A Step-by-Step Guide, By People Who Have Had Enough
There are people in this world who will borrow money from you energetically, and then go completely silent, as if the transaction wiped their memory along with your contact details. You know these people. You may even love some of these people. But you don’t know how to get your money back from them.
This piece is for you.
We asked a few people who have experience in these matters. The responses ranged from sensible to legally ambiguous to, at one point, spiritually nuclear. We have arranged the tactics as a step-by-step guide for you, ordered from civilised to increasingly less so.
Step 1: Ask Them For Your Money.
This sounds obvious to some people but not to others.
Before you spiral into strategy, Ayooluwa offers the most radical suggestion of all: “Ask them directly, it’s your money.”
Sit with that for a moment. Your money. Yours. You are not requesting a favour. You are not applying for a grant. You gave someone something that belongs to you, with the mutual understanding that it would be returned. Asking for it back is not awkward or aggressive. It is, in fact, the baseline.
The reason most people skip Step 1 and go directly to silent suffering is that we have been socialised to treat debt collection as the rude party’s problem. Somehow, the person who borrowed without paying back occupies the moral high ground, and the person trying to reclaim what is theirs becomes the villain of the story. Do not fall for that.
Step 2: The Soft Approach – Maintain Plausible Deniability
If a direct ask feels too confrontational for a first move, perhaps because the debtor is a friend, a coworker, or someone you still have to see at family functions, there is a gentler method.
Adeife calls it the “how far” technique: “Reach out subtly. ‘How far?’ ‘Have you forgotten me?’”
This is the art of the loaded check-in. You are not asking for anything except how they are faring on that glorious day. You are simply wondering, innocently, if perhaps they have forgotten a small thing. The question hangs in the air like a polite threat.
The beauty of this method is that it gives your debtor a face-saving exit. They can respond with an embarrassed laugh and a transfer, and you both pretend it was always going to happen this way. Dignity is preserved on all sides. Barely.
Step 3: Become Inevitable
When subtlety has been met with a read receipt and three days of silence, it is time to gently, but persistently, escalate.
Fola’s advice is straightforward: “become an alarm clock. Remind them every blessed day.”
Just be consistent. A message in the morning, perhaps one in the evening, and a cheerful follow-up on a random Tuesday afternoon. There is nothing technically wrong with simply being present in someone’s notifications. You are merely ensuring that your existence, and specifically the existence of what they owe you, cannot be minimised, snoozed, or archived.
People who owe you money are counting on you to get tired first. The goal here is to demonstrate that you have, in fact, nothing better to do than remember this, and you’re willing to die there.
Step 4: Introduce a Little Ambiguity
If daily reminders have been absorbed without response, it may be time to let the situation breathe, just in a different direction.
Nancy’s advice is economical in its elegance: “Threaten them subtly. Or let them know you actually use police to pick up people who owe you money, subtly too.”
You’re not threatening anybody, oh. This is just casually shared information about the kind of person you are and the kinds of activities you are known to engage in. What you are doing is creating a small, uncomfortable uncertainty in someone’s mind. Not fear, exactly. More like: the faint awareness that they do not fully know what you are capable of. This is a remarkably effective motivator for people to adjust their behaviour.
Step 5: Name and Shame, or Employ Legal Consequences
For cases where time, patience, and subtlety have all been exhausted, Gbemi offers clarity: “Threaten to call them out or arrest them.”
These are two distinct tools, and worth treating separately.
Calling them out is the social option. It is dragging them into the digital public square, the understanding that reputation is a currency too, and that continued non-payment may result in a certain kind of transparency. Many debts have been settled not because of legal consequences, but because someone’s cousin saw a post and called Big Mummy.
Arrest, or more precisely, involving formal channels, is the procedural option. It is slower, less satisfying, and probably involves paperwork. But it is real, and debtors who have entirely ignored the prior four steps sometimes find the word “lawyer” has an almost miraculous effect on their memory.
And then there is Ejiose, who adds a note of structural wisdom that belongs across all steps: “Let them know the reason why they should pay you back, especially for next time. And maybe call them out, but that should be the last option.”
This is the long game. You are educating someone on cause and effect, on the relationship between borrowing and trust, on why there will or will not be a next time. It is generous, really.
Step 6 (Nuclear Option): Spiritual Escalation
We have saved the most committed strategy for last.
Dunsin proposes the following: “going naked at 12 midnight and swearing for them till they send it back.”
We will not explain this. We will not contextualise it beyond saying that it exists in a realm where certain oaths, taken under certain conditions, carry weight that no court summons can match. It is, to put it plainly, a very last resort move, but one that signals to your debtorthat you are entirely serious and have nothing left to lose.
If you have reached Step 6, the money was never really the point. This is a matter of principle now.
Final Word
Lending money to people you know is, at its core, an act of trust. Sometimes that trust is honoured quietly and on time, and the friendship continues unscathed. Sometimes it is honoured eventually, after some or all of the above steps, and the friendship survives with a few new wrinkles. And sometimes the money is simply gone, absorbed into a silence so complete that it becomes its own answer.
In that last case, the only thing left to do is decide what the relationship, and the lesson, were worth.
And if you’re a chronic onigbese, please stop that bad behaviour.
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