Musa Jibril, Kate Halim And Vivian Onyebukwa
When a drunk says: “I may be drunk but I have not lost my senses,” know that the issue in question is not a joking matter. That was exactly the case on the night of Friday, April 26, 2019, at the Dopemu axis of Lagos-Abeokuta expressway. The time was a few minutes to midnight, and a handful of commuters were stranded with no commercial buses on the road. Suddenly a jeep parked by them and the driver shouted “Toll-gate, Sango Otta, N200.”
None of the commuters responded. That was when the drunk gave the verdict: “Even in my right senses why would anyone use a tear-rubber jeep to do kabu kabu?”
The reporter and a second person joined six others in the jeep. “I knew they were all afraid. It doesn’t make a sense that a jeep is being used as a cab. They probably thought I am a ritualist,” the driver explained.
For the benefit of doubt, he showed his ID. He was a worker at Equity firm in the Alausa area of Ikeja. “I close by 5 pm but hang around till 7 before coming to Ota, and pick passengers along the way. When it is late, transport fare is often high. I charged N350 from there to Sango. Sometimes, I make between N5, 000 and N8, 000. That helps to fuel my car and I am able to get to work the next day; as for salary, we finish it one week after payday. So, I have to find a way to get to work the next day and still do some fine-boy stuff. Nobody would believe me if I tell them I have no money. My brother, in this present Nigeria, you have to think outside the box otherwise you become a casualty of this hard time.”
There have been strident cries of hardship in Nigeria in the past three years. From the common man to the clergy; from the politicos to traditional rulers, everyone agreed that Nigerians are going through extraordinary hardship long before the damning reports from Brookings Institution and IMF that confirmed Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world.
Officially, the adverse economic situation was explained away as due to the recession. One year after the government declared the country out of the wood, there is hardly a reprieve for Nigerians. The citizenry is still facing a daily survival grind that is as traumatizing as it is enervating to the average Nigerian.
Harrowing tales of survival
Without any doubt, Nigerians are facing one of the most difficult times in the country’s history. The hard time is here and everyone is caught in the race to survive.
For, Ayodele Oshikokhai, 55, hard time is one of the facts of life, but the hardship of the past three years is unlike anything he has experienced. Suffering time he calls it. “And do you know what makes it worse?” he asks. “Hunger.”
His stories add up to a riveting vignette of the grind the average Nigerian faces. The father of four has worked most of his life as a journalist for various print media, In boom time, he supplemented his earning by doubling as an advert executive, earning healthy commissions from adverts he got from long-term friends and benefactors who work in two major banks.
Three years ago when the recession bared its fang, those boons dried up and he found himself unable to put food on the table.
“Previously, I could afford a bag of rice, half bag of beans and three or so buckets of gari every month; but from early 2016, it became difficult. The corporate adverts from the banks stopped coming. Then the magazine I wrote for folded up. Every day, prices of basic commodities kept going up. To worsen the matter, one of my sons got an admission into the university.”
Oshikokhai, a widower, says he needed no soothsayer to tell him this is a desperate situation that called for desperate measure.
“I called the children, all four of them, and told them what we are going to do; they protested, but I drummed some senses into their head, “ he says.
What did he do? He got himself employed as security personnel at Kendricks Guards. His son who got admission had to postpone going to the university for one year and instead took up casual work. The family as a collective readjusted their reality.
He says: “I consider myself fortunate getting the security job. It is what put food on the table to date. Right now, it is a matter of survival and this job guarantees our survival, me and my children and my 97-year-old mother.”
Currently, the family seems to have stabilized. Oshikokhai however, says it is only him that knows how hard the shoe pinches. He gives a clue: “In the past three years, I have not been able to buy a shirt or shoe, neither a singlet, not slippers. We just live from hand to mouth.”
Joseph Hunyingbo is another veteran of this hard time. When the time was good, he prided himself in having multiple streams of income. He was foreman for the construction arm of a real estate company and also a supervisor at a thriving paint factory in Apapa. As the economy haemorrhaged, he lost both jobs. And by late 2017, he was confined to home by the resulting austerity.
“My wife is a trader, but her earnings can hardly feed the family,” he says.
Hunyingbo recalls the most harrowing experience of hardship.
