Hello Thrivers,

Three founders came together to build something that affects almost every Nigerian, but very few people have thought to build in this way.

Almost every Nigerian has been in, witnessed, or heard about a security situation they wish they had known about earlier. It could be a faulty elevator, a robbery happening nearby, a one-chance vehicle, a dangerous road, or an emergency that people only hear about after it has already happened.

But what if an app could alert you before you find yourself in that situation?

That is what Oriekaose Agholor, Kosisochukwu Kabiri, and Adetunji Adewoye are building with Wahala App, a real-time safety and SOS platform created to help Nigerians get alerts when there is danger near them.

For them, Wahala App is not just another app. It is a response to a problem many Nigerians understand too well: safety information is often scattered, delayed, difficult to verify, or trapped inside WhatsApp groups and social media posts.

Let’s hear from the founders.

We all had childhood trauma experiences that collectively shaped the birth of Wahala App.

For Oriekaose, it happened around the age of 9, when his school bus was involved in an accident on the expressway and no help came. His teacher eventually had to flag down a keke to take the students home. His parents did not even know about the incident until he told them when they got back from work.

If the students had been seriously injured or killed, their parents may not have known until it was too late.

For Kosi, the experience was a one-chance robbery while travelling to Enugu by bus. He had to jump out to save his life, leaving his belongings behind with the robbers, who could also have been kidnappers.

For Tunji, it was hearing gunshots outside his compound as a child and lying awake with the knowledge that no one was coming to address what was happening.

Those experiences were different, but they pointed to the same thing: there needed to be a better way for people to know when danger was happening around them.

During the 2020 lockdown, Nigerians kept hearing about “unknown gunmen” committing violent acts. After the End SARS protests, some of the posts and incidents that had been shared online also became difficult to find again.

That made the problem clearer.

Social media has become a major source of information, but it is also very temporary. It does not always preserve, organise, or deliver safety information in a way people can act on.

A post can trend today and disappear tomorrow. A warning can stay inside one WhatsApp group. An incident can be shared without the exact time, location or confirmation needed to make it useful.

That was the gap Wahala App was created to address.

All three are technical co-founders at Wahala App LTD.

Oriekaose Agholor is the CEO, Kosisochukwu Kabiri is the COO, and Adetunji Adewoye is the CTO.

“Oriekaose brought the team together.”

Today, the team is divided according to their strengths. Oriekaose leads company strategy, product vision, fundraising, partnerships, and Wahala AI development. Kosi manages operations, mobile product ownership, UI/UX design, and internal team management. Tunji leads the tech stack, backend and web architecture, map infrastructure, security, DevOps, and technical hiring.

But building the team was not immediate.

The idea had existed since 2022, but the first few attempts did not work out because the team did not yet have the right skill set and motivation to execute it properly.

At one point, Oriekaose almost gave up, but something his mentor told him stayed with him:

“Nobody hands you money or belief just because you have a good idea; if you have to build the first version out of toothpicks and paper, build it out of toothpicks and paper.”

That pushed him to try again. He reached out to Tunji, who had always shown real interest in the idea, and together they built the first version: a map with basic reporting features. It was not perfect, but it was enough to show the idea.

Social media has helped people share information, but it was not built specifically for public safety.

That is a serious limitation because public-safety information is most useful when it reaches people close to the incident in real time.

A report that arrives hours later may create awareness, but it may no longer help someone avoid danger when they need to.

Private WhatsApp groups are also limited to help people inside the group. A person passing through an area, visiting a new city, or working temporarily in a different community may not have access to that information.

There is also the issue of misinformation.

But with the Wahala App, every incident is recorded with key information such as time, date and location. This allows the app to create incident timelines, visual map distribution, hot-zone detection, and eventually support predictive analysis and preventive action.

The app tells you where the incident happened, when it happened, how severe it is, whether it has been updated or disproved, and how that information can help people respond more intelligently.

Because we are dealing with something as crucial as safety, we cannot afford to treat every report as automatically true.

At the same time, we cannot afford to build a system so slow and difficult that useful information becomes useless by the time it reaches people.

Incidents are verified through our proprietary consensus algorithm, built around transparency. Reports can only be made by people who are relatively close to the incident, and anyone within the area can update or disprove a report.

To report, update or disprove an incident, users must provide evidence through the app. For low-severity incidents, that may be pictures. For high-severity incidents, it requires video.

Everyone on Wahala App can see the report, updates and disproofs. Non-users can also see incidents shared with them by Wahala users.

Privacy is also very important because Nigerians care about their safety and may be afraid of retaliation when reporting sensitive incidents like crime.

That is why Wahala is designed as an anonymous platform. We try to collect as little personal information as possible. For example, we ask for a user’s birthday only to confirm that the person is old enough to use the platform, since the app is meant for users aged 13 and above, but we do not store it after verification is complete.

We also encourage users not to include personally identifiable information in their usernames and reports. By default, the app provides auto-generated anonymous usernames, which users can change when creating their account.

Another challenge was severity.

The team had to think carefully about how incidents are classified because a robbery may be deeply traumatic for one person, while another incident may involve something as extreme as terrorism. The system had to recognise different levels of urgency without dismissing individual experiences or undermining critical threats.

Speed was also important.

Public-safety information loses value if it arrives too late, so the team had to think about low-latency reporting while still maintaining reliability.

For Wahala App, the challenge is balancing accuracy, severity, speed, reliability, privacy, connectivity and accessibility at the same time.

“We cannot replace government, and we are not trying to.”

What Wahala App can do is provide tools that make public-safety information easier to gather, understand and respond to.

In other countries, software and AI companies work with government and security institutions to improve threat detection, intelligence and public-safety response. Nigeria and Africa also need systems built with our own realities in mind.

That is where Wahala App comes in.

The goal is to create a powerful network for gathering real-time data, supporting predictive analytics and improving communication between citizens and the institutions responsible for safety.

For the average Nigerian, this means you can use Wahala App to see what is happening around you before you walk into a dangerous situation.

If there is a robbery, one-chance report, fire, unsafe road, violence, emergency or any other incident nearby, the app can help users report it with evidence and alert others around that location.

The report is tied to time, date and location, and people nearby can update or disprove it.

Wahala App is trying to change how Nigerians receive and respond to safety information by giving incidents a time, a place, a record and a way to be challenged, updated and understood.

For a country where safety information is often scattered, delayed or difficult to verify, that kind of structure matters.

Because sometimes, the difference between avoiding danger and walking into it is not whether information exists.

It is whether the right person receives it in time.

To learn more about Wahala App, visit wahala.org.

You can also follow Wahala App on Instagram, and X/Twitter.

To connect with the founders, you can follow Oriekaose Agholor, Kosisochukwu Kabiri and Adetunji Adewoye on their social platforms.

Download Wahala App on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.

Till next time,

Team Thrive

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