CTO at the Age of 16 — The Fall of John Oseni
The story of John Oseni was the biggest talk in the Nigerian Tech Space as of March 2022. Everyone was amazed at the news of a 16-year-old boy getting employed and flown to Italy for the post of Senior Developer, or so we thought. Here is the story of a CTO at the Age of 16 — The Fall of John Oseni.
Who is John Oseni
Born in February 2006, John is a young boy from Ogun State, Nigeria. He was the fourth child in his family and attended Command Day Secondary School, Akure, Ondo State, where he graduated in 2021.
John's journey into tech started at 14 when Green Garage, a FabLab in Akure, Nigeria, visited his Secondary School to introduce the students to basic computing and hardware. John became very interested in this newly found knowledge and participated in a competition hosted by Green Garage and emerged as a runner-up amongst 80 other participants.
Weeks after emerging as a runner-up, John reached out to Green Garage to receive his prize, but instead, he was offered to take programming lessons for a week; this was the beginning of the world of programming for John, and with his persistence, he was able to take his lessons even without access to devices like computer and mobile phone.
John is a blockchain and full-stack web developer and has worked as the Chief Technical Officer of various startups.
The Lies of John Oseni
The fall of the 16-year-old CTO started with just a tweet on X (formerly Twitter) by a user who goes by the name “Czar”. Czar claims he worked with John on a fintech project, but the project failed eventually due to his lies and deception.
In the tweet, Czar started by explaining how John reached out to him earlier this year, telling him he needed help in building a new startup idea he had and how he had already worked on the backend of the project and had investors waiting for the project to be completed and fund it
Czar, interested in this project, traveled back to Nigeria with high hopes and excitement. He believed he would be working on the next big thing in the Nigeria Fintech industry as John Oseni was very influential.
The tweet goes on, and Czar explained that his first payment from the project was just a tiny percentage (2%) of what he was earning in his previous job; the money was just enough to purchase fuel to power a generator for electricity, in his tweet, he claimed he wasn’t bothered about this, and he was just interested in building.
The first realization that hit Czar was when he discovered that the project’s backend hadn’t even been worked on as John claimed; he also claimed that John would always make empty promises with the phrase “money is coming,” but he never pays them as promised. Later on, Czar’s generator developed a fault, and he couldn’t deliver his tasks as expected; this made John delay his promised support and forced Czar to spend about N400,000 to be able to deliver and work faster and better.
However, Czar was very optimistic about the project even though he and other developers on the team were missing out on more significant opportunities and spending from their own pockets to ensure the project didn’t fail.
Long before you knew it, betrayal had set into Czar’s heart, but he was still optimistic about the project. Everything took a turn when the CEO of the supposed fintech project called for a meeting, and the CTO, John, denied him of that meeting; this made Czar suspect foul play.
Unfortunately for John, the next day, the CEO (name undisclosed) exposed how John defrauded him of over $40,000 and underpaid everyone working on the project. John, who later discovered that he had been exposed, revoked the CEO’s admin rights and removed him from the project’s GitHub repository.
Czar felt disappointed and betrayed; he hated the fact that John had to remove him from the GitHub repository and find out that John had been lying the whole time. He regretted working on the project and wished he had used his money and time for a better and more productive project.
You can read the whole thread on X.
What else was John Oseni Lying About?
This thread was what started John’s fall yesterday; Czar, who kept John anonymous on his original thread, later revealed that he was talking about John after quoting a tweet from another user, unicodedeveloper.
Minutes later, the news spread across the Nigeria Tech Twitter community. Czar’s original tweet gained many impressions, and more people revealed deep secrets about John.
To start with, a user claimed that John wasn’t flown out or even hired by any company in Italy, and it was all a facade and lie to set himself to fame.
Another user, who remained anonymous, came forward with a WhatsApp chat screenshot of how he claimed John — almost convinced him to purchase an open-source project, which John was claiming to be his own and denying any connection of “his” project to the open-source repository.
It didn’t end there; X, as a toxic social media platform, later on dug out a tweet from John in 2022 claiming that he built his own first “web-based crypto wallet” after 4–5 months of working earnestly, “reading articles, checking schema codes, making research on full blockchain and web 3”. This tweet was posted with a screenshot of a Visual Studio Code interface with lines of code. Initially, in 2022, this tweet went wild, and John received many positive comments and engagements, but these positive comments backfired in 2023 after Czar exposed him.
Czar later pointed out that while he was publishing that post, John used “big words” like “checking schema codes”, “exchanger”, “full block chain” and said that this was a red flag to him when John made that post.
Another reveal came out when Czar quoted a tweet to John’s response to a question about the programming language he used to build his so-called “web-based crypto wallet” in 2022. John replied to the question with “react-typescript sir, and a lot of apis sir” and Czar quoted this with ““a lot of apis”🌚”
Reading through the replies for Czar’s quoted tweet, I was able to uncover that John didn’t use any bit of typescript and that he used Angular in building it (that is, even if he was the one who built it). It was also discovered that his claims to use “a lot of apis” was a whole lie, as an X user claimed that building blockchain projects does not involve the use of APIs
Later on, it was exposed by another user on X; codingossy that the whole codebase John claimed to be his own belonged to Bitpays public repository and that the code has been live on their GitHub since 2011, although we are not sure if this was the same project he was trying to sell to an employer.
Another scandal John was involved in already took legal proceedings as an affidavit of John and how he went into business with an individual and claimed to have collected $37,000 from the individual without providing a receipt. In the affidavit, John also claimed that on the 31st of May, 2023, the individual wrote a petition against him on the misappropriation of funds meant for the setup of a fintech company (I am not sure if this was the fintech company Czar was referring to). John later claimed in the affidavit that he would pay back the money in four installments and complete the payment by the 24th of October.
We also got to see people addressing a tweet from the Nigeria media giant, Channels Television; John was able to speak on Channels podcast. In this podcast, he claimed to have donated over 50 laptops to support the tech career of other young people like him in Nigeria and told them not to make a social media post about it. A couple of X users disagreed with this and claimed John had assisted young people in getting a laptop but hasn’t assisted over 50 people!
Any Actions from John Oseni?
As of when writing this content, John has cleared every piece of info from his X and LinkedIn bio and deleted every job experience on his LinkedIn profile. The only statement released is from John’s current workplace, GoFree, where he works as a CTO. In the statement released by the company on their X handle, they claimed they had initiated an internal investigation team to examine the allegations against John and to uncover the truth. It was also revealed that John will step down temporarily from his role as a CTO immediately.
Before clearing his bio and experience, John claimed on LinkedIn to have had over 14 brands as either a CTO, Managing Partner, or a Co-Founder, which to many developers on X sounds like a lie as John only has an experience of 2–3 years as a developer.
The only action we have gotten from John is a post from Czar and how he threatened him, stating Czar’s location and claiming that he will prove it. We also saw a statement from John Oseni on a previous date addressing the issue with the FinTech project!
We hope to hear from him soon and know what he has to say about these allegations.
The Nigeria Tech Community has a lot of influencers who are assisting and inspiring beginners in tech on how to go about their careers. However, John fell off that list yesterday, and many more will still fall off it. As a beginner in tech, focus on building and spend less time on social media, feeding off the lives of so-called influencers who might lie and don’t know their onions like they say they do.
Just focus on building, and don’t be like John Oseni!
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