In 2020, I stumbled on the phrase “moral idiot,1” derived from the Greek root of idiot, meaning a private person or someone not in the public eye.

Essentially, a “moral idiot” is someone in a public-facing role who doesn’t realise or care about how their actions—or inactions—affect others.

After reading this, I started to reflect on the many ways I’d been a moral idiot in my life. This reflection made me wonder: What is the opposite of a moral idiot?

The answer, I realised, is someone who cares deeply. Someone who goes out of their way, in a sort of maddening manner, when they should ideally have no reason to care and would be “justified” in not caring. Someone who treats every task—no matter how mundane—with respect akin to worship.

That’s where Mama Balo comes in. Mama Balo, my latest documentary with Kayode, is about someone who cares deeply about her job—the opposite of a moral idiot.

She is a toilet cleaner in Nigeria, where blue-collar workers are often overlooked and underpaid. Yet, she approaches her work with an incredible dedication that is rare for any job, let alone one society deems “unimportant.”

One vivid example of her work ethic comes from a day when she noticed a drainage that wasn't part of her duties had clogged. She didn't walk past it. She didn't say, "It's not my problem." Instead, she spent over an hour carefully clearing it [with her hands], ensuring the space was functional for others.

Her dedication made us ask: Why does Mama Balo care so much about her job? And is it useful—or even fair—to ask others to care this deeply when they’re underpaid and overlooked?

These questions lie at the heart of what we set out to capture in our documentary.

Mama Balo challenges everything we think we know about work ethic. She embodies the belief that any job can be dignified if approached with respect. A point James Somers echoes when he says that “no job is too low not to warrant care because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world.”

Beyond all this serious hand-holding, Mama Balo is also a secret documentary about joy—the joy of work and relationships, joy that’s richly and deeply independent of money. The joy that comes from finding meaning in a job because you respect it.

This film marks a shift for us. With The Gravediggers, our first documentary, we avoided moralizing. With Mama Balo, we’re leaning into it. We want to be didactic. We want to wring out global implications. Most importantly, we want you to care.

Through her story, we hope to challenge how you see work, dignity, and responsibility. If Mama Balo can find pride and meaning in her work, what excuse do the rest of us have?

If you’ve read this far, thank you. We’re currently raising money to give Mama B a retirement nest egg as she gets older and can no longer do her job.

If you’d like to donate to this, pls find the link here. Every amount counts and nothing is too small - thank you!

1

Idiot explanation from Merriam-Webster

One could begin with the smell of rotting refuse from the three garbage trucks in front of the abandoned sports centre at Rowe Park. Or start with the gibberish scribbled on the road partition from Sabo-Yaba all through Herbert Macaulay Way. But the old man, stationed at the gate of the old library adjacent to Rowe Park, barely registers these. 

Instead, he walks silently down the road, a fixture in his Adidas tracksuit. He leaps over the concrete road partition, passes the garbage trucks, and jogs down the narrow road to Alagomeji. Sometimes he stops along the road, shuffles his feet and throws a flurry of blows into the air, each jab followed by hard gasps of his breathing—“ahh-argh-hegh!”—and then, reaching the junction, he turns and walks down the main road.

At this time of the evening, groups of area boys exchange loud banter at different corners of the road. A few stop and hail the old man, their hands in the air, “Up Coach!” He grins, responding with a hearty, “Ahhh! Well done!”  

About an hour later, the old man jogs his way back down the dirt path toward the old library, his tracksuit drenched in sweat, dripping from his brows down his chin. He lives alone in the security room apartment in front of the National Library and has remained there since he knocked out Àlàbá and hung his gloves in 1990.

In the small room, a shelf holds a stack of books, old photos and record albums he rarely plays. On one side, three untuned guitars lean against the wall, alongside boxing cassettes, a piano and a trumpet that gather dust and, on the other, wall nails support a makeshift clothesline, where tracksuits and security uniforms hang to dry. Above his boxing gear is an old photograph of him cradling a trophy. Just outside the room are two chairs and a table, where he sits all day until someone calls, “Mr Okafor!” or a car honks at the gate, or when, in a rare moment, he reveals to a curious visitor what it is like to be a boxer in Nigeria.

