Ugi Augustine’s 20-year tech journey started with a secondary school conversation

In 2002, Ugi Augustine, then a laboratory prefect at the West African Peoples Institute in Calabar, Cross River State, Southern Nigeria, stood beside a visiting MTN technician. The telecoms employee had come to the school for computer laboratory maintenance. But for Augustine, that encounter was his first brush with technology. 

“I got inquisitive, asking questions about the internet and how to build the systems,” he recalls. “ We didn’t have any training on systems or technology, but that was my first time interacting with somebody who had really poured a lot into the conversation.”

The conversation left a lasting impression on Augustine, who had spent his life preparing to study medicine. He found curiosity pulling him toward a different path: technology.  Augustine would go on to found Nugi Technologies, a tech company that builds software for people.

“I had prepared my entire life for [studying medicine],” he says. “[But] that first meeting point with tech actually changed a lot. I think my mind started shifting.”

In 2006, the choice had grown urgent. Augustine’s parents, both civil servants with a combined monthly income that barely exceeded ₦30,000 ($235 at the time), still had one vision for him: a career in medicine. Technology, in their eyes, was a path to becoming a typist or a secretary.

“My parents’ frame of mind was, ‘What is this tech you’ve been talking about? Do you want to become a secretary?” he says.

Despite his parents’ aversion, Augustine was determined to pursue his dreams. To raise some money for the ₦100,000 ($784 at the time) course he wanted to study, he took his dad’s phone and entered to play MTN’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, a Nigerian game show based on the original British TV format of the same title.

Augustine’s dad had ₦200 ($1.57 at the time) worth of airtime on his phone, so Augustine used ₦100 ($0.8) to enter the show, and the following week, his dad’s number was on the screen. 

“I won ₦20,000 ($156.7) from the show and [my dad] took ₦5,000 ($39.18) as commission, because he was the owner of the [phone] number that [won the money],” he recalls

He started his tech career with  ₦15,000 ($117.6) and a lot of grit.  With the money, he applied for an e-commerce course at Softnet, a Calabar-based tech learning institute, in 2006. The fee was ₦150,000 ($1,175.6), which was a lot of money at the time. 

“Around this time, the minimum wage for civil servants in the early 2000s was just around  ₦3,000 ($23.5). And [my parents] were not really high-grade civil servants,” Augustine recalls. “ By 2006, I don’t think their combined salary was up to ₦30,000 ($235).” 

He supplemented his ₦15,000 ($10.6) with earnings from freelance website projects, and completed the fees to study programming languages used to build websites,  HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript at Softnet. 

His hunger for knowledge was intense: he began reading e-books related to his coursework on Oracle’s website, often beyond what the school allowed. When the school’s owner discovered it, Augustine was punished and denied his certificate. “Later on, when I realised that the books were free, I started wondering why I got punished for taking out e-books,” he says.

Augustine never graduated from Softnet, but he carried the knowledge with him. It became the foundation for everything he would go on to build.

“I don’t actually regret [reading those e-books],” he says. “I don’t regret what I did to actually become better.”

The rejected admission and the London dream

By 2008, the pressure from Augustine’s parents to study medicine peaked. 

He sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), the entry examination into Nigerian universities, and secured admission to the University of Calabar (UNICAL). 

But Augustine, already making money building websites for schools and working in a cybercafé where he made “roughly ₦100,000 maybe in a month,” felt his destiny lay elsewhere.

“Inside me, there was something that was saying, Don’t do medicine, don’t do medicine,” he says.

He got admission for medicine at UNICAL. But he did not want it.

“I saw that tech had a lot of money, so I started praying that the admission somehow should be taken away from me,” Augustine says.

Weeks later, the admission list was republished, and his name was no longer there: “That was a sign that tech was what I was born for.”

Augustine then enrolled at the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) in Cross River State, raising ₦500,000 ($352) of the ₦600,000 ($423) tuition himself by working day and night in cybercafes. 

