Ngozi Chukwu’s earliest childhood memory is of writing a song on her balcony. She was in her first year of secondary school, maybe 11 or 12 years old. She had moved to a new secondary school and was having a terrible time. So she went home and wrote. The song had a Hannah Montana beat. It is still in her head.
Years later, she would win multiple writing prizes at a petroleum company’s summer camp. But she never imagined that media was something she would do.
“It seemed to me a thing that was natural to me, to be able to write things, poems, compositions, essays,” she says. “So I thought that the harder thing was science, engineering.”
She studied electronic engineering at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, one of Nigeria’s premier federal universities.
When engineering killed the joy
Chukwu had started university excited. Then came her first laboratory class, and it was terrible for her.
“It was obvious to me that this lab was not for 2013,” she says. “There was no space for us to breathe. I can’t explain to you how deeply my heart sank. I gave up on school.”
That is where she says she lost her spirit. Not the joy of learning—the joy of classes, of school, of the structure she thought would guide her. She started spending time at the art faculty instead and became interested in social impact. She volunteered as a grant writer for a non-governmental organisation (NGO).
She participated in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), a mandatory one-year program for Nigerian university graduates, as a teacher in Ilorin, the capital city of Kwara State in the North Central region, teaching English, geography, and history. It felt meaningful to her.
When she returned to Lagos after her service year in 2020, she wanted to continue to teach. She got a job at a private school with ten kids in her class. But she realised quickly that she did not know how to do the job well.
“I felt like the kids were smart, they were learning things faster, and they were already good,” Chukwu says. “ The teachers had to do extra. I felt like I wasn’t doing enough extra. So I had to try to sit down and learn how to teach and come back, or just find something else to do.”
Around that time, NFTs and Web3 started trending, and she got curious. After research, she thought blockchain could change the world. She started unpaid writing for projects that would later pause for different reasons. But it made her interested in reporting about tech.
Then she saw an opening at TechCabal, a media publication reporting on Africa’s tech ecosystem. With no previous experience in journalism, Chukwu was reluctant to apply, but the publication’s reputation convinced her.
“I hadn’t done many interviews then; quite frankly, I hate interviews,” she says. “Being in a formal setting to be assessed causes my brain to freeze.”
She said she had gotten the job by being honest, maybe too honest. In her interview, when she was asked what the best thing she had written was, she said, “A joke.” She explained that one of her biggest ambitions was to be a funny person, to make people laugh.
“It felt like the most obvious thing to say when I was asked,” Chukwu recalls. “ I talked about the blockchain projects I had written for obvious reasons, but I tried to let my personality shine through in the blogs and poems I mentioned. I was nervous about it, but they said they were good. I guess they were, because I got the job.”
The painting and the panic
On Chukwu’s first day at TechCabal as a junior newsletter writer, she was sweating because she had jumped buses. She wore tiny braids to look professional. She was nervous.
On that first day, she was sitting in one of the offices with other employees and was trying not to panic. Then she looked to her right and saw a painting by Shutabug, a digital artist. A big parachute carrying a danfo, the yellow buses that served as public transportation, plying the roads of Lagos.
“I can’t explain to you how that made me feel,” she says. She has written about that painting seven times since. “There’s a function to these things,” she says. “Art does something in the moment, even aesthetically.”
In her first three weeks, she said she cried a lot and fell sick. She did not understand newsletters or how to rehash news. Her friends asked if she was sure she could do it.
“I don’t believe in myself,” she recalled telling them. “I’m quitting.” But she did not quit. “I’m not a quitter,” she clarifies. “I’m a complainer. But I’m not a quitter.”
She had a good manager, Timi Odueso, whom she calls the best manager ever. He taught her how to make rehashing news interesting. The more she wrote, the more interested she became in what was happening in the world. She started to understand the function of the work. People needed stories. People used stories. It felt good to be necessary.
What she learned about breaking news
Over time, Chukwu discovered what kind of stories she liked. Business and product stories. Breaking news. She covered Chowdeck as a product, the ecosystem’s network with the Paystack Mafia, and an analysis on the impact of failed startups on the ecosystem. She loved being the first to report something.
“I loved covering those because people’s idea of what fintech is in Africa is very different,” she says.
But she also learned something frustrating: to get the best of these stories, you need sources inside companies. And Chukwu insists that in Africa, this is slightly more difficult.