In the late 1940s, the Okafors, both young Cambridge University graduates, worked for the Lagos colonial government. The husband was a military officer at Marina, while his wife was a department manager at Kingsway Stores, the most exclusive retail chain in colonial British West Africa. It was located on Broad Street, near Lagos Marina.

The couple often took an annual break from work every December and would travel to the husband’s hometown in Issele-Uku, Benin province, with their children for the holidays. One year, something strange happened: before they returned home to Lagos, two of their twelve children fell sick and died after a few months. 

This strange cycle continued every year – first, the twin boys, then the twin girls followed – and by 1948, eleven children had died.  

On their last trip to the village, their only surviving child, Michael Ayodele Okafor, was also on the brink of death; a fever burned his body from the inside, and his tongue began to peel. 

Michael’s mother had had enough. “I will not marry you again!” she cried, “Your people are killing my children. Take me back home to Abeokuta! I can't stay here anymore!”

With only one son left, she fought to keep him alive. She collected different kinds of medicine and fed them to the boy. When he barely responded to treatment, she sought Ifa’s guidance. She covered him in an iron pot with punctured holes, crying to Ṣàngó, Ògún, Ṣọ̀pọ̀ná, and all the gods her ancestors worshipped. 

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Three years passed, and Michael Okafor grew into a healthy teenager. They’d moved back to Lagos, and he’d returned to Standard Four in the neighbourhood school. His mother remained overprotective. She’d say to every kid in the neighbourhood, “Abeg, na your friend? Don’t knock his head! Na me and you go die with am.”

When a teacher beat him, she’d show up in school, wrapper tightened, and say, “Una don kill eleven, you wan kill this one again?!”

“Na so she do so tey dey pack me one side, they no dey teach me book again,” M. Okafor recounted, “I became scared of my mother; she made me feel weak.”

When he was fourteen, his teenage yearning for independence turned into something else.

First, he’d skip school, over the fence, and off, lurking around with boys in the neighbourhood. He'd often return home late to a worried mother.

“I became a rascal boy,” M. Okafor said.

His rebellious streak continued until one day, colonial officers spotted him as he roamed the streets during school hours. When they brought him to his mother, the neighbours advised, “Let them take him away. When he gets there, the white men will be able to control him.”

Isheri Welfare Home, Ojodu Berger, was a correctional centre for juvenile delinquents to re-socialise, re-educate and re-integrate the boys into society. They could opt for formal education, technical work, music, or sport and were free after obtaining a certificate for whatever they learned. It’s where M. Okafor spent the next eight years of his life.

There, he wasn’t the only boy beyond parental control; the centre was home to bigger boys with worse vices, and his rebellion was no match. 

While waiting in line to draw water from a well one afternoon, a hefty boy suddenly pushed him to the back. He tried to fight, but the bigger boy crushed him. Defeated, he retreated to the dorm room and sobbed uncontrollably. He despised life at the centre just as he had at home, but there, he felt trapped.

When the day came for him to choose how he’d spend his time, he chose music, carpentry and boxing. In music, he found escape; through the piano, trumpet and guitar. Boxing gave him control, direction, and one place to channel his anger and frustration: a punching bag. He was hooked.

It felt good to hit something. But after sparring a few times with boys in his category, he suffered yet another beating that left him questioning his decision. The dangers of boxing stared him in the face, and doubts crept in. He wasn’t sure he could continue down the path or if he had what it took to continue fighting. The uncertainty lingered, but he was determined to push forward, to prove something to himself. 

The Isheri coach would say: “Listen up boys, I know you’re all here for different reasons, but I want you to know that this sport can take you places you never thought possible. You put in the work, and you could be standing on that Olympic podium. And it’s not just about the winning, it’s about the person you become through this process. You’ll develop the discipline and resilience to push through pain. And when you go pro, you’ll earn a lot of Nigerian pounds, more recognition and power.” 

He knew that the path to becoming a pro boxer was difficult, he needed to train hard to develop his strength, and repeatedly win at the amateur level.

“Ahh-argh-hegh!”He’d train at every chance he got. He couldn’t sleep without training or fighting.

