TG Omori, known for being behind the camera, has opened up on how kidney failure pulled him off set at the height of his career, drained him financially, and forced him to accept that money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy time.
Speaking on the Afropolitan podcast, the music video director walked through the cost of dialysis, the depression of watching other people’s work drop while he could not create, and the strange mercy of being slowed down after fame followed him to New York.
ThankGod Omori Jesam, also called Boy Director, first made the illness public in August 2024 after a kidney transplant at St. Nicholas Hospital in Lagos failed. His only brother had donated the organ. He later spoke of going back into theatre more than once, healing from stitches, and listening to an internet that decided he had fallen off when he was simply fighting to stay alive. The new conversation does not reopen that chapter for pity. It puts a price on survival and a name on the other pain, the one that had nothing to do with the ward and everything to do with the work he loves.
“Money is actually important because I can’t lie to you, we’ve spent a lot of crazy money,” he said.
He explained that a regular dialysis session can cost about ₦50,000 to ₦70,000 in some hospitals, while his own care sat far higher because it was handled in a more private facility.
“Where I used to do mine, or where I do mine, was around 150 to 200K because it’s like exclusive.”
Patients, he added, sometimes need three sessions in a week.
“So that’s about 500K a week. So a minimum wage person is dead already on one session.”
He asked listeners to imagine waiting a year for a transplant and remaining on dialysis the entire time, with tests and medication stacked on top of the machine.
“So sometimes your bill might hit 200K per session. So in a week you’re probably looking at 600K. So if you calculate that in a year, 31 million.”
Even a salary of one million naira a month would not hold that line.
“You have to actually have money not just money, you have to have people that have money to also support you. So if you look at things like that, you understand that even though money can’t buy happiness, money can still buy some time.”
That warning is consistent with what he has said since last year. In August 2025 he looked at six months of medical bills and wrote that the total could buy two Mercedes GLE SUVs and a C300. Dialysis at more than ₦100,000 a session, sometimes three times a week, against a ₦70,000 minimum wage, brought him to tears in hospital because he could see no path for the ordinary patient.
The other wound was quieter and, for a director, harder to explain.
“The pain of not being able to create was a different level of pain. It was very depressing. I was just analysing videos coming out and shaking my head. I was like that injured player on the bench.”
He also said he felt God wanted to slow him down.
“I had already relocated to New York. The fame was getting so much.”
Demand had followed him across the water. Then he was the man on the sidelines, studying other people’s works, knowing he could not answer.
He has edged back toward the lens. The Seyi Vibez Shaolin video in 2025 was one public return after the failed transplant, and he has continued to talk about shooting as if every video could be the last.