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As dusk settles at his imaginary gate, Musa resumes his silent vigil. He has seen too many contradictions to be surprised. Yet, this one makes him chuckle ruefully. “So,” he mutters to himself, “a country that cannot protect its poor now wants to tax their survival. Truly, nothing wey Musa no go see for gate.” In moments like this, Musa remembers the rhetorical wisdom of Ezikeọba lore: ‘Ọ dụn ngwere ọyị, ọ ga-agba eshị ọtọ ene nwunye ye ọmụgọ?’ — ‘If all were well with the lizard, would he be stark naked while rendering postpartum cares to his wife?’ The proverb, rich in irony and pity, captures the helplessness that drives the lizard’s indecent exposure. It is not lack of decency but lack of choice. Applied to this context, the proverb unpacks the tragic inevitability of commodifying one’s body in a nation where survival itself has become an extreme sport. If all were well with Nigeria’s daughters and sons – if education were affordable, jobs accessible, wages livable, and dignity guaranteed – would anyone willingly trade intimacy for survival? Would they choose the perilous street over the safety of honest labour?
In all honesty, the sex workers are caught between the rock and a hard place. Sex work, in this light, is not a profession of preference but a symptom of despair, a desperate transaction born of economic suffocation. It is, in plain language, the hard way, the only way available in a system that abdicates its duty to protect and provide. The same hand that denies them jobs now stretches out to collect taxes from their struggles. Musa, observing from his post, can only sigh: “So, when hunger becomes policy, survival becomes taxable.” Musa’s gate is not merely a symbol of watchfulness, it is the frontier where ordinary Nigerians encounter the consequences of elite experimentation. The fuel subsidy is gone, the naira floats on turbulent tides, inflation gallops without bridle and hunger now walks the streets like a licensed trader, where the system predisposes the operators to expand its revenue base, not by taxing wealth or waste, but by taxing despair.
The ordinary Nigerian, like the proverbial lizard, is left naked in the scorching sun of survival, forced to make do with whatever remains of human dignity. If all were well with Nigeria, her daughters would not become breadwinners through barter of the body. The tragedy is not in their choices but in the conditions that make those choices inevitable. Therefore, the lizard’s nakedness is neither voluntary nor moral; it is cosmically ordained. Which brings us to a complementary Ezikeoba saying of even greater philosophical depth: “Ezechitoke kemer ijiji rube ye aga, maa ker ngwere n’eshi oto. (God the Creator made the housefly clothed, but fashioned the lizard naked, who emerged stark from the furnace of Creation.) This proverb introduces the cosmological understanding of ordained vulnerability – that some beings are born into hardship. The lizard’s struggle is not chosen; it is woven into his DNA. Any strategy he devises to live with that hardship is a form of adaptive resilience, not sin.
The lizard’s struggle is an inherited condition of being. Whatever strategies he devises to live with his nakedness are not sins but adaptive immunities, that is, survival instincts refined by necessity. Applied to Nigeria’s sex workers, this lore becomes a moral mirror. Their choices, however condemned, are less about depravity and more about desperate adaptation. In a system that strips citizens bare, survival itself becomes a divine negotiation. The proverb unveils a cosmic philosophy: that some beings are created to struggle as a condition of being. Their hardship is not self-inflicted but ontological. The lizard’s nakedness is his lot, not his fault; his resilience, his theology. So it is with Nigeria’s sex workers, products of a society that strips them bare yet blames them for their nakedness. Their trade, however condemned, is an act of survival, not sin, a reluctant dialogue between hunger and human instinct.
As Ezikeoba wisdom further cautions: “Ejig enya oma eje uka ekpere” (It is not without a cause that one leaves the old orthodox church for the mushroom one). So, too, no one in good conscience embraces sex work out of whim; it is a coerced vocation, born not of desire but of necessity. No one, in good conscience, wakes up and chooses prostitution as a career path. It is not vocation but survival, a desperate response to a society that locks every legitimate door and then condemns those who find unorthodox windows. In a country where hunger is legal and survival is criminalized, the body becomes the last negotiable asset – the ‘hard way, the only way. The 1979 epic film, “The Hard Way, the Only Way,” dramatizes the eternal human struggle for survival in a hostile world. Its thematic message, that endurance is sometimes the only path left, mirrors the predicament of Nigerian sex workers, who navigate the moral and economic labyrinth of a nation that offers no safety nets. Their trade is not a moral statement but an existential strategy: a reluctant inscription in the book of survival.
Borrowing from the 1986 martial arts classic, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” the creed of Nigeria’s underclass is simple, keep fighting or perish. The street hawker, the jobless graduate, the widow-turned-petty trader and the sex worker all live by this philosophy. Each day is a battle against despair. Their resilience is not heroic romanticism but raw necessity, a refusal to vanish quietly in a system that has long forgotten them. Each sunrise is a new battle against hunger, humiliation and hopelessness. Theirs is not courage born of choice, but defiance born of necessity, an instinctive protest against extinction.
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African literature and cinema have long mirrored these gendered agonies, the theatre of resilience where womanhood wrestles with survival. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) offers a literary echo of this resilience. Tambudzai, the protagonist, resists patriarchal and colonial suffocation through education and defiant perseverance. Like Tambu, the Nigerian sex worker embodies existential resilience, the audacity to live in defiance of a world that denies her legitimacy. Her survival is her protest; her endurance, her rebellion. If Tambu’s struggle represents the mental emancipation of the colonized woman, the Nigerian sex worker’s struggle represents the economic emancipation of the abandoned woman, forced to commodify what society refuses to dignify. Both navigate oppressive structures that criminalize their ambition while feeding on their subjugation.