***

The welfare home often brought professional boxers to train the boys and occasionally took them to the Shell Building at the National Stadium, Surulere. They’d mix and train with amateur boxers who came from different boxing clubs in Lagos, from Idumota to Ikorodu, Isale Eko, and Costain. Hogan “Kid” Bassey, the first Nigerian to become a world boxing champion, had returned home to coach amateurs. Along with other coaches, he’d watch the boys spar in the boxing arena, analyse their strengths and weaknesses and show them how to improve. 

About a year after Nigeria’s independence, M. Okafor made the team for what would be his first local tournament. The Isheri boys headed to the Shell Building to participate in the annual inter-club open championship. “We be like stick wey no dey move to woman,” M. Okafor recalled, “Nothing dey wey go make us happy; we always dey ready to attack.”

He was competing in the welterweight category. He stood across another boy, Fidelis Onye Som, and dropped him twice in the first round for the mandatory count. Fidelis stood up and threw a flurry of punches at M. Okafor, putting him down for a count in the second round. He got up and mounted pressure, outpointing Fidelis over three rounds. Okafor would later discover that the opponent he’d defeated had been the Lagos welterweight champion, and his name has since stuck like glue. Fidelis.

***

M. Okafor felt like he’d finally found something he was good at, and so his ambition grew. He would go pro, then become a world champion, just like Hogan “Kid” Bassey or Dick Tiger. 

After completing his time at the welfare centre in 1962, he returned home to his mother, who eagerly introduced him to a young girl. “I was 23 when they married for me, and I never knew anything about lovemaking or marriage; my mother would force me and tell me how to relate with my wife.” 

It was time to meet her grandchildren and make up for the children she’d lost. “We (my wife and I) quarrelled many times, and I’d leave her at home for days, but my mother would always come to settle the matter. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have stayed with the woman,” he said.

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Amateur boxers didn’t earn money from the sport until they turned professional. He needed some form of stability. 

With the carpentry skills he picked up at the welfare home, he got a daily wage job with the Nigerian Railway Corporation in Lagos in 1963. He worked with other carpenters to construct and repair wooden railway structures and was paid 10 shillings after the day’s work. He earned a cumulative income of 200 shillings monthly, which was equivalent to 10 Nigerian pounds. After a year of working at the Nigerian Railways, his wife had their first son. At 24 years old, he was now a family man, which meant he had more mouths to feed, but he couldn't abandon his boxing aspirations. 

He’d look at his arms, fists and chest in the mirror and was sure he could one day become a world champion; he just needed to remain determined. The Nigerian Railway Corporation had a boxing club, and after a few months of working, he was scouted for the team. After work hours, he’d train and compete in local tournaments. 

He was good and quickly became the captain of his club, but he still was no match for the Costain Club boys like Karimu Young and Nojim Maiyegun, who qualified for the 1964 Olympics. Maiyegun won a bronze medal in the light middleweight category that year. It was every amateur's dream to make it to the Olympics, but M. Okafor didn’t make it past the inter-club trial at Shell Club in 1964.

***

He continued to train relentlessly at the Railway Club until May 30, 1967.

At 2 a.m. that Tuesday in Enugu, over 500 km from where M. Okafor trained, the military governor of Eastern Nigeria, Emeka Odumegu Ojukwu, delivered a speech. Surrounded  by diplomats and journalists, he declared: 

“...Now, therefore, I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by the authority, and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her continental shelf and territorial waters shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of “The Republic of Biafra…”

The Nigerian government, led by General Yakubu Gowon, declared a police action to arrest the secession, and war broke out a few weeks after. It didn't matter that he'd lived in Lagos for most of his life or that he didn’t feel Igbo; his last name was Okafor, and he wasn’t safe. 

“I had to run away,” he said, “I was forced to run to my father’s hometown in the Midwest, the same place eleven of my siblings had met a mysterious fate.

“My wife na from Sapele, and her papa no want make she follow me go. We drag this thing so tey, the father say no, ‘War is coming, let my daughter return home to me. If my pikin go die, make she die for my face.’ 

“Na so I carry my own pikin go home, make everybody hold their pikin.” 

With his little boy’s life in his hands, he packed a small bag and fled.