“People don’t really care about their jobs that much,” she says as an observation. “And I think maybe that’s the thing that’s different about our ecosystem versus Silicon Valley. People there love to defend their work. People are passionate. In Nigeria, I feel most of our inventions are still out of necessity, not for invention. It’s like, let’s make this thing cheaper and faster. More affordable, seamless.”
“In Silicon Valley,” she argues, “people have moved past basic needs. Their work comes from a place of passion, invention, and the desire to create something new.”
Chukwu argues that the African tech ecosystem and the publications covering it are younger. This means that companies are more guarded. Sources are harder to cultivate.
Silicon Valley is a contrast with established media infrastructure—decades-old trade publications, reporters with deep source networks, companies that understand press coverage as part of the game.
“It’s rare that a mid-level employee knows these things about products deeply enough, about expansion details, to talk to someone else about it,” she says. “The people who know are higher up and don’t have any interest in telling a reporter anything. And it’s possible to get those people in your corner, but that would take a long time.”
By that point, she said she had started to develop what felt like a reputation. A person who was looking for bad things about companies. She wondered if it was even worth her time to try.
Function over form
Chukwu has a principle she lives by: function over form. She is not sure where she picked up the phrase, but it has stuck with her.
She does not have giant ambitions. People do not think this about her because she is dramatic, but it is true. She does not believe in legacy.
“If the world actually ends, legacy ends too,” she says. “So if it doesn’t end, what’s the point of your legacy? Legacy will disappear.”
What she cares about is being functional. Necessary. Doing work that means something in the moment, not work that will be remembered forever.
At TechCabal, the work felt functional. “People need stories. People use stories. It felt good to be necessary. To be functional,” she says. She quotes something she read somewhere, “It feels good to be in a very beloved industry.”
But then things shifted; her mom died in 2024. She had to start thinking about life differently, economically. She realised she would need to either get promoted to a very senior role quickly or find a new job.
She was also getting tired. The source problem was exhausting. She was thinking about how much better her stories could be if she had better access to information.
“Maybe I was making up excuses. Maybe I was just bored. I’m still not sure,” Chukwu says.
Initially, she was not searching hard for something new; she hadn’t fully committed to the job search.
“But I interviewed someone who was running a blockchain research lab,” she says. “And he seemed really smart. We got talking, and I loved his ideas. As a joke, I told him if he had an opening somewhere, I was available. And then he reached out.”
Chukwu left TechCabal for Polytope Labs in 2025. Polytope Labs is a blockchain research lab working on blockchain interoperability, in her words, ‘making different blockchains talk to each other.’ It was a good mix for her. Blockchain plus writing. Something new to learn. Something that felt, at the time, functional.
The lazy person’s guide to meaning
Chukwu calls herself lazy. Not in the sense that she does not work. In the sense that she finds the most efficient way to do things.
“I saw a post on LinkedIn where a CEO said, ‘I’d like to hire lazy people because they figure out how to get things done faster,’” she says. She likes that framing. Lazy as efficient. Lazy as smart.
Her career path has not been a straight line. Engineering to teaching to journalism to blockchain marketing. But there is a thread: she follows what feels meaningful.
She is in the process of recording a podcast to be launched in May 2026, Articulated, about visual artists: painters, sculptors, not musicians. She thinks they do not get as much attention as they deserve. She has three unfinished art pieces sitting somewhere, collections she started years ago and never finished.
She is, in her own words, “just a girl trying to find her place.”
But she has found something that works for her. Not a grand vision, a principle: function over form. Do what feels necessary. Do what means something. Do not waste time chasing legacy, status, or permanence.
When she thinks about her identity, she thinks about occupation. “I like being busy,” she says. “I think it makes more sense to think about it as an occupation than as work. I’m occupying myself.”
Right now, she is learning marketing at Polytope Labs. She is figuring out what other interests she has, what else she wants to learn. She tried coding once. It did not work. She is trying to be curious. She is trying to be a good human being.
“I’m just trying to do my best,” she says.
That is her whole philosophy. Be functional. Be necessary. Try your best. Do not worry about legacy. When the work stops feeling meaningful, find something that does.
It is a simple framework. It is also deeply honest. And for Chukwu, who wrote Hannah Montana songs on her balcony as a kid and now works on blockchain interoperability, it has been enough.
