The Day I Almost Sold My Kidney for a Keke Napep Business

The Day I Almost Sold My Kidney for a Keke Napep Business in Ibadan

The email came on a Tuesday morning, while I was frying akara for breakfast in my one-room self-contained off Ring Road, Ibadan, and I remember it so clearly because the oil had just started popping when my phone buzzed with a subject line that read: URGENT: You Have Been Selected For Diaspora Grant Empowerment Scheme 2026.

My name is Deji, and at the time I was twenty-six years old, unemployed for eight months, and owing my landlord two months rent that he reminded me about every single morning like it was his personal alarm clock.

The email said a foundation based in Toronto was giving out grants of one point two million naira to young Nigerians who wanted to start small businesses, no strings attached, first come first serve. I should have closed it immediately.

Instead I opened it with hot oil still sizzling behind me, akara threatening to burn, because when you are that broke, hope arrives disguised as anything, even bad grammar in a scam email.

The email had typos everywhere. It said “Congratulation” instead of “Congratulations.” It asked me to confirm my “Bank Verification Nunber.” Any sensible person would have deleted it.

But my neighbour Kazeem, who fixed generators for a living and somehow always knew everybody’s business, had told me two weeks earlier that his cousin in Lagos got real money from something similar, so when I saw him outside washing his oga’s Toyota Hilux, I ran out with my phone still in my hand, akara forgotten, smoke starting to curl out of my kitchen window.

Kazeem, come see this thing, I said, breathless, shoving my phone in his face.

He wiped his hands on his trouser and squinted at the screen like a lawyer reading a contract. This one resemble the one wey my cousin get o, he said. But make you no send your BVN like that. Ask them make dem send small money first, to prove say na real thing.

That was Ibadan logic for you, the street version of due diligence. Not don’t trust it, just make them prove it small small first. So I replied the email, heart hammering, and within an hour I got a response from someone calling himself Pastor Michael Osareme, who said the foundation partners with a keke napep leasing company in Ibadan and that as part of “verification,”

I needed to pay a refundable processing fee of forty five thousand naira to confirm I was serious about starting a transport business.

Forty five thousand naira. I did not have forty five thousand naira. I had eleven thousand naira and a phone that was already cracking at the corner. But my mind, that terrible, hopeful, foolish mind, started doing arithmetic.

If I paid the forty five thousand and got one point two million back, that was nothing. That was seed for harvest. I thought about selling my phone.

I thought about borrowing from my elder sister Bukola in Lagos, who would ask a thousand questions I didn’t have patience to answer. And then, God forgive me, I thought about the kidney adverts I kept seeing shared in WhatsApp groups, the ones that said healthy young men in India or Egypt were getting paid millions for one kidney, since a person could survive comfortably on one.

I actually typed “how much is a kidney worth in Nigeria” into Google. I want you to sit with that for a second.

A grown man, standing in his kitchen with burnt akara stinking up the whole compound, seriously googling the black market value of his own organs because of an email with bad grammar.

It was my mother’s voice that saved me, not literally, she wasn’t even in Ibadan, she was in Osogbo, but her voice in my head, the one that always said nobody wey sabi road go show you shortcut wey go kill you.

I paused. I looked at the email again. I looked at “Pastor Michael Osareme” and his official looking letterhead that had a Canadian flag stretched sideways like it had been resized in a hurry by somebody who had never opened Photoshop properly in his life.

I called Kazeem back, this time not with excitement but with the cracked phone shaking in my hand.

Oga don ask me for forty five thousand, I told him. I dey think say make I sell my kidney small small to raise the money.

Kazeem looked at me the way you look at a person who has just told you they want to jump into the Ogunpa river during flood season.

Deji, abeg no be say I wan insult you, he said, but which kidney? You wan die because of one point two million wey una never see? If na real thing, dem no go ask you for money first. Na dem suppose pay you.

Something about hearing it said out loud, plainly, without the fog of desperation clouding it, broke the spell. I went back inside, put out the smoking pan, and actually smelled the burnt akara for the first time, sharp and bitter, filling the whole room.

I sat on my bed and read the email one more time, slower this time, and saw what I had refused to see before: the sender’s address wasn’t even a Canadian domain, it was a free Gmail account with numbers at the end, like 2547, like a phone number pretending to be a person.

I didn’t reply. I blocked the address. I sat there for a long time just breathing, thinking about how close I had come to typing my BVN into a stranger’s form because I was tired of being poor and tired of my landlord’s morning greetings that were really morning threats.

Three weeks later I got a real job, nothing glamorous, sales associate at a phone accessories shop on Bodija road, thirty five thousand naira a month, not one point two million, nothing close.

But it was mine, earned by standing on my feet nine hours a day convincing people that the phone case I was selling wouldn’t crack on first drop. I paid my landlord half of what I owed and promised the rest by month end. He didn’t smile, but he stopped reminding me every morning, which in landlord language means progress.

I still think about that email sometimes, about how close broke people are, every single day, to doing something irreversible because someone dangled hope with bad spelling and a fake Canadian flag.

I think about how it wasn’t intelligence that saved me in the end, since I’m not smarter than anybody, it was one neighbour who fixed generators for a living and had the sense to say the truth plainly when I was too desperate to see it myself.

Some people call it village people, some people call it scam awareness, I just call it grace wearing blue coveralls and holding a spanner. Either way, I still have both my kidneys, and honestly, in this economy, that already feels like winning.