Author’s Note for “Daily Money”

My beloved country, Nigeria, has many names. These days, a lot of those names are positive. So many aspects of our culture have made it to the global stage to great admiration, and much of our people’s awesomeness is being discovered and extolled from all corners of the globe. But it wasn’t always so, as a few of the names synonymous with Nigeria only a short while back were as negative as they were shameful. Like being thought an internet fraudster the moment you produced your green passport as a young Nigerian, due to the fact that local yahoo yahoo fraudsters from Nigeria made international news too many a time, doing the country’s PR great damage. This is despite countries like Russia, Ukraine, China, and the USA coming in ahead of Nigeria in the World Cybercrime Index developed jointly by the University of Oxford and UNSW Canberra in 2024.

As someone who has lived through the many phases of internet fraud among young people in Nigeria, I’m well aware that there’s much more to my country than this little percentage. I’m also aware that though the scourge still exists, the formulas that made money for yahoo boys (as they’re called) in the past hardly make any money now, due to many stop-gap measures implemented by relevant authorities and money transfer platforms.

But while yahoo yahoo money may be drying up, the get-rich-quick mentality associated with it is on an opposite trajectory, especially with social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat providing many with an avenue to flaunt their wealth and opulence—whether ill-gotten or otherwise, no one really cares. The currently incarcerated internet sensation and international poster boy for yahoo yahoo, Hushpuppi, might come to mind here. This is why a lot of yahoo boys these days now turn to what is termed yahoo plus—codename for money rituals with voodoo and juju practices. For many, it doesn’t matter what’s the price, the goal is to get rich and show off the goodies on the internet, by whatever means necessary.

This is the premise that gave birth to “Daily Money,” a short story that is inspired by true events, when a cousin visited a car wash and experienced an exchange between the wash’s owner and a frail-looking young man who had come to plead that whoever took money from his car when he came for a wash the week before should please produce it. The young man explained that his money was a product of yahoo plus and it came with the condition that he must spend every kobo of whatever amount he gets daily before the turn of midnight, regardless of how much it was.

While we likely would never know how that particular episode ended, it inspired thoughts and planted the idea for “Daily Money.” Told from the perspective of a car-wash attendant who took such ill-fated money and deposited some of it in the bank, unaware of the conditions and possible consequences of such an action. In this fictional tale, the characters affected must get back the money if they are to stop further calamity from befalling them as their lives were already in shambles since the first day the sun went down on the money one of them took, unspent in his bank’s vault.