In March 2023, Adewale Adekomaiya lay trapped in a mangled car in Lagos while passersby filmed and a bystander tried to rob him. That near-death experience shattered his assumption that travel could wait for “later.” Within months, the Senior QA Architect and his wife packed their lives into a €900 ($1,048) digital nomad visa to Malta, spending two years working remotely across seven European countries. Now back in Nigeria with a newborn son, Adekomaiya tells JOHN ADOYI about the true costs of constant mobility, navigating racism abroad, and why his family’s next journey is taking them across Africa.
Passers-by stood around the wreckage and filmed.
Adewale Adekomaiya was trapped in a car in Yaba, a neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2023, just months after getting married. No one came to help. The only person who approached, Adekomaiya said, was trying to rob him.
As he waited for help that didn’t seem to come, his thoughts wandered somewhere else: to his new wife, and to all the things they had planned to do together.
“I just got married,” he told TechCabal. “If I had died, I would have just gone without experiencing the world with my wife.”
Until then, Adekomaiya had treated life as something to be enjoyed later. He would work and save, thinking he would eventually have the time and money to see the world.
The fateful accident made “later” feel less certain.
Within months, he and his wife had left Nigeria for Malta, where they built a life around remote work and travel. Two years later, after returning home for the birth of their son, Adekomaiya is preparing to leave again.