In 2019, after two years navigating corporate life in Lagos, Nicole (33) quit her job to run her food business full-time. Shortly after, a trip to Dubai sparked a grand plan to expand overseas. But right after moving, the pandemic lockdown, a series of costly business decisions, and legal troubles left her stuck in a foreign country, facing a massive debt.
This is Nicole’s story, as told to Boluwatife.
Throughout my life, whenever a door closed, I always found a way to open another one or test myself further. I always had an answer to every challenge. Looking back now, I believe this constant drive to scale up and change my life ultimately landed me in my current nightmare.
I am stuck in Dubai, owing 123,000 dirhams (about ₦45 million), living under an arrest warrant, and facing a travel ban that prevents me from leaving the United Arab Emirates. I am trapped in an apartment with my two-year-old daughter, and I don’t have the answers anymore.
I moved to Lagos in January 2017, after spending most of my life in Jos and Abuja, and schooling in Delta State. The decision to move came in December 2016, after a friend told me, “You’re a big fish in a tiny pond. Have you considered Lagos?”
This was two years after I completed my microbiology degree and graduated from university. I was already working at a community pharmacy in Asaba, taking home ₦30k/month. The income was enough to give me the quiet life I was used to, but I had big dreams. So, when my friend suggested I was wasting my potential in Asaba, I took his advice.
As if by fate, I landed a job with a recruitment solutions company in Lagos the very next month. My best friend and I decided to relocate together, but Lagos was a huge culture shock. It was loud, crowded and very expensive. My new salary of ₦55k/month almost doubled my previous salary, but I quickly realised that a single source of income wasn’t sufficient in Lagos. So, by March, I took on a second job as a night pharmacy technician at a hospital on Victoria Island, earning ₦75k/month.
For four months, I worked at the recruitment company in Marina by day and the hospital by night, sneaking in naps between shifts. Commuting from my Gbagada home to Marina and VI was exhausting. I was also quite petite, weighing barely 50 kg. I was running on empty. One day in July, I collapsed at my day job. The doctors diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome.
By then, my boss at the day job had noticed my declining productivity. I came clean about my other job, and she advised me to choose one path. So, I quit and decided to focus on the hospital. The pay was better, and the night commute was against traffic.
Later that year, after my dad encouraged me to get my certificate, I went for NYSC.
How the food business started
After NYSC, I juggled different roles, including FMCG sales, where I managed four branches for ₦60k/month. I was still living in Gbagada, and the stress of my long commute from the mainland to the island was draining me.
Around that time, my best friend noticed how much I complained about street food. As a microbiologist, I was obsessed with food safety and hated buying subpar meals. Whenever friends visited, I’d cook elaborate dishes. My best friend finally said, “Your food is so good. Since you’re tired of your job, why don’t you try this as a business?”
On August 20, 2019, I officially launched my food brand. I started small with two signature dishes: a multi-protein village jollof for ₦2,500 and a fried yam/plantain arrangement with snail and beef in pepper sauce for ₦3,500. People loved the dishes, and I started making money. Soon, I was catering for corporate clients and banks.
In November, I’d saved up enough to travel to Dubai for the first time. My best friend and I had already started thinking about leaving the country someday, and we’d heard it was advisable to take as many trips as possible to get visa stamps in our passports.
Before Dubai, we’d saved up and gone on a road trip to Ghana, which also got us stamps in Togo and Benin. The Dubai trip was a ₦350k-per-person deal we’d seen earlier in the year for a five-day group trip to the One Africa Music Fest. It included flights, the visa, and shared accommodation. We saved up for weeks to afford it.
Dubai blew my mind. It was clean, peaceful, and safe. But it was hard to find Nigerian food. On our fourth day, 10 of us had to contribute 1,800 dirhams just to get a local meal delivered. My friend looked at me and said, “Look at Dubai, and look at this food. You cook way better than this.”
I immediately saw an opportunity to scale. After returning to Nigeria, I uploaded a picture of my food on Instagram and tagged a Dubai location as an experiment. Within hours, three people messaged me wanting to order Nigerian food in Dubai. The demand was clearly there.
By this time, I was already earning nearly ₦150k per month from my business in Lagos. I even quit my FMCG job in December to focus full-time on the business. My parents had paid my rent for the year, giving me the runway to build my brand.
I convinced them to support my move to Dubai.
