeyin.

I have been thinking about that profound statement for hours and realizing how true it is. Many people in Nigeria are for sale It is when they reveal their true colors after negotiations and being settled that people are surprised. No Nigerian surprises me anymore. The evils people are capable of because of money and power are beyond imagination. Plus many are trapped because of their ambition.

The first form of formalized apprenticeship training I had seen in Nigeria was with my classmates who were engineering students mandated to do industrial training and provide reports afterward as part of SIWES. Even in the 80s, they struggled to find suitable placements. Unsurprisingly, 100% of my engineering classmates at that time ended up in banking and other professions like information technology. I remember one of them, an engineer at Xerox, coming to meet us at school once during our MBA and just returning to resign. This was early 90s