#NairaLife: After Relocating Twice, She’s Back in Nigeria and Deeply Embarrassed About Her Finances

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.

When I was about five or six years old, my parents had just separated, and I was living with my mother. 

I remember her coming home with crisp stacks of ₦200 notes. It was a big deal because the ₦200 denomination had just been released. That was my very first memory of money, but the most impactful one happened when I was 9.

My mum randomly announced that my sister and I had to start taking public transport to and from school. Before then, we took the school bus or went with friends. My mum explained that, since she only had one car, she had to drive to work and simply couldn’t afford a driver or the school bus.

My mum was raising three kids by herself, but up until then, I never felt we were lacking anything. It was the first time I realised that you need money in life.

They separated when I was five years old, so I don’t remember much, but I know we had a few more things. 

I have pictures of my summer vacations abroad, and I imagine we lived better, but I really didn’t feel much of a difference. My dad was a businessman and had more money than my mum, who was a civil servant. 

My mum was incredible, though. She sheltered us and made sure we never suffered.  We wore great clothes, had toys, and packed lunches for school. When she travelled for work, she would take catalogues from different stores and ask us to circle the things we wanted. Then she’d buy them. I don’t know how she managed to provide for us, but she did. 

Things changed again when I was 10.

My siblings and I went to live with my dad. I didn’t know why at the time, but apparently, he argued that he would give us a better education. My mum was facing civil service housing restructuring and couldn’t get subsidised housing, so she agreed. One holiday, we went to visit him, and we just never moved back.

Financially, it was a massive upward shift. We moved from a semi-government missionary school to an elite private school in Lagos with an American curriculum. My peers were the children of governors, politicians, and captains of industry. They were definitely more “ajebutter” than I was. 

My dad was rich, but he ensured we did our chores and ran errands. Many of my classmates didn’t even know how to take an okada or go to the market to blend pepper. The exposure I got from living with my dad, coupled with noticing how sheltered my classmates were, led me to the first thing I did for money in secondary school.

My friend and I bought packs of gum and sweets to resell in school. In the market, a piece could cost ₦5, and we’d sell it for ₦20 or ₦30. The profit margins were insane. My classmates had no idea since they didn’t even know the actual price. 

Interestingly, I didn’t need the money. I got a weekly allowance plus school lunch, so my friend and I spent the extra cash on stuff like lip gloss, CDs and imported snacks. We did this “business” on and off throughout secondary school. It was lowkey, though; the school frowned on it.

I graduated from secondary school in 2011 and moved to the Middle East for university.

Some of my half-siblings were already in the country, so settling in wasn’t difficult. My dad paid my tuition, and my stepmum stocked us up on dry goods and groceries at the start of every semester. My monthly pocket money was about ₦40,000 (after conversion from the local currency), which was enough, since everything else was covered. 

However, though I didn’t need to work, I tried my hand at a wild number of hustles in uni. The first one was in my second year when I had a stint selling fabrics.

We were planning a cultural show at the university, and the African students were looking for traditional textiles. I knew the big markets because I’d visited them once with my mum. So, I found a dealer who sold Ankara and lace, made bulk purchases, and resold them to other students at a markup.

Around the same time, I started mixing my own body butters and soaps. My skin looked great, people noticed, and I turned it into a small dorm-room business, making about $140 a month. I did that on and off in my second year.

I didn’t stop there. I also got heavily into wigs and hair extensions. I watched YouTubers buy hair directly from China via AliExpress. I ordered some, coloured it and made a custom unit for myself. An Ethiopian girl on campus loved it and asked if I could do her sew-in weave. I had never done one in my life, but I knew how to sew. It took me six hours, but it came out beautifully.

Soon, I was charging around $30 per style for weaves and crochet hair. I also started selling high-quality human hair extensions. I would source the hair for $200 and sell it to them for $450 to $500. I did that throughout my time in uni, and even for some time after. 

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I was working multiple angles. In my final year, I dropped my course load to three classes per semester and picked up two on-campus jobs, earning an extra $330 per month. 

I even took an unpaid off-campus editorial role at an international magazine, trying to position myself for a corporate path after switching from a technical major to a social sciences major.

I went hard because I desperately wanted to ensure that when I graduated, I wouldn’t have to look to my parents for financial support. 

2016. I landed a graduate trainee role at an insurance company about a month after. My salary was equivalent to $1,200/month. I didn’t pay rent because I lived with my sister, so it was enough for transport, groceries, and going out. But I only stayed at the job for three months.

There were four trainees: two guys and two girls. A male peer and I were the top performers. When it came time to offer full-time positions, management approached him first with a low offer, which he rejected to pursue his master’s degree.

A week later, they offered me the role at an even lower salary. I felt completely insulted and quit on the spot. It was a terrible financial decision in hindsight. I ended up without a stable, full-time job for nearly three years.

I entered the freelance trenches. I picked up photography skills from my campus job and started shooting weddings, portraits, and events. I charged about $200 per hour. Some months, I made $800 to $1,000. In one exceptional month, I made $8,000 because I shot gigs back-to-back. I also did some border-buying, shipping fabrics to a friend who ran a fashion line in the US. I did a lot of odd jobs, really.

In late 2017, my sister woke me up one morning and told me, “You have to start paying your half of the rent.” 

Our rent was about $1,000 a month. It was the tough love I needed. I pivoted to social media consulting for brands and restaurants to secure repeatable, monthly retainers. In early 2018, my sister and I launched a social media consultancy.

It was going well until clients started defaulting on payments. At one point, we were being owed about $11,000. Entrepreneurship is truly the ghetto. Then, in mid-2018, my dad passed away.

Thank you. I was grieving, exhausted, and emotionally drained. I was already in Nigeria when he passed, and I figured I could just stay here and live in his house rent-free. 

So, after the burial, I temporarily returned abroad to officially wrap up the agency with my sister, and then in August 2018, I moved back to Lagos.

It felt like a soft landing initially. My stepmum and family got me a car. They also wanted me to work at the family printing factory, but I refused. I was a creative marketing person; I couldn’t picture myself working in a factory.

Social media marketing was booming, so I went on Twitter, found an opening, went through a few interviews, and got a job by October. The salary was ₦150k/month.

I quickly realised that ₦150k in Lagos was hardly enough for anything. Before my car was fully sorted, I was spending ₦5,000 per trip on cab rides from the mainland to the island, which drained my finances.  Even without paying rent, my salary evaporated — a full tank of fuel was roughly ₦8,000 a week. 

I was still trying to shop on ASOS and go out for brunch with my international mindset, and I was actively dipping into the $5,000 savings I brought back from the Middle East. 

By December, I went to my family’s company and pitched a remote marketing strategy role to help them expand a product. They agreed and paid me an additional ₦150k. Now I was making ₦300k/month, but it still wasn’t cutting it. I wanted my own apartment, and Lagos was aggressively draining my mental health. I hated waking up at 5 a.m., battling traffic, and sleeping in my car before the office opened. On top of that, political shifts in 2019 made me feel like I was wasting my life.

Because of my residency status in the Middle East, I had to return to the country every six months to keep my visa active. In March 2019, completely fed up with Lagos wahala, I bought a one-way ticket and flew back to the Middle East with no concrete plan.

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