The Okoye brothers, Peter and Paul Okoye went downright emotional yesterday at the ‘Headies’ and they revealed something about them that you will not believe!
The Nigerian R&B duo composed of identical twin brothers who produce and release their albums through Square Records were winners of the Special recognition award at the just concluded Headies awards.
The duo who surprised the crowd at the event with some of their old tracks revealed how it took them years to save their first million naira after they were given their awards.
“While we were living in Jos, we lived with our uncle and he gave us – Jude, Paul and Peter just one room to share. It wasn’t easy, we were squatting with a large family.
“Somehow, we came to Lagos and after selling our stuffs, we were able to rent a one-room apartment and you know we had no chairs but we did not care.
All we were after was how to market our music…..eventually money started coming in but it was small, very small. For a while, we were angry that our names were being mentioned everywhere and peeps would see us to say, ‘I just saw your music on MTV base”, meanwhile we had no TV to even watch the MTV base in our house”.
On their first one million naira, they said “The first time we had one million naira we celebrated it. For a long while, all we could save was N850,000 and it was paining us. One day however, we went for a concert and right there we were paid N150, 000, then it was big money. We immediately added it to the N850,000 and voila, we had N1million. We bought drinks to celebrate, we were glad that we were now millionaires.
“To the upcoming artiste, you don’t make money immediately
, it’s like you are investing in music and would reap later on”.
They dedicated their awards to their late parents, wives and kids.
It would be recalled that in 2012, Davido won the coveted Headies ‘next rated’ prize car while Sean Tizzle also got same in 2013.