Eloswag Nwamu On Why Every Creative Needs a Money Strategy, Not Just a Following

The following piece is based on a conversation held during an edition of The Moveee’s monthly live culture panel, The Platform, titled “The Multifaceted Creative Live,” where Eloswag Nwamu — dancer, DJ, recording artist, content creator, and two-time Head of House on BBNaija Season 7 — speaks to Moveee editor Tope Akintayo and contributor Favour Bolade on the hustle that shaped his instincts long before fame, why he treats an audience as an asset to be built rather than bought, and why he believes every creative needs a financial plan that outlasts the following.

Before Big Brother Naija, before the dance videos that went viral, before the brand deals, Eloswag Nwamu was doing five jobs at once and calling it one. He had signed on as a digital marketer at a Lagos media firm, but the role never stayed in its lane. “I applied for one but I did almost five,” he says. “I was their sound guy. I was a presenter. I’d stand behind the camera. I’d call people for the Vox Pop while presenting it too.” The work, scattered as it was, gave him an early read on how the media space actually functions — wired, chaotic, and full of people doing more than their job title says.

The pattern started earlier than that, in Ghana, where he studied information technology and computer science and quietly built a parallel life as a DJ and event promoter. With no team and no budget, he ran his own nights from scratch. “Every time I wanted to create my own event, I’d go to the bar I used to play at, make a flyer, call all my friends and the hosts in school, and direct them there because it was close enough that nobody needed transport money.” On the side, he started recording music with a campus producer who used the same software he did. He estimates he sang close to a hundred hook-and-chorus features for a Ghanaian studio owner, mostly in exchange for free studio time, before YouTube — where he posted dance videos relentlessly — became “what brought me to limelight” ahead of his BBNaija run.

Long before any of that, there was his mother’s cashew business, run out of their house. “It wasn’t like we were in the market or anything. She was just looking for new businesses to start,” he explains. A supplier in Enugu sent the nuts in bottles; Eloswag found a faster way to repackage them into sachets, a skill that came back to him almost word for word when a similar task showed up inside the Big Brother house. The business folded after two months — his mother got tired of the labour — but it left him with a principle he still leans on. “You just have to try new things. It’s okay to fail. If it doesn’t work out, maybe it wasn’t for you. You start up another thing. Nigeria makes you a multifaceted person when it comes to business.” The same logic applied when he tried selling sneakers and clothes online through WhatsApp and didn’t move a single pair for an entire year — until a digital marketing class changed how he approached it, and the sales started coming.

What kept him pushing through a year of zero returns wasn’t a business plan. It was his family. “I just had this burning fire to make money,” he says, tracing it back to watching an uncle return from the United States with gifts for everyone. “I’m traveling to Ghana to go to school — maybe it’s my turn to come back and support the whole family.” Underneath the hustle was also something quieter: music as company during a lonely childhood. “Music was my only friend. They used to ask me why I don’t talk, and I’m like, I’m listening to music.” One of his aunties gave him an iPod after he passed a stage of school, water-damaged now but still in his possession. “If I ever have a museum, I’ll put this up,” he says. “This literally kept me going.”

That instinct for organic, word-of-mouth growth shows up again in how he talks about his DJ mixes, which he still uploads to Audiomack purely for the listener counts and the reposts. “I just love seeing reviews — oh, this is nice, I love this mix. That’s the energy. Even if I’m not doing it for gigs right now, I’ll keep creating and keep uploading.” It’s the same energy that shapes how he handles online criticism. Rather than absorbing it, he treats it as material. “I had a friend who would criticize every song I sang. The next one I’d make, he’d say this one’s better. It became an improvement. Negative cannot exist without the positive — find a way to charge your battery off it.”

Leading people, on the other hand, never came naturally to him — which made being voted Head of House twice in the Big Brother house an odd fit. “The funny thing is I don’t think I like leading people,” he admits, tying it back to how he grew up. “I always liked doing stuff by myself.” What the house did instill was a sharper relationship with deadlines and preparation. Tasks were scored, food access was tied to completion, and the structure pushed him toward something he now names outright. “I think I’m a perfectionist. Let’s just put it that way. Going into the house, it just doubled. If I make a mistake, I have to do it thirty more times until it’s perfect.”

