The Lagos high-income conundrum

In October 2014, I was unhappy.

Fresh out of NYSC and a year+ into my Nigerian adventure, I was broke. Now I have to warn you, if you don’t like being reminded about how privileged some people are, then you probably don’t want to read the rest of this article because it will trigger you. With that said, I have to point out that my “broke” was relative. I was living with my parents in the 8-bedroom mansion at Ogudu GRA where I grew up, and I was not spending money on literally anything. Dad even used to buy me a full tank of fuel every Sunday.

I had just resumed my first proper job in Nigeria at BHM Group as an executive intern and I was getting paid N40,000 a month. I considered this utterly scandalous because I was coming out of a 2-year post university period that had seen me do just about every type of work under the sun. I had sold wall cavity insulation for £15,000 P.A. gross, I had worked at Iqbal Poultry factory in Wythenshawe as a factory floor operative, I had stacked shelves for £9.50/hr at Asda WalMart and I had done minimum wage call center work for Hermes Parcelnet in Morley.

I had also worked “real” jobs at Thomas Cook, Direct Group and KPMG paying in excess of £20,000 P.A., which averaged at about £1,500 per month net of deductions. It’s not as though I was particularly living the life in the U.K., except you count the luxury converted flat I lived in. Which my dad paid for, ahem.

Expectations, expectations

Basically, I had a lot of expectations with regard to money when I came back to Nigeria. I had a UK qualification and some solid experience, and at the same time I was Mr “Can-Do,” without any of the attitude problems that allegedly afflicted fellow IJGB’s trying to build a career in Nigeria. I had attacked the BHM interview process like a man possessed. Not only did I crack the brief I was assigned, but I took it a step further and even designed a video commercial for the client.

I wasn’t surprised to get the job, but I was less than impressed with the N40,000 offer. It got worse after I resumed and I realised that all of my colleagues who had completed the 6-month probationary period were comfortably earning 3 or 4 times that. After 6 months of N40,000, I guess I had learned a bit of humility, and so the prospect of earning N160,000/month looked extremely tantalizing before my eyes. In my mind, N160,000/month would solve all my cashflow problems. I would always have enough money to do whatever I wanted.

Before the confirmation letter even came, I had already planned out the flat I wanted to move into, the vacation I wanted to take, all of that stuff. None of that happened. It wasn’t that the N160,000 didn’t go further than the N40,000. It was that new things that I never spent money on before started to come up. I’d have some trouble with my car and instead of going to mooch off dad, I’d go withdraw my own damn N20,000 to replace the condenser. But hey, that stuff adds up! Nobody told me that.

Reality is disappointing

Before getting it alone in 2015, a household income of N260,000 seemed like plenty to live on. Nobody tells you that once you are truly on your own, you will become price sensitive about everything you never gave a foggiest about before, down to the price of goddamn onions. Nobody tells you that those dreams about “saving N150,000 every month” from that income would only be possible if you literally eat bread and water and trek to work everyday. Nobody tells you that life in Lagos, when not subsidised by family, is a completely different ball game to life in this city when you are running under your own steam.

The generator? You have to ration the number of hours it stays on. Food? You have to start eating three times a day, as against just eating whenever you feel like. Going out? Hahahahahahahaha… Maybe… Mobile data? Oh dear. Fuel and car maintenance? The car has about 50 things wrong with it right now, but we’ll manage it like this until the end of the month. And then until the end of next month. And possibly the one after that too.

Around this time, I made a great career move, exchanging the “Manager” title at a dingy digital agency in Lekki for “Writer” on an exciting new TV show called ‘The Other News with Okey Bakassi’. When I saw the money they were offering, my eyes nearly fell out of my head — it was more than I had ever seen since coming back to Nigeria. Let’s just saw it blew past the N300,000 mark and then some. I had made it! A man was gonna be rich!

A month went by. I quickly realised that I was still price sensitive about onions and tomatoes. I was still glancing anxiously at prices on the menu whenever I went to a restaurant. I mean technically I had more money, but it didn’t feel like it. I very quickly found out that just because you had three-quarters of a million in your account three weeks ago does not mean you will have even a third of that amount left now. Where did it go? Who knows?

I started pushing to get more freelance copywriting work in addition to my work at Channels TV and in March 2018, my monthly income brushed N1m for the very first time. And yet, I was still broke. Somehow. At this point, I made the discovery that so many other people have made. I realised that Lagos – Nigeria in fact – offers package lifestyles for every income bracket, and you will conform to the lifestyle of your bracket whether you like it or not. In other words, as your income goes up, so will your expenses. Trying to consistently save money in an environment set up to extract maximum price for minimum value is like trying to outrun a treadmill.

Where does that leave us? I have no idea.