Honestly, I was too optimistic, and I overpromised. I said I only needed a three-month visa because, within two weeks, I’d make good money. I even called a male acquaintance who lived in Dubai and asked about the price of Nigerian food there. All the information I got pointed to the fact that I’d be successful. The numbers seemed right in my head.
Moving right into a global shutdown
On March 11, 2020, I landed in Dubai with an extra 20kg box filled with Nigerian food items. My plan was to stay temporarily with the male acquaintance, start selling, and make enough to secure a bed space in a shared apartment within one week.
Unfortunately for me, on March 13, just two days after I arrived, Dubai was under a complete COVID-19 lockdown.
I was stranded with no local SIM card and no income. Within two weeks, the guy I was staying with began demanding sexual favours. When I refused, he kicked me out. I can’t forget the date. It was April 4. I stood on the balcony of his 24th-floor apartment and genuinely wanted to jump. I felt tired and hopeless.
One of his flatmates, an Indian, noticed my distress and helped me secure an 800-dirham/month bed space in Dubai Marina. In complete shame, I called my dad, and he paid my first month’s rent. I moved in the next day, sharing a room with other women.
Building back up in Dubai
As lockdown restrictions eased, the UAE froze tourist visas, essentially keeping them valid while the lockdown trapped everyone. This move extended my visa to September 2020. I aggressively leveraged social media to find customers. I jumped onto viral livestreams, searching for Dubai-based users and commenting, “Nigerian food in Dubai.”
It worked. My first customer was two buildings away. I sold three packs of jollof rice with plantain and chicken. The day I made my first 500 dirhams (about ₦51k at the time), I cried and sent my mother a picture of the money.
By September 2020, I moved into a maid’s room in a penthouse for 1,200 dirhams a month to have a better kitchen setup. By December 2020, with my dad’s financial help again, I secured a two-year freelance visa for roughly 7,000 dirhams.
Between 2020 and 2022, I worked tirelessly. I saved 70,000 dirhams by cooking until 4 a.m., avoiding parties, and cutting my personal expenses to the bare minimum.
The cloud kitchen gamble and the beginning of the end
In late 2022, my ambition got the better of me again. I decided to take the business out of my house and get fully licensed. I didn’t want to be just a girl cooking at home; I wanted scale.
I created a business plan for a cloud kitchen — a delivery-only commercial space. After COVID, people were no longer going to restaurants to eat. They preferred to order online, and I saw it as an opportunity to do more. I’d also found a commercial cloud kitchen facility that promised to handle the accounting, logistics and operations. I just needed to come and cook. They’d put me on the delivery apps.
I shared the business plan with over 10 people before I found an investor who brought 30,000 dirhams to join my 70,000 dirhams. The agreement was that they’d take a 20% net profit share for the next 36 months.
Then I signed a contract with the cloud kitchen facility. The yearly rent was 150,000 dirhams, but I opted for a monthly payment option of around 13,600 dirhams. Just setting up, paying three months’ rent upfront, and leaving a security deposit swallowed half my capital. But based on my calculations, if I kept selling like I’d done the past two years, I’d still be profitable.
Then, everything went downhill.
First, the visa ban hit. In October 2022, after I’d paid for the space and was trying to set up, the UAE stopped issuing visas to Nigerians. I needed a business license to onboard on the delivery apps, and usually, once you had the license, you got an investor visa. The visa ban complicated the whole process.
Every time I called the licensing office, the first thing they’d ask was, “What’s your nationality?” As soon as they heard, “Nigerian,” they hung up. On top of that, my freelance visa was expiring in two months.
While this was happening, thousands of Nigerians were being deported or leaving the country. I lost nearly 80% of my customer base. Eventually, I was able to start running the kitchen under the facility’s business license, but it meant my sales had to go directly into their accounts, and they sent me the profit.
I had no other choice. I’d already spent too much money at that point. Plus, I needed the visibility that the delivery apps would give me to recover my lost customers.
But that wasn’t the end of my troubles. The cloud kitchen facility was poorly managed, and I regularly struggled with pest control and theft. Rats ruined hundreds of dirhams’ worth of imported Nigerian yams, crayfish, and rice before I started buying big pots to store food and try to minimise losses.
I shared the facility with other cloud kitchens, and some of them would steal my cooking ingredients and equipment. Every time I complained to the management, I’d hear things like, “Our security system is down. We’ll fix it.” The Emirati landlord changed management five times in eight months, but the problems never fully went away.
