The Nave · About
One letter, from the door to the crossing.
He has answered to many names. What follows is for whoever arrived here looking for any of them.
Temitayo Ezekiel Olayiwola — also Cotek Temi, Temi Cotek, Temitayo Cotek, Cotek Temitayo, Omogbolahan, Kadiri, and simply Cotek — was born under more names than most men keep, and chose to keep all of them. The fact has been useful. It has also been honest. He grew up Nigerian; studied in Bangalore, India; and made a home in Ras Al Khaimah, in the United Arab Emirates. He learned early, and across three continents, that plurality was not the opposite of integrity.
By trade he is an environmentalist. He spent years at Action International Services as a Senior Water Quality Analyst, studying water and wastewater treatment systems — the kind of work where the numbers and the smell rarely agree, and you learn which one to trust. He now leads the environment division at AMRO, providing environmental solutions across the UAE and the GCC: management plans, compliance, advisory. He is a member of Emirates Nature–WWF, and a certified diver. The reef on weekends. The ledger on Mondays. The same hand on both.
He is also the founder of Cotek App FZ-LLC, registered at RAKEZ in Ras Al Khaimah — a small software studio that builds tools around stewardship and accountability — a household ledger, a project workspace, a travel journal, a deacon’s desk, a poetry garden. Each one is a ledger of a kind.
He is a published author of three books — the Life vs Love trilogy (Orchids and Tamarind, 2018; Infinity Wall, 2020) and The Cerulean Monster (2021, written across 113 days in early 2021). They live on Amazon, Bol, Google Play, Everand and OpenLibrary. He is a poet (AllPoetry, and his own poems.cotek.app); a researcher (ResearchGate, Academia); a photographer (Unsplash, where he posts as @cotek); and a Bible teacher at RAK Church. He is a husband. On Instagram, the handle life_vs_love_ is named for the trilogy.
The five letters of COTEK are five of his names — Chimera, Omogbolahan / Olayiwola, Temitayo, Ezekiel, Kadiri — and the word, in the language he was given, means hope. The building you are standing in is built around that fact.
Same person. Many lives. One ledger.
Where to look next