The day my trusted friend vanished with ₦4.2 million of my phones

Two years ago, during the harmattan season, I sent a consignment worth ₦4.2 million from Lagos to my Aba shop. Phones, accessories, everything I had saved for months to buy. My friend Chinedu, the same guy I grew up with in Aba, offered to help me transport it. He had a bus, he said, and he was going to Aba anyway. I trusted him like a brother.

Four days passed. No call. His phone started ringing without picking. I went to his house in Aba, his mother said she hadn't seen him in a week. My stomach turned to water. I called everyone we knew, no one had seen Chinedu. The consignment was gone, my business was finished, and my reputation was on the line because I had promised those phones to customers who had already paid deposits.

I spent two weeks in Lagos, sleeping at the motor park, asking every driver if they had seen him. Nothing. I almost gave up. Then one evening, my younger sister called me crying. She said Chinedu had sent her a message from a new number, asking her to tell me he was sorry. That he had gambled the money on betting and lost everything. He said he was in Ghana and wasn't coming back.

I sat down on the floor of my shop and cried like a baby. Not because of the money. Because I had trusted someone with my everything and he threw it away like it was nothing. I had to start from zero, borrowing from my mother, selling my laptop, working day and night to pay back the deposits. It took me 8 months to recover fully.

Now I have a rule: never mix business with friendship. If you want to help a friend, give them money you can afford to lose. But never give them your inventory. Never give them your future. The street will teach you this lesson one way or the other. God is involved, but your eyes must be open.