“There was a day we had nothing to eat all day. Everybody I called that night said they had nothing. All we needed was just N1,000. We went to bed hungry, me and my wife. As for the kids, we were able to scrape some things for them.”
He continues: “Two days later, I decided to go to Apapa to find something to do. Unfortunately for me, it was a bad day. I got nothing and my transport fare took me as far as Iyana Iba. I resorted to begging danfo drivers to give me a lift to Badagry. That was the day I knew how rude these Lagos boys could be. At last, I had to beg some women at Iyana, Iba. First, I begged for food, akara (fried beans) because I’d not eaten since morning. The woman took pity on me and gave me N500. The last time I cried was when I lost my mother in 1983, but that night, I cried, real tears. I was humbled.”
Hunyingbo explains how Nigerians are scathed by this hardship. “In the past, if you lose a job, you are likely to find another job within a month. That is what makes Lagos tick. But in this current hardship, there’s no job anywhere. That is what makes it the worst hardship in recent time.”
At 52, he now works occasionally as a bus conductor along the Badagry-Mile 2 route. “These young Lagos drivers are brash and unruly,” he concedes, “but I tolerate them.”
The real reason behind his becoming a bus conductor: “On a good day, I am assured of at least N3000 from plying the Badagry-Mile 2 route. However, if I have a job in town, I can easily get around and back home without paying for transport because all the drivers now know me. “
His final shot: “This is the kind of hardship that breaks a man.”
What about a woman? Talk to Helen Ojo and you would find that the womenfolk too did not fare any better.
A native of Abia State, she married Olusola Ojo, a Yoruba man. Ojo was an artisan who provided for his family of one child and his pregnant, fulltime housewife partner. Then he died barely five years into their marriage, his death coinciding with the birth of their second child, a daughter. Unfortunately, it was at the onset of the recession. Suddenly, Helen found herself in trouble, saddled with responsibilities beyond her capacity, ranging from feeding two children to paying their school fees to paying their rent.
Then she had no choice but to work. Unfortunately, job opportunities shrunk as recession bites hard.
“Things were so bad I could not pay my house rent, so I had to squat with my mother in her one-room apartment in Ajegunle,” she recounts.
She also found it difficult to pay for her children’s school fees.
As a result, she withdrew her children from a private school and enrolled them in a public school.
She has to do all manner of menial jobs to take care of her children. Eventually, she settled for nanny jobs.
During her off-days as a nanny, she goes about seeking cleaning jobs or any domestic job for a fee. She also helps caterers who are contracted to cook for big occasions. That has been her story of survival thus far. “I am not ashamed to do any work as long as I can take care of my children”, she says.
Her other survival measures include shunning purchases of Aso Ebi or spending money on the elaborate hairdo. “The clothes I have I try to keep them neat and look decent. No new clothes for me for now,” she says.
Also, she keeps a tight rein on how the family feed.
“I measure their (children) food and ensure that they do not overfeed or waste any food,” she explains.
The untold stories
Everyone who spoke with Saturday Sun thought their situation was not the worst. They recalled worse situations and horrible circumstances they had witnessed about neighbours, acquaintances and strangers. The stories are diverse; their common denomination was excruciating hardship.
From Oshikokhai comes a disturbing perspective. He opines that the situation has made many housewives to tread the path of infidelity, as some of them are pushed to the wall and had no choice than to trade sexual favours for financial gratifications.
His words: “I have seen two instances in my area in Agbado. One woman who is a neighbour approached me and told me a touching story of how her husband had been jobless for a year and the family was almost starving. She needed a token for them to feed that night. She asked for my help and suggested she could pay me back with sexual favours. I told her there was no need for that. I gave her what I could afford. A few days later she was back with the same request––and the same offer. I had to threaten her, that I will report her to her husband. But after she left, I was so sad, I sat there crying. I know this is a woman who in good time was a good wife, a woman with pride.
“The other incidence also involved another housewife whom everyone know was sleeping with a young bachelor in the neighbourhood. Some men became angry and decided to hint the husband about his wife’s waywardness, but to their surprise, her husband told them that he was aware and had no problem with that. It meant both husband and wife made the arrangement.”
He concludes on an ominous note: “I have never seen anything like this in my life, this extraordinary hardship.”
