Award-winning Nigerian singer Temilade Openiyi, popularly known as Tems, has spoken about the career she might have chosen if music had not become the turning point of her life.
She shared this during an interactive session with fans on Wednesday via X.
A fan asked her, “If music didn’t work, what else do you think you would be doing today?” and Tems replied, “I might have been an accountant or a mathematics teacher.”
The response surprised many of her followers, who often see her as one of the most creative voices in Afrobeats. It also opened up fresh conversation about how close she came to living a totally different life before fame found her.
The singer has never hidden the fact that her journey into music was not planned from childhood and that she had explored other paths before finally choosing music.
This new revelation comes months after Tems made global headlines in February when she won the Best African Music Performance category at the 2025 Grammy Awards.
She secured the award with her song Love Me JeJe at the seventy-seventh edition of the Grammys held at the Crypto dot com Arena in Los Angeles.
The win marked her second career Grammy.
She beat strong nominations, including Tomorrow by Yemi Alade, MMS by Asake featuring Wizkid, Sensational by Chris Brown featuring Davido and Lojay, and Higher by Burna Boy. The category itself is still new, introduced in 2024 when South African star Tyla won the first edition with her hit song Water.
Tems entered the 2025 ceremony with three nominations, bringing her total career nominations to eight.
She was also nominated for Best Global Music Album for Born in the Wild and Best R and B Song for Burning. The multiple nominations, combined with her win, strengthened her reputation as one of the most recognised Nigerian artistes on the global stage.
Before this level of fame, Tems worked as a digital marketer. She resigned from the job in January 2018 because she wanted to pursue music full-time.
That decision shaped everything that followed. In November, she released a surprise extended play titled Love Is a Kingdom, a seven-track project that blends Afrobeats, alt-R&B, and her signature introspective sound.
Her major breakthrough arrived in 2020 when she featured on Wizkid’s track Essence. The song quickly became a worldwide anthem and later climbed to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 after Canadian singer Justin Bieber joined the remix. The global success of Essence turned Tems into an international star and opened the door for collaborations, endorsements, Grammy nominations and her eventual Grammy wins.
