#NairaLife: His Salary Grew 26x in 5 Years, but He’s Deeply Dissatisfied With His Success

Every week, Naijaonpoint seeks to understand how people move the Naira in and out of their lives. Some stories will be struggle-ish, others will be bougie. All the time, it’ll be revealing.

It was realising money was important because of how my parents mismanaged their wealth.

When I was about six or seven years old, I constantly heard stories about how my dad came back from overseas with bags of cash. We were living in a choice area of Lagos. We even had two houses, and were building another one in a nearby state. Our neighbours took vacations abroad. We didn’t, but I knew we had money.

The first time I handled actual money was when it all fell apart.

In 2006, when I was in Primary 4, my dad took a new wife and threw my mother, my siblings, and me out of the house.

I remember the event vividly: my sister was making custard, I was making toast, and we were watching cartoons. My uncles just showed up and told us to pack our things. They dropped us off at a beer parlour, and we sat there drinking Fanta like idiots, with our custard and toast packed inside Tupperware.

We (my mum and siblings) moved to another state to live with my grandmother. She had a small kiosk where she sold petty items like oils and groundnuts, and we helped her run it. I grew a habit of eating groundnuts by the handful because I loved them so much. 

Selling things at that shop was the first time I handled money. It clicked that selling more meant extra money for snacks, or that grandma would give us money to buy fried meat for our rice.

My dad had several ventures. Before moving back to Nigeria, he was a war veteran and engineer abroad, which was how he made a lot of money. When he returned, he started a massive industrial agricultural business: poultry, pig, and fish farming. 

He was the main supplier of chicken to high-end restaurants and fast-food chains. He also worked with beverage companies supplying flavourings for their juices.

Growing up, I remember boxes of chemicals filling his office. His farm was industrialised and automated, with processing lines and defeathering machines. My mum, who had been doing well working in a bank before they married, left her job to become a housewife and manage my dad’s business. She handled client acquisition and relations.

When their marriage crashed, my mum’s source of livelihood crashed with it. My dad was not a financially prudent person. Left alone to run the business, he completely mismanaged it, and the multimillion-naira business failed within a couple of years.

My mum got a job at a university and made decent money. While we didn’t starve, it was a stark contrast to the life we knew. My grandparents were also incredible, industrious people who helped raise us.

It taught me a few distinct things. For one, money is fleeting. On the other hand, I believe I can always make money. This isn’t entirely positive because it makes me fearless about starting over. I saw my mum reinvent herself, and even my dad made a decent living again despite his poor habits. I feel like there’s never a permanent endpoint; you can always rebuild.

I think the whole thing also made me too generous. Because I know money comes and goes, and because I lived through having absolutely nothing, I give heavily. If a friend calls to say they have no food, I will send money, often more than I should.

I’m realising now that I’ve been falling into the same trap as my parents. My mum was overly generous, which left her with nothing of her own, and my dad was just a poor spender.

My parents briefly reconciled after a few years, but he ruined things again and cost my mum the university job. That triggered about a decade of complete financial stagnancy for us. Things got much worse.

When he passed away in 2022, we didn’t have a relationship. He was not a good father or a good man. I’m almost 30 now, and I sometimes wonder if I could talk to him about money if he were alive. I basically had to raise myself financially, which made me hyper-independent, but it also means I have a lot of questions about navigating money and no one to ask.

In 2016, just before my second shot at uni. For context, I’d been admitted to the first university in 2013, but I dropped out in 2015 due to financial problems. 

My dad wouldn’t help with the fees, and my mum was struggling to find work. At that point, she’d moved us out of my grandparents’ to another state in the hopes of landing some business contracts. That didn’t work out, and we lived in a tiny, cramped one-bedroom apartment for years. I didn’t return to university until 2017. 

Anyway, back to the money part. 

I had started writing fiction and submitted a horror story to a competition. My entry won first place. The prize money totalled ₦76,000 and was paid via Western Union. At the time, we were deeply broke, so that was a massive amount of money for my family. I went to the bank near my house, and they gave me the money in a black nylon bag. 