In 2010, Augustine graduated from NIIT with a first class and gained admission to study Business Information Technology at Middlesex University in London. However, he kept deferring his admission, as he lacked the funds for travel or fees. He spent the next three years in an unpaid internship at Hot Minet Services, a networking company in Calabar.

“[An unpaid internship] is something that so many young people will not do today, but it taught me a lot about managing business, because I was learning directly from the founders of the business,” he says. “ I also learned how to program access points, build login pages for Wi Fi networks, build a platform to onboard their customers, and take payment, connecting it to Interswitch. So even when they didn’t pay me, I didn’t care.”

He survived that period by sleeping in the office all week and running a side hustle on Amazon, the e-commerce giant.

Using a “Shop-to-my-door” virtual address in Texas and a Visa Gold card from Oceanic Bank, he shopped for Nigerians who wanted to buy things on Amazon. 

“I remember somebody shopping on Amazon for almost ₦30 million ($21,156),” he says.

Augustine made  ₦5 million ($3,526) from his Amazon business. He saved it and later used it to fund his education in London.

By 2012, he finally moved to London, aided by his Amazon savings and a ₦2 million ($1,410) scholarship from the Cross River State Government. 

“[Tech] was not yet a category for the scholarship. You know, if you want something in life, you keep pressing. I kept on [writing] messages on Facebook to the governor (Liyel Imoke),” Augustine says.

He graduated from Middlesex University in 2013 with a first class in Business Information Technology and Business Information Systems.

Coming home and the birth of Nugi Technologies

In September 2013, Augustine did what many of his peers didn’t: he returned to Nigeria. He had an offer to work at his lecturer’s husband’s tech firm, but turned it down because “I felt that Nigeria had potential for technology, and we still do.”

In Nigeria, after working for three years at a local tech firm, he left in December 2015 and, in 2016, founded Nugi Technologies, a company that offers services including web and mobile development, Quality Assurance (QA) testing, IT consulting, and network implementation. 

His mission for his staff was simple: treat developers better, because he had an unpleasant experience at his previous job. In his first year, he provided stable internet access at the company because he believed “you can’t develop while you’re offline.”

Ten years on, Nugi Technologies has evolved into an “engineering-first” company with its headquarters in Calabar and other branches in Lagos and London. 

The company is currently working with the Cross River State Government to establish a 20-hectare data centre in Calabar.

“I really want Nigeria to begin to win the race for AI technology infrastructure,” says. “ If we get it right, we are a big force. I believe that so many countries out here don’t want us to get it right, because we remain slaves [when] we keep buying from them.”

On the product front, the company recently launched Servyx, a tool for managing remote servers.

Giving back

Augustine’s tech journey started in Cross River State, which he believes can be turned into “a self-sustainable engine.”

According to Augustine, the state took a bet on him when he was given the  ₦2 million ($1,410) scholarship, and “the state has benefited 1,000-fold so far because my work has impacted the state.”

Nugi worked with the Cross River State Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to build systems that help with revenue tracing.

“I’d seen where the gaps were for Cross River State, and I wanted to passionately address them. Some of the things I saw were revenue mismanagement and poor revenue administration,” Augustine says.

Augustine has since stepped back from day-to-day operations, handing the mantle to younger leaders like Chief Executive Officer (CEO)  Ajoke Akinlabi to ensure the company remains “digital” and agile. 

“[I was] a bit too analogue, and we felt that younger people running Nugi will be the best thing for the company,” he says.

This move also allowed him to manage his health, having lived with sickle cell for 40 years.

“I felt that each time they needed me out there, I was always sick or something. [I] didn’t just have the momentum to drive the modern-day engineering company. And for me, that was why I stepped down—so that I can look after my health and then help from outside,” he says.

Augustine now splits his time at Nugi’s London office, where he markets the company’s products to international clients while managing the health complications of living with sickle cell disease.

*Current rate used is $1 to ₦1,418 

*2006 rate used is $1 to ₦127.6, according to African Export-Import Bank data.

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