The Nigerian Railways Corporation had suspended services on several routes; no train could move from Lagos to Benin, and he didn’t own a car. He walked a few miles and stood by the roadside to flag down passing vehicles, hitchhiking through Benin, Agbor, and Umunede until they reached Issele-Uku. 

Issele-Uku was located near Onitsha, where the war raged on. The Midwest didn't join the war, but its people weren't immune to the violence.

Neighbouring villages were under attack with residents being murdered. Issele-Uku remained eerily silent, with everyone laying low, barely leaving their huts except to hide on the farm and hunt for food. 

“Our mind was not at rest. We run here, we dodge there. If we hear say dey don come, we go run inside farm and stay there for about one or two days.”

On August 9, 1967, 3,000 Biafran soldiers invaded the Midwest, with plans to advance towards Lagos and Ibadan. They crossed the River Niger bridge into Asaba, through Issele-Uku, and upon reaching Agbor, the Biafrans split, with some battalions taking Warri, Sapele and Ughelli. 

“The soldiers passed through our village and tried to force us to support Biafra in the war, but we refused. They jaga jaga everywhere and took three of our girls with them.”

By 1968, the war showed no signs of drawing to a close, and devastating news reached M. Okafor, “I hear news say my wife don die for Warri.”

He felt something he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager, an overwhelming need to escape and break free; from Nigeria, where he wasn’t wanted, or Biafra, where he didn’t feel like he belonged. 

“During the war, I couldn’t do boxing; everything don scatter.” The war had left no room for boxing, music or anything that truly mattered to him.

One day, he made a decision: he left his four-year-old with his aged father and crossed the border into Cameroon.“I found my way to Calabar, where I entered a canoe to Bamenda, West Cameroon and then moved to  Kumba, Douala, before settling down in Yaoundè, the capital of Cameroon.”

The first opportunity Cameroon gave him was music.“A band poached me when I got to Douala; I could play the trumpet, the guitar and the piano. I played Cameroonian Afrofunk and a fusion of Congolese Soukous and Makossa with the band. We made and sold several records.  

“To cool off, we’d drink Majunga palm wine and champagne. We had women who liked our music. We called them Jumba. I had six of them. If you no get Jumba, your music no go sell for Cameroon.

“Ah savwa omo, savwa yé ko tamwir, savwa omo, savwa yé ku turu… (Remember, my love, don't forget, know that you must recall…)" he sang soulfully as he struck the keys on his old piano.

The war ended in 1970, but M. Okafor returned to Nigeria with his band in 1972, stopping to pick up his son, and then continuing to Lagos. In the 1970s, Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, suffered from a serious lack of established recording studios, causing the band to migrate to Nigeria for better access. “When I came back, my house at Oyingbo was no longer my own. Na property we dey talk? The thing wey I run leave. Everything don follow the war go,” he recounted.

When he was ready to work in 1973, he was reinstated into his old position at the Nigerian Railways. This time, as a full-time carpenter, receiving ₦28 per month. The head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, introduced the Naira on New Year's Day, 1973, replacing the Nigerian pound at a rate of  £1 = ₦2. 

He’d been staying at a friend’s apartment, but shortly after resuming work, he was compensated with a house at the Railway quarters for the loss incurred from the war. “That ₦28 was big money. I never spent everything before the months ended. Everybody in my family was eating, and we were living in the Railway compound free, with no house allowance.”

He resumed boxing again, continued to compete in tournaments, and by 1980, now 40 years old, he won a medal for boxer of the year within his club. 

 When it was time for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, he represented his club in the welterweight category but was dropped at the open championship trial. He was still with the band, but after a while of recording and live performances, they went their separate ways in 1980.

In 1984, his team travelled to Bauchi and competed with boxers from other Railway Clubs from across Nigeria. He won first position in the light middleweight/super welterweight category, bringing the cup to Lagos. He’d become one of the best boxers at the Railway Club, and he was certain he’d make the Olympics this time.

It was three months before the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; he’d made it through the first trial. He competed with boxers from other clubs in an open championship at the Mobolaji Johnson Sports Centre. This time, he made it to Abatti Barracks for the Champions of Champions trial and was invited to training camp. If he made it through this stage, he’d make the Olympic team.“I fought three times and wasn’t knocked out. They said my opponent won by points. Everything is politics o jare. They’ll see a good boxer, but they’d want their person to go, and they have the final say. It wasn’t just me,” he claimed. “They dropped many of us off at the trial.” Charles Udealor, the heavyweight champion then, also claimed he was dropped out of the 1984 Olympics.

