AY Makun: I lost N500m opening a non-smoking club

AY Makun, the comedian, has recounted how he lost N500 million to a non-smoking nightclub business.

In a recent interview with Chude Jideonwo, the media personality, AY said his wife strongly disagreed with the idea but he went ahead to invest N500 million in the business.

The comedian said despite dedicating his time to research the business, God said it was “not his calling” and the business “failed”.

“I woke up one day and I said to myself, ‘it’s time to open a nightclub’, ‘AY, if you can gather 6,000 people at Eko Hotel, what’s in a club that you can’t just gather 100 to 200 people buying drinks,” he said.

“I think God just wanted me to know that ‘this one is not your calling’, ‘you are the one calling yourself’. 

“It is good to have the right partner, my wife was strongly against it. I said, ‘No, it is good for networking and PR‘. Shout out to all the guys who are doing it and getting it right.

“But I thought then that when I come, I am just going take all of them out of the market. It was a huge investment running to about 500 million naira.

“We put everything in place, the staff strength was solid, the interior was crazy and I will go there every Friday, I will look at the door and I am not seeing people coming.

“The opening was grand and massive. I started with a non-smoking club; I didn’t know that all these things go together.

“The wise ones will call me, and I will tell them that sometimes when I take my wife to the club, when we get back her hair will be smelling of smoke, and women should have their wigs neat’. Long story short, I saw my ‘period’, it was very bad.”

AY earlier revealed how his 17-year feud with his colleague Basketmouth began.