An Ope’s Diary entry
sharp-sharp /ʃap-ʃap/ ADVERB |Slang| (NigEn)
immediately, without delay, no waiting: Abeg, send the money sharp-sharp
I saw a video last week, and I have not recovered.
It is a skit. You have probably seen it: one man, full confidence, no hesitation, arguing that time is not money. His evidence? Nobody has ever gone to price a Benz and been told it costs six days. Nobody has ever priced a Toyota and been asked to bring twelve hours.
I laughed. Then I sat up straight.
Because as a joke, it is a joke. But as an argument, the man is accidentally correct, and I do not think he knows why.
Let me explain, because this one concerns your money.
The 96-year-old is the entire lesson
Later in the same skit, he brings up a 96-year-old man who charges something like ₦473 million to show up somewhere. One appearance. One evening.
His point was: see? Time is not money. Value is money.
My point is: look at that man again.
He is not really being paid for that evening. He is being paid for decades of building a name, a body of work, a face people recognise, and a kind of scarcity nobody else can supply.
The evening is simply where he collects.
So the skit lands on something true and strolls right past it. Time is not money the way a naira is money. You cannot spend it. You cannot price a car in it. Nobody is collecting it at a POS, but time is a multiplier. And a multiplier needs something to multiply.
Your money can do the same thing, and it does not need talent
That is the part I love, honestly.
That old man had to put something down first: the rehearsals, the years nobody clapped, the work that paid nothing at the time. Then time went to work on it.
Your money can behave in a similar way, except it does not ask you to be gifted at anything.
The idea is called compounding: the returns your money earns start earning returns of their own. You have probably heard a version of this called compound interest.
Year one, you will not be impressed. By year three, you will be mildly interested. By year twenty, somebody will ask you what you did, and the honest answer is that you did very little for a very long time.
Let me show you with figures
Two people. Both save ₦20,000 every month. Both stop at 55.
Bestie A starts at 25. Bestie B starts at 35. That is the only difference between them.
For illustration, let’s assume an average 12% annual return, compounded monthly. Real investment returns will vary and are not guaranteed.
- Bestie A puts in ₦7.2 million across thirty years, and ends with roughly ₦69.9 million.
- Bestie B puts in ₦4.8 million across twenty years, and ends with roughly ₦19.8 million.
Please read that again.
Bestie A only contributed ₦2.4 million more. But starting ten years earlier gave every early naira more time to earn returns, and then gave those returns more time to earn returns of their own.
That is what time did.
Same ₦20,000 every month. Same return assumption. One started ten years earlier and ended up about ₦50 million ahead.
The line he said and did not hear
There is one more moment in that skit I cannot stop thinking about. He mentions, almost in passing, that the old man does not even have enough time left to spend that kind of money.
He says it as a flex.
Bestie, that is not a flex.
Money can buy almost anything in this country. It cannot buy back one year you have already spent. That man’s ₦473 million cannot purchase him a single afternoon of being forty again.
So if there is one thing your younger self is holding that your richer future self will never be able to buy back, it is time.
And the kindest thing you can do with it is give your money somewhere useful to sit while the years pass.
So where do you start?
You start. That is genuinely the whole first step, and I am not being cute about it. ₦1,000 is enough to start investing in a mutual fund on Cowrywise, with options across different asset classes and risk levels, all managed by professional fund managers.
Small is fine. Late is expensive.
Never starting is worse.
Then you make it boring. Automate the contribution so the money moves before your hands can reach it. The best savers I know are not the most disciplined people in the room. They are the ones who removed the decision entirely.
Then, if you know yourself, and bestie, I know myself, you make it hard to interrupt. Regular Savings lets you lock your money for anything from three months to two years, and you only touch it at maturity. Protecting money from yourself is not weakness. It is strategy.
And then you leave it alone.
That last part looks like doing nothing. It is not. It is giving what you already started enough time to become something bigger.
One last thing
Not sharp-sharp. Nothing about compounding is sharp-sharp. It does not care how badly you want the money, or how loudly you pray about it. It cares how much time you give it.
So yes, the man was right about one thing.
Nobody will sell you a Benz for six days.
But give your money enough days, enough months, enough years?
One day, it might be the thing that buys the Benz.
Rooting for you, always.
Your money padi, Ope
