Last week, a viral tweet from Don Jazzy about a cash giveaway of ₦1,000,000 to 100 people (₦10,000 per person) on an app called ‘Abeg’ caught my attention.
At first, I wondered—“What is Abeg?”, “Why is Don Jazzy giving money away on it?” and “Why would anyone give away free money?”.
The economics were incomprehensible.
Admittedly, Nigerians have a perverse relationship with money. Most Nigerians desperately need it, but a small selection of Nigerians keep giving it away, as we recently saw in Oba, Anambra.
Nevertheless, this trend was a little different, and Don Jazzy was not the only one involved.
It didn’t take me long to spot the customer acquisition strategy for Abeg, the current lead sponsor of Big Brother Naija and the social payments app.
Abeg is a recently relaunched app that taps into the social media culture of “giveaways”. Right now, the primary use case of the
