mint

The day the Central Bank rolled out those crisp new naira notes, everybody at the bank queue was rubbing the paper between their fingers like it was silk from Kano. Somebody joked, 'e still smell like ink,' and an aunty behind us said, 'that's because they just minted it.' That word stuck with us long after the queue moved.

To mint, in its oldest sense, is to press metal or paper into official currency. There is a whole building for it, the mint, where government makes money the honest way, with machines and approval and a paper trail. But somewhere along the line, the word grew a second life. Now when someone says 'that boy is minting money,' they don't mean he owns a printing press. They mean he is making it fast, easily, and in quantities that make the rest of us blink twice.

Think about the Alaba market trader who started selling one particular phone accessory nobody else stocked, and within two years had three shops and a Hilux. People say he's minting it. Or the software developer in Yaba who built one app that blew up abroad and now earns in dollars while sleeping. Same word, same admiration, same small side eye that asks, 'but how though?'

In London, you hear it about crypto traders, property flippers, even a Nigerian nurse who started a side business exporting shea butter and jollof spice mixes to homesick students. When money comes in fast and visibly, people reach for 'minting' before they reach for questions like how sustainable it is, or whether it's taxed, or whether it will still be there in three years.

That's the calm warning tucked inside the word. Minting sounds glamorous, but real mints follow strict rules, consider every coin, and answer to authority. The kind of minting people gossip about at parties often skips all three. Fast money without structure is still just fast money, and fast has a way of leaving as quickly as it arrived.