Coming out of the show carried its own distortions. He pushes back on the idea that his post-BBN brand deals underperformed, pointing to work with Castle, Nike, Fearless, Red Bull, and Campari that fans simply never amplified the way they did unrelated tweets. He’s equally direct about where some of the backlash came from — a relationship that fans disapproved of, and a hoodie reading “Obedient” and “Useful” that he wore inside the house as a deliberate political statement. “We need a new country, to be honest. We know about the suffering right now.” Big Brother confiscated several of his clothes over it. He says he’s made peace with both the misreadings and the consequences.

That same clarity carries into how he thinks about brand partnerships and paid promotion. He’s watched the influencer economy up close — brands buying positive reviews to manufacture trust the way a boat operator might hand out biscuits to keep riders smiling through a flood — and says he understands exactly why it works. He just won’t do it himself. “I prefer more organic energy than paying for the reviews. If it’s organic, I’m good. Not the kind where they tweet it, then the day I actually go DJ, it turns to nonsense.” He extends the logic to negative press too, arguing that visibility, even hostile visibility, still moves the needle. “Negative PR just makes people know you more. It depends on whether a brand can take that negativity and turn it into a collaboration — solve the problem, and the PR becomes good PR.” He points to Lagos’s recent mainland flooding as a live example: a crisis nobody wants associated with their brand, until a company positions itself as the one that knows how to fix it.

Picking which brands to work with comes down to alignment, not just money. He’s turned down political endorsement asks outright — “I’m tired of backlash” — and walked away from underpaying gigs from betting platforms offering far below his rate. But occasionally the calculus isn’t about payment at all. A short-term ad campaign with a phone brand paid him modestly, he says, but the exposure pulled in other offers once people saw the work. “Other brands see it and say, this guy is good for the job. I don’t mind. That’s literally how it is.”

Fashion runs in the family. His mother is a designer who works in Ankara, and he credits her — and the rest of his household — with instilling the instinct to always look put together, locs and all. “She knows how to swag up. Everybody in our family knows how to dress.” Musically, he’s currently leaning into Afro House and experimenting with AI tools to rework his own unreleased songs, recreating instrumentals and arrangements from his own vocals just to hear what a proper producer might unlock. He’s quick to shout out artists he thinks are underrated — Major AJ, Tariq, Mon (the artist behind “Chandelier”), and Serotonin among them — calling himself “a very, very chronic music listener.”

Acting found him almost by accident. His role in Rise Again, billed as Nigeria’s first dance movie, came from an audition he didn’t expect to land, built on instincts from skits he used to film with a friend years earlier. “I was like, this is a nice adventure, let me do it.” A second project, shot even before Rise Again and still in post-production for Amazon Prime, is still unreleased. He describes the process — repeating a single take ten or twenty times until it lands — with the same perfectionism that defined his run in the Big Brother house.

The lowest point predates all of it. In 2021, jobless and recently out of a relationship, he says he was in what he calls “a very dark place” and started rewatching Naruto from the beginning. Something about the character’s refusal to stay down, despite years of being mocked and dismissed, lodged itself in him. “Since then, there’s nothing — if I fail in something, I repeat it thirty times until it works. I like results. I put in the hard work.” The following year, he landed a job. The year after that, he entered the Big Brother house. He traces a direct line from finishing that anime to the momentum that followed.

What he’s building now is less about being seen and more about being financially deliberate. He talks candidly about the cost of staying camera-ready — Ubers instead of buses for safety, the pressure to keep up appearances, wardrobe that he insists on repurposing rather than discarding — and argues that creatives need to take money literacy as seriously as their craft. “Once it finishes, we’re getting older. There’s going to be a time you might not be getting shows or bookings. Right now is the time to invest, save, and figure out where your money should be working for you.”

The next big swing is an event he’s still in the early planning stages of: Party with Swag, modeled loosely on Lagos’s piano-district scene but bigger, built around the kind of crowd reaction he says he’s chased since his DJ sets in school. He’s still scouting for a team — someone to handle payouts, someone to help with proposals — and isn’t rushing it. “If I do a festival or party and it pulls a positive amount of people, I’ll kick off from there. It’s literally one of the things I have in plan. I just haven’t done it yet.”

Asked what he’d say to the version of himself before any of this started, his answer doubles as the thing he’s printed inside his own head since the house. “The grind has always been the grind. Don’t forget that. Depression cannot hit a moving train — you have to move.”