Nigeria’s chess king, Tunde Onakoya has been in the most interesting news headlines over the past few weeks.
Recently, the Guinness World Record holder revealed his ambition to become a billionaire, and not just ‘the charity guy’.
This revelation was made during his interview on Afropolitan. Over the past week, Tunde had experienced following his visit to the Presidential villa on Monday, June 9.
The event had unsurprisingly sparked controversial reactions from netizens, who questioned his engagement with the President.
According to the Lagos-born chess master, the visit had been made to present his Guinness World Record certificate, alongside an adire chess board to the President.
In his defence, the Ikorodu-native clarified that, “I have no interest in partisan politics because of the sensitivity of the work that I do”.
He further explained that while that visit didn’t mean any form of endorsement, he would continue to visit many more people and sell his chess boards.
As one who has gained mainstream recognition for his philanthropic work among young underserved children through chess, the name ‘Tunde Onakoya’ has indeed become more easily associated with charity and chess. Now, the 30-year-old founder says he wants more to his identity.
According to him, it has always been difficult to share that. Nonetheless, Tunde says,
“I just don’t want to be known as just the chess in slums guy. The charity guy. I want to make a lot of money”.
Apart from reaching the billionaire status, he also shared his desire for affluence and power. In his words, “with that power comes new responsibility. And my responsibility and duty will always be to the children”.
The Chess in Slums founder has already begun to walk the talk, leading an interesting conversation on how he can actualize his dream of reaching the billionaire. Tunde asked his followers on X how many chess boards he has to sell to become a billionaire, and yes, the numbers have been coming in! According to calculations, our Makoko chess lord will need to sell 1.6 million chess sets to make 1 billion dollars. Well, How long would that be?
X users like Dr. M.O @MascotOgbe suggested to Tunde,
“If you sell enough gold-plated chess boards to politicians, especially APC politicians, you will become a billionaire in no time”.
While that may have seemed to be a suggestive opinion, given Onakoya’s recent visit to Aso rock, the latter is taking that suggestion at face volume and might just run with it.
We just might be seeing more of Tunde Onakoya with Nigerian politicians because like he said,
“Everyone deserves a chess board as long as they can pay for it, I’m happy to sell to all parties, politicians and civilians.”
From the barber’s shop in Ikorodu to New York’s Times Square and his impact work at Chess slums, Tunde Onakoya has continually lived out his mantra that “It is possible to do great things from a small place.
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