Let’s be honest about the parts nobody puts on the pitch deck: I’ve shipped production releases during NEPA outages, held a client call with a generator humming outside the window, and once lost forty minutes of unsaved work to a power flicker that no amount of “did you save recently” discipline prepared me for.
I still choose Abuja. Every time someone asks if I’m planning to relocate “for the ecosystem,” I have to explain that I think the ecosystem is actually here — just not the one people mean when they say that word.
What building here actually looks like
Nine years of freelance and CTO work took me from Babcock to codebases in Miami and Alabama, remote, invisible, building other people’s American dreams from a Nigerian desk. Coming back to build Hustlrs and Nadiron Technologies from Abuja wasn’t nostalgia. It was noticing that the problems worth solving — a task-auction economy that actually understands how Nigerians hustle, payment rails that work when the “reliable” ones don’t — are problems you can only solve well from inside them.
The unglamorous infrastructure tax
Backup power, backup internet, a mental model for “what happens when the primary goes down” baked into how I architect everything, not as an afterthought. It sounds like a disadvantage. It’s actually made me a better engineer — resilience isn’t theoretical to me, it’s Tuesday.
The part that’s genuinely fun
There’s a specific energy to building in a city where half the tech community still remembers when “startup” was a foreign word, and now there are WhatsApp groups trading investor intros and generator recommendations in the same breath. It’s scrappy. It’s occasionally chaotic. It is, without question, more interesting than a coworking space in Palo Alto.
Abuja isn’t waiting for permission to matter. Neither am I.