Hunyingbo says, he has heard so many bad stories he sometimes wondered fearfully if Nigeria is headed for the kind of terrible times described in the Bible in Deuteronomy 23 where people cursed by God resorted to eating their children for food.
He supports his story with a harrowing encounter inside a bus.
“I was on a bus to Badagry at about past 9 pm. There was this Yoruba woman who called her daughter on phone, after asking for her siblings, a total of five children. She told the daughter she would arrive home late. At the time we were just at Iyana Ishashi. “Go and collect one Spag and three eggs, one Maggi and Ororo igo kan (from a neighbour). Tell her I will give her the money tomorrow morning. Cook and let them eat before they sleep. You take one egg, then share the other two for them.”
According to Hunyingbo, everyone in the bus listened to that poignant telephone conversation and the follow-up monologue in which the woman berated God and raved about being unfortunate to have been born into “this accursed country.”
“Everyone of us who understand Yoruba understood her ravings, and we all relapsed into our private thoughts. For me, it was like, ‘so after all, I am not the only one in this troublesome time’.”
How others survive
Everyone has become impecunious it is no longer a shame to beg, observes Saheed Fuhad, a real estate worker. “People beg openly now: at the motor park, in the market place at ATM machine and even on the social media. Sometimes, they get on your nerve with their insistence, but the truth is times are really hard and not everyone has found a way to cope with the hardship.”
Is there really a foolproof way of surviving this hard time? There is no tried and tested strategy. However, some women are braving the odds by becoming food sellers.
An example is Titilope Ogunjimi who lost her job last year.
Even though she sells fabrics on the side, losing the main source of her livelihood strained her financially.
Ogunjimi stayed at home for over six months still selling fabrics but people started owing her money a lot and she needed to make money to sustain her family. She turned to the one thing that came easily to her––cooking.
“After staying idle for over six months and being owed by neighbours and friends alike, I turned to mobile cooking as a means of making money to keep body and soul together,” says Ogunjimi.”
On a good day, she cooks five different foods for her growing customers from Facebook and Instagram. She relies mostly on referrals from her customers who spread the news about her delicious food.
Selling food has kept her busy and also helped her plan her life well, she tells Saturday Sun. The money she makes from cooking and selling food has sustained her family for over a year now. She notes that even though she has some challenges getting food across to some of her customers, the patronage has been encouraging.
Jacqueline Ibeh runs Ada Amichi Kitchen. She has only one motivation for focusing on cooking food for sale. Money. “Given the way the economy is going, one has to do a business that will constantly bring money and cooking does just that, “ she says.
“This business is people-oriented. You deal with people a lot and because people are different, you can’t please everyone even if you put in your best. I have had issues with some customers and delivery guys. But this business brings me money, so it’s good,” Ibeh adds.
Vivian Kokoma, owner of Kokoma’s Pot Catering has been cooking during church events and for her friends for over ten years. “It is a hobby that has become my livelihood,” she declares.
When the recession arrives, she was already in a safe harbour.
Her clients, she notes, are everyday people who don’t have time to prepare their own food. “My clients are the working class wife, the stay-at-home mom who is busy with other things, the single father, the divorcee, the widower, the bachelor, the spinster, and companies.”
What that means is that on a daily basis, she is assured of decent earnings.
Cooking is lucrative, Kokoma says, “but before you start reaping profits, you must have re-invested in the business many times to ensure the smooth running of the business.”
There is also Grace Enoabasi, alias Queen of Afang Soup, who turned to selling cooked food when it dawned on her that she needed more than what her so-called profession could give her in order to survive the tough time in the country.
Today, selling food has kept her financially afloat. It gave her financial independence and in this current debilitating situation of the country, that is a big boost for her.
“I sell soups to people. I particularly cater to those who love Akwa Ibom delicacies. This is my niche and I stick to it. I make the best Afang and Atama soup you have ever tasted, she boasts.”
Time is tough. And many complain of no jobs. But she has a different worldview. Enobasi’s patrons include men, women, couples and companies alike. The orders she receives on a daily basis can at times become overwhelming.
Where others are seeing a half-empty glass, Enobasi sees a glass cup that is half full.
“The most important thing is that I am making money from my food business to take care of myself and my family,” she says.