Chika Unigwe’s “On Black Sisters’ Street” (2009) continues this narrative of coerced agency, illuminating the dark corridors of European sex trade, where African women, fleeing poverty, find themselves entangled in new chains of exploitation. These are the same Nigerian daughters who, if taxed at home, would become the tragic paradox of a government profiting from their humiliation. Buchi Emecheta’s “The Joys of Motherhood” exposes the suffocating burden of womanhood under cultural and economic bondage, a sobering reminder that even motherhood, society’s most sacred role, can become a theatre of sorrow when survival is unguaranteed. In Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim’s short film “Oshimiri,” we encounter the transgender sex worker, praying, loving, and building a family in the shadows of Lagos. Oshimiri’s story reclaims humanity from the margins; it tells us that even in the twilight zones of societal rejection, the desire to love and belong endures. And in the grim Ghanaian documentary “Welcome to Sodom” (2018), the e-waste graveyard becomes a living metaphor for postcolonial decay, human beings scavenging among the ruins of technology, just as sex workers in Nigeria scavenge among the ruins of morality for fragments of survival.
If Victor Hugo were alive today, perhaps he would find in Nigeria the living reincarnation of “Les Misérables.” His tragic heroine, Fantine, cast out by the very society she sought to serve, mirrors the plight of countless Nigerian sex workers, who navigate the dark alleys of survival. Like Fantine, they sell what they must to live another day in a land that has monetized despair. In Les Misérables, Hugo writes, “Where the eyes of a woman filled with tears see only a void, the heart of a man should fill it with justice.” But here, the void is filled not with justice but with taxes. The system now proposes to levy the income of those who trade in the only currency left to them, their own flesh. It is as if Fantine, after selling her hair and teeth, were asked to pay VAT on the proceeds. The parallel is haunting. Fantine’s tragedy was not her sin but her society’s hypocrisy. Likewise, the Nigerian state, by criminalizing prostitution while seeking to tax it, reveals a moral schizophrenia, condemning the body yet coveting its earnings. It is an irony too rich for even Hugo’s pen, that the Republic of Les Misérables now has a franchise in Abuja. Yet, through the fog of hypocrisy shines the stubborn flame of resilience. Like Fantine, Nigerian sex workers embody that tragic form of courage born from necessity, the will to live in a world that denies one the right to live decently. They are not heroines by design but by endurance, living proof that, in Nigeria, even despair must pay tax before it dies.
All these works share a luminous thread: existential resilience, the indomitable will to live, love, and endure in defiance of systems that should nurture but instead destroy. In the lexicon of African survival, there is no luxury of retreat. The 1979 film The Hard Way, the Only Way captured that tragic credo: survival, even through indignity, is still survival. For the Nigerian sex worker, each night’s labour is both rebellion and lamentation, a silent protest against an economy that sells hope by the ounce and despair by the ton. Like Tambudzai, like Unigwe’s sisters, like Emecheta’s Nnu Ego, they persist, bodies battered but spirits unbroken. Their endurance, like the lizard’s naked dance in the sun, is both tragedy and testimony.
Again, let’s pivot to the irony of monetized morality. To tax prostitution in a society that breeds it through neglect is the crowning irony of moral inversion. It is to criminalize despair and commercialize it in the same breath — to play Pontius Pilate with one hand and tax collector with the other. If fiscal responsibility is the goal, let government first tax its own excesses, the convoys of corruption, the bloated allowances, renovations and renaming, the ghost employments that haunt public service. For until Nigeria learns to tax greed before it taxes hunger, for until ‘grid collapse’ turns to ‘greed collapse,’ it will remain a country feeding on its own shadow. Another pivot yet again, as we turn to the transition from despair to dignity in order to reclaim the human. The Ezikeoba proverbial lore offers the final word: not all nakedness is shameful, and not every deviation from orthodoxy is sin. Sometimes, both are the body’s way of surviving in an unjust world. Yes; both are survival reflexes, divinely permitted strategies for navigating a world of cosmic imbalance.
Finally, if President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda must bear any moral fruit, it must begin with restoring human dignity, not taxing human desperation. Hope cannot be renewed where hunger has become a taxable asset and survival a fiscal offence. If the Agenda is to transcend political sloganeering, it must first clothe the naked and feed the hungry, not strip them further in the name of taxation. It must transform Musa’s weary mutterings into genuine hope, that one day, the gate he guards will open not to another absurdity, but to justice, equity, and humane governance. Until then, Musa remains our national conscience at the gate, silent, observant, and unshakably resigned – watching, sighing, and shaking his head at the unending parade of absurdities that pass for policy. Until then, Musa remains by his gate, sentinel of systemic paradoxes – shaking his head as he mutters the nation’s eternal refrain: “Nothing wey Musa no go see for gate” – that sardonic refrain that captures the cumulative fatigue of a people constantly ambushed by the unintended consequences of governance. Until then, the gate remains crowded, the drama unending, and Musa, our eternal sentinel, keeps watching, muttering, and shaking his head at the newest scene in his beloveth country’s grand sitcom.
• Prof Agbedo writes from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
