How Nawo is keeping money spraying alive, after a CBN ban changed everything

Somewhere in Lagos, Nigeria, a man is handing over ₦35,000 to collect ₦20,000 in mint notes. He is not being robbed. He is getting ready for a party.

That is what it costs now to participate in one of the most recognisable rituals in Nigerian celebration. The moment the music swells, the crowd gathers at the edges of the dance floor, and money rains down on whoever is being celebrated.

A tradition so embedded in the culture that it has its own name, its own soundtrack, its own choreography.

Spraying money is a declaration not a transaction. It says: I see you. I celebrate you. In front of everyone. But between the Central Bank of Nigeria’s ban on naira mutilation, the EFCC’s enforcement campaigns, and the underground market that now charges a premium just to supply crisp notes, that declaration has become expensive to make. The joy is still there. The infrastructure around it is broken.

Nawo, a Nigerian startup digitising the spraying experience, thinks it has the answer. Adeola Adebayo, Nawo’s founder, said he had been thinking about this problem for nearly a decade before most people knew it was a problem.

How Nawo’s founder spent 9 years waiting for Nigeria to need his idea

In 2016, Adeola had an idea he called E-Money, a digital money spraying app, loosely inspired by the celebrity E-Money and the money gun culture that had taken over Lagos party scenes.

The concept was ‘what if you could spray money from your phone?’ Digitising the gesture without losing the spirit. He sat with the idea for a while. Then he quietly set it down.

“The reality was that nobody had a reason to change how they celebrated,” he says now. “Cash was still everywhere, and nobody was questioning it.”

The timing was wrong. Nigerians were not looking for an alternative to something that still worked perfectly well. So the idea did what many premature ideas do, it waited.

It waited through years of CBN currency redesigns. Through the #DontAbuseNaira campaigns which started to reframe spraying as disrespect rather than celebration. Through the growing awkwardness of EFCC officers appearing at parties. Through the slow, grinding realisation that the mint note economy was becoming a black market.

Then, in 2023, the CBN made a move. The naira redesign and the restrictions that came with it did not just inconvenience party-goers, they interrupted something cultural.

Overnight, people found themselves asking whether they should stop doing something that had been part of every owambe, every wedding, every birthday celebration they could remember.

“It was not just ‘oh, this is a policy change,'” Adebayo says. “It felt like something cultural had been interrupted.”

That was the moment the nine-year-old idea came back, not as a tech experiment, but as something with a mission.—The product he built is called Nawo.

It is, at its most functional level, a digital spraying platform, that is, a way for people at events to send money to whoever is being celebrated, with animations that mimic the visual spectacle of notes flying through the air.

Adeola Adebayo, co-founder, Nawo

The flying naira video his team posted racked up 206,000 views. But the views were not really about the technology. They were about recognition. Nigerians in the comments were not marvelling at a clever app. They were asking where they could actually use it.

“It struck a cultural nerve,” the founder says. That nerve is the hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up watching spraying happen. There is a reason the physical version persists even when it is expensive and technically illegal.

At a traditional owambe, money flying through the air changes the atmosphere in the room. People dance harder. The energy becomes something you can almost touch. Friends compete. The person being celebrated feels the weight of everyone’s attention and generosity at once.

A phone screen does not automatically do that. Adebayo does not pretend otherwise.

“The hardest thing to replicate is the beautiful chaos of real spraying,” he says.

He describes the structure that digitisation inevitably introduces (wallets, balances, confirmations) and acknowledges that it trades some of the physical experience for order. But his argument is that the physical experience has already changed. The chaos is already gone.

What is left of traditional spraying in 2025 is a more expensive, more stressful, legally grey version of itself. The question is not whether to preserve the exact original form. The question is whether to preserve the spirit, or let the whole thing slowly disappear under the weight of regulation and economics.

“If culture refuses to evolve, it slowly dies,” he says. “Nawo is our way of making sure it evolves.”

The irony at the centre of this story is not lost on him. The same government whose ban created the conditions for Nawo to exist could also, someday, regulate it into a corner.

He is building a company on a foundation that the state can move at any time. His answer to that is not bravado, it is positioning. Nawo partners with licensed financial processors who handle the regulated components of payments, keeping the startup on the right side of the compliance line while focusing its energy on the experience layer – the cultural product, not the payment rails.

“We’re not building against regulation,” he says. “We’re building with it.”

Read also: CBN silent as bill to create rival fintech regulator advances in House of Reps

In a sense, Nawo exists precisely in the gap that regulation revealed. The ban did not create the desire to spray money at celebrations. It just exposed how fragile the infrastructure around that desire had become.

Adebayo is building replacement infrastructure, one that works within the law rather than despite it. He is currently onboarding event planners, party organisers, and clubs.

The logic is that these are the gatekeepers. Once Nawo becomes part of how an event is set up (screens, hosts, participants) the behaviour becomes natural for guests.

The big spenders arrive, and the mechanism is already there. A full owambe rollout has not happened yet. But it is coming.

The question worth sitting with is the one he answers last and most carefully: if Nawo disappeared tomorrow, what would Nigeria lose?

Not a startup, he says without hesitation. Spraying money is one of the most visible expressions of how Nigerians celebrate each other publicly. It shows up at weddings, birthdays, graduations, naming ceremonies; any moment worth marking.

It is generosity made visible. It is presence, compressed into a gesture. That tradition is being squeezed from multiple directions at once. Regulation. Enforcement. The cost of mint notes. The slow shift toward cashless transactions that were not designed with celebration in mind.

What Nawo is trying to offer, beneath all the product decisions and partnership agreements and licensing structures, is a simple thing: a future for a tradition that would otherwise be given a quiet funeral.

“Decades from now, when people still celebrate this way,” Adebayo says, “they’ll see digital spraying as the natural evolution of a tradition that refused to disappear.“

Nine years ago, he had the same belief. He just had to wait for the world to be ready.

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