It felt surreal because, as a kid, I used to carry briefcases and heavy bags of cash with my dad’s driver to pay farm workers. At that low point in my life, ₦76k was huge. I handed it all over to my mum to pay off some family debts.

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Somewhat. I won two more writing competitions later that year. Around that time, I completed my A-levels (IJMB) and scored 16 points, the highest possible score. I was the only one in my centre to hit it, and it got me direct entry to the university in 2017. 

While waiting for classes to resume, the proprietor of my A-level centre hired me to tutor students for ₦1,000 an hour, and I did four to six hours a week.

After he saw how good I was, he recommended me to a larger study centre in town, where I was paid ₦2,500 per hour and worked 6 hours a week. ₦18,000 a week was incredible money. 

When school resumed, I had to pause tutoring and only pick it back up during holidays and semester breaks.

In addition to tutoring, I made extra money by editing people’s short stories and novels. The income from this was erratic. Sometimes I’d get ₦10,000 for a short story. The highest I ever made was ₦75,000 for editing a 380-page book. 

None at all. Things were incredibly tight for my mum. I paid for my own school fees and accommodation. Thankfully, it was a public university, so school fees were only ₦16k a year, and a standard hostel bed was ₦8k, or up to ₦30k for a two-person room.

I relied entirely on income from freelancing and getting my fiction published. I’d get published about four times a year. Some places paid ₦50k or ₦100k, but many indie journals paid only $15-$20, or 0.05 cents per word. Plus, it’s a numbers game; I’d submit 100 stories, and maybe two would get accepted.

I had to learn to manage whenever the freelance gigs dried up. I lived on potatoes because they were cheap. Back then, ₦15k could get a student a massive grocery haul: milk, cornflakes, butter, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, toiletries, and even some chocolate bars. When I was completely broke, my friends and mentors would step in to help me, and I did the same for them whenever I had cash.

In 2019, things stabilised slightly. I landed three concurrent internships with literary organisations. They only paid about ₦20k/month combined, but it kept me afloat until the internships ended after Covid hit in March 2020. 

Peak suffering. It was the lowest point of my life. My mum, my siblings and I were stuck in that one-bedroom apartment, eating one meal a day. Our beds were on the floor, we had no wardrobes, and we fetched our water from a well.

But in September 2020, I got my first “big break”. An NGO put out an ad for a content creation and social media role. By then, I had four years of freelance writing and social media management under my belt. A prominent activist friend wrote me a recommendation letter. The NGO’s founder recognised my friend’s name, and during our first interview, she told me she loved my profile and hired me on the spot. My salary was ₦150k gross monthly, and ₦125k after deductions.

I was so happy, but mostly scared. It was my first proper corporate job, and I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was just excited that I had money now and things could finally be better for my family. I didn’t tell them my real salary, though. I told them I was earning ₦70k. One of my mentors taught me early on never to let anyone know exactly how much you earn.

I felt an intense sense of responsibility. My family had survived thick and thin together. In 2015, an uncle gifted my sister ₦99,000 to buy a Samsung S3 she really wanted, but she willingly handed the cash over to fund family needs instead. Going through that kind of hardship bonds you. I took it upon myself to pay for whatever I could.

So, I was practically giving away the entire ₦70k my family thought I was earning. Every month, I gave my two siblings ₦15k each, ₦20k to my mum and another ₦20k to support the house feeding and groceries.

I worked in that role for about a year before joining a media company in 2021. My role was still at the intersection of writing and content strategy. My salary bumped up to ₦200k/month. Again, I halved it and told my family I was earning ₦100k.

It was brutal. My classes started at 7.30 a.m. and ran until 12.30 p.m. I’d rush back to the hostel, grab lunch for 30 minutes, and log into work from 1.30 p.m. until midnight or 1 a.m. I was often exhausted, but incredibly proud. I loved the work, even if I didn’t always love the concept of a job.

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