On Christmas Day 2022, a peak period for food businesses, I sold only two plates of food. I was so overwhelmed and discouraged. I even tried starting a new brand with pasta dishes and salads, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was depressed and felt like I was drowning.
But the kitchen did give me some popularity. I was next door to a famous restaurant, and sometimes, when the wait time there was too long, people would order from me and enjoy the food. I even had some TV and radio companies come and talk to me about my journey, leaving Nigeria to do business in Dubai.
I was doing well, but the problems were more than the wins.
By May 2023, the cloud kitchen management claimed I owed them 40,000 dirhams for two months’ worth of rent and utilities. This was money they knew I didn’t have because all my sales were being routed directly through their account. Plus, I’d complained about how I was losing money to theft and the rats, and they’d done nothing to help me. But they didn’t care.
On May 31, they shut off my utilities, seized my equipment, and locked me out.
By June 4, the landlord at my bed space kicked me out because I couldn’t pay rent. I was homeless for three weeks, sleeping wherever I could. A friend housed me briefly until I managed to rent a small studio from a friend who ran an Airbnb so that I could cook for my few loyal remaining customers.
Around this time, the UAE introduced a new clause allowing Nigerians who were permanent residents of countries such as the UK, Canada, and the US to apply for short-term tourist visas. So, some of my customers were able to visit, and they started buying from me again.
My finances didn’t return to what they were before, but I was surviving. I decided to live a little. I got into a relationship, and my partner was good to me. He was smart, and I had someone to share things with. Then, I got pregnant.
At some point, we even considered marriage, but the visa issue was still a problem. Without a visa, he couldn’t get a job, but as an entrepreneur, I could still cut corners. The financial stress eventually pushed him to leave the country. I gave birth to my daughter in August 2024 as a single mother.
Just when I thought I was slowly floating above water, the landlord of the cloud kitchen sued me in November 2025. He said, “I heard you have a restaurant. You are doing well. You want to just cheat me and go?”
I tried my best to explain that I was just cooking from my home, but he claimed I’d broken the contract. I tried to get a lawyer, but couldn’t afford the 5,000 to 9,000 dirhams fees, so I represented myself in court. The court held the three sessions entirely in Arabic. They only spoke English when they told me to “answer yes or no.”
In February 2026, the court ruled against me, ordering me to pay 123,900 dirhams, which included my landlord’s legal fees.
Immediately after the verdict, the system blocked my two Dubai bank accounts. They also placed me on a travel ban, meaning I cannot legally leave the UAE until the debt is paid. My landlord also went to the police to apply for my arrest, so I also have an arrest warrant out for me. If I am found in public places like a mall, a bus, or a metro station, the police can detain me.
With all these restrictions, I can’t work to make money, and my dad can’t even send me money. To appeal the ruling, the court requires me to pay half of the debt upfront, but I couldn’t even afford a lawyer in the first place.
Before the verdict, I’d started experimenting with catering for events and made 13,500 dirhams for an 80-person wedding. But that’s no longer a potential income source because after the airstrikes on Dubai in February and the ongoing US-Iran war, Nigerians aren’t coming to do destination weddings again. I haven’t cooked for more than five people at once since February.
My current situation
I applied for charity benefits, but got a rejection in 90 seconds. My friend in America helped set up a GoFundMe and raised $6000 (about 22,000 dirhams) for me. I used that to hire a lawyer and tried to have the arrest warrant removed, but they refused the appeal.
My lawyer also tried to argue for a payment plan, but they said I must pay at least 31,000 dirhams upfront, followed by 18,000 dirhams per month. But 31,000 dirhams is almost ₦12 million, and no one can send me money. I had to refuse the payment plan.
I can’t move around freely in public without risking being taken away from my child. My current visa expires in a few months, and I can’t renew it because of the arrest warrant. My situation will also get worse if I overstay. I’m trapped in an apartment with my two-year-old daughter. When I manage to get a rare food order, I have to ask customers to pay in cash or transfer to a third-party exchanger who physically brings cash to my house.
Between April and now, I have taken overdoses of my sleeping pills twice. I just don’t want to wake up. I look at my daughter, knowing she only has me, but I feel defeated by my own ambition.
I tried so hard to do everything the right way, but now I’m just waiting, angry at myself, disappointed, and completely unable to see a way out.
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