Here’s how to pay your rent as a musician, Mr Eazi’s way. The plan is serious and should be followed in order.
Mr Eazi has been asking followers to stream “Comfort” so he can pay his rent. Landlords across Lagos, London and Dubai are reportedly calm. The plan is serious and should be followed in order.
The Method: In Seven Steps
Step one: lose someone else’s money early. At 19, borrow ₦19 million from your uncle, a doctor, and buy diesel in Apapa for an MTN supply deal. Then let the government remove the fuel subsidy while you hold the stock. Within three months you will have completed, for free, a course that business schools charge for.
Step two: add qualifications until your mother starts praying with specifics. Take an oil and gas job in Port Harcourt paying around $6,000 a month, then quit because the routine bores you. Finish a master’s degree, then sell phones in Computer Village. By his own account, his mother began praying special prayers. Her theory of the problem was never published.
Step three: pitch an accelerator, and run a phone-trading site on the side. Take your platform to an accelerator, like Mr Eazi did with Obiwezy at 440. Then start a site where people buy and swap used phones, like his Phonetrader.ng. Keep the deck. You will need it again.
Step four: spend your first payday on videos. Two London shows paid £12,000. Spend it on two videos, not rent, and enjoy roughly three weeks of silence from your mother.
Step five: turn every change of address into a tracklist. By now this should be eazi. Between Lagos, Kumasi, Port Harcourt, Accra and London, you will have collected enough forwarding addresses that the titles write themselves. Accra to Lagos. Lagos to London. Do not ship a project without a visa stamp in the title.
Step six: marry into the family business. Note the symmetry: the man who lost his uncle’s money in fuel married the daughter of an oil tycoon. The wedding unfolded across Monaco, Dubai and Iceland in 2025. This step is not available in all markets.
Step seven: ask the internet for rent. In 2020, after Temi Otedola’s father gifted her a Ferrari, Eazi asked fans to stream “Oh My Gawd” so he could afford a used one. The rent plea is the sequel, and it asks for less. Franchises call this a reboot.
Step six is the one you can’t copy, and that’s what makes the other’s worth studying.
Remove the marriage and every other step still holds, because each one ends in an asset. The diesel loss became an appetite for business risk, which he has described as the start of his business mindset. The phone platform became the template for an incubator, and he has said emPawa works the way Phone Trader did. The first £12,000 became the videos that opened London. Each change of address became a project that sold. By 2020 he had proposed letting fans buy equity in a song, and he has been reported to have raised a $20 million fund for African artists. “Comfort,” released on 2 October with MOLIY, came out through emPawa Africa, the incubator he founded.
So the rent plea is not a budget line. It is a public bit sitting on top of a structure he owns. It also works for a reason beyond humour: an artist at his level asking for streams gives the listener a role. The stream becomes participation with a joke attached.
That is the pattern worth naming for anyone who has already turned work into position. The ownership stays serious and the performance stays light. The bit gets the click, and the ledger is the business.
