Nigerian Teen Won Game Show to Fund His Tech Dream

In 2002, a high school student in Calabar, Nigeria, had a conversation that would change his life. Ugi Augustine, preparing for a future in medicine, met an MTN technician visiting his school and discovered something that fascinated him more than any career his parents had planned: technology.

Four years later, Augustine faced a problem. His parents, civil servants earning about $235 per month combined, expected him to study medicine. Technology, they warned, would only make him a secretary.

Augustine had a different plan. He secretly used $0.80 of airtime from his father's phone to enter Nigeria's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire game show. When his dad's number appeared on screen the following week, Augustine won $156.

His father took $39 as commission for owning the phone. Augustine took his remaining $117 and enrolled in a programming course that cost $1,175, working freelance website projects to pay the difference.

His hunger for learning got him in trouble. At Softnet Institute, Augustine discovered free programming books on Oracle's website and read beyond what the school permitted. The owner punished him by denying his certificate, but Augustine never regretted it. The knowledge became his foundation.

By 2008, Augustine finally won admission to study medicine at the University of Calabar. He had been making roughly $235 per month building websites and working at cybercafes, and something inside him resisted. "I started praying that the admission somehow should be taken away from me," he says.

Weeks later, his name disappeared from the admission list. Augustine saw it as a sign and enrolled at the National Institute of Information Technology instead, earning his first-class degree in 2010.

He spent the next three years in an unpaid internship at a networking company, sleeping in the office during the week. Augustine survived by running a side business helping Nigerians shop on Amazon, eventually making $3,526 that he saved for his education.

In 2012, Augustine moved to London to study at Middlesex University. Today, he runs Nugi Technologies, building software that serves people across Nigeria and beyond.

Why This Inspires

Augustine's story shows what happens when curiosity meets determination. He turned 80 cents of airtime into a tech career by refusing to let limited resources or family pressure define his future. His willingness to work unpaid for three years, sleep in offices, and hustle on the side demonstrates a resilience that carried him from a Calabar high school to founding his own company. Most importantly, he chose learning over credentials when his school denied him a certificate for reading too much.

Twenty years after that first conversation with an MTN technician, Augustine has proven that a single moment of curiosity can spark a lifetime of achievement.