“I tried for the Olympics three times, and since they weren’t picking me, I started to lose faith. You already know those with the coaches; you go just dey wahala yourself.”

Out of all the six boxers who made the Olympics in 1984, only Peter Koyenguachie in the featherweight category made it to the finals, returning to Nigeria with a silver medal. Other boxers, including Charles Nwokolo, light-welterweight; Rowland Omoruyi, welterweight; Christopher Ossai, lightweight and Joe Orewa, bantamweight, were eliminated earlier. Only Jeremiah Okorodudu, middleweight, made it to the quarter-finals, and he lost 1-4 to Joon-Sup Shin of South Korea.

He was prepared to stop boxing. He was 44 years old, and boxing hadn’t taken him anywhere. Every great Nigerian boxer he knew left Nigeria before they became something — Hogan “Kid” Bassey, Dick Tiger, Nojim Maiyegun, Bash Ali and others. Rafiu King, he said, had also been at the Isheri Welfare Home before he went pro and left Nigeria to fight in France, Switzerland, Italy, the U.S. and other countries.

He’d wanted to go professional too, but “When climbing a tree, you get to a point where you stop. Oò lè gun orí ewé, tí ọ bá dé òkè, ilẹ̀ náà lo nbọ̀, but, èmi òlè dé òkè yẹn, ìyẹn ló bí mi nínú tí ọkàn mi fi kúrò ní boxing (You can’t stand on the leaves. If you get to the top, you’ll still come down, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get to that top. That made me so angry that I stopped boxing).”

There was no one left to encourage him. He had lost his dad in 1984 and his mother two years before him. Before his father passed away, he’d ask him, “Kí lo nwá ní ìdí boxing yí gan. You wan die?” pointing out boxers who had suffered head injuries and upended their lives. 

Muhammad Ali was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease (PD) in 1984, which later contributed to his death in 2016. Nojim Maiyegun, the first Nigerian Olympic medalist, gradually began to suffer blindness after receiving several punches to the head.

“Gbogbo àbúrò mi ti kú, èmi nìkan ló wá kù. Mo bẹ̀rẹ̀ sí ronú, ‘Tí èmi náà bá lọ kú nkọ́? Ìya mi á bínú lọ́run (All my siblings have died. I’m the only one left, and so I started to think, ‘What if I died too?’ My mother would be angry in heaven).”

M. Okafor stopped boxing altogether, but he continued to watch local tournaments. When he stopped, his peers from the Railway Club began to mock him for retreating, calling him a weakling. In 1990, he finally accepted the challenge to fight another boxer called Àlàbá.

But amateur boxers would taunt him everywhere he turned on the street, saying, “Àlàbá go kill you for ring.”

***

M. Okafor's anger and frustration over the mockery and his unfulfilled potential had finally reached a tipping point. “Àlàbá? Pa èmi? (Àlàbá? Kill me?)”

He was going to wound Àlàbá. “They thought I was finished, but that just gave me the courage to train harder.” He started to watch Àlàbá’s fighting cassettes to understand his moves.

It was match day at Rowe Park, and Àlàbá fought his way into M. Okafor’s guard, throwing a staccato of punches at his face —“Tah-tah-tah-tah”— pounding away with near-total freedom, despite the occasional block or slip from Okafor. Àlàbá’s uppercut tore the flesh above Okafor’s right eye; he was stronger than he’d thought. M. Okafor stood up, infuriated. Seconds later, he was all over Àlàbá. He went on his toes, jabbing endlessly until the final bell. Àlàbá was so beaten that he had to be rushed out of the ring for medical attention. He’d incurred a penetrating head injury that caused damage to his brain. He remained bedridden for weeks, and after a while, he developed a staggering gait, stammer and tremble of the hand. 

Àlàbá was punch drunk; a cognitive impairment, loss of memory, slurred speech, balance disturbances, and abnormal movements, which occurred most frequently in many older or poorly skilled boxers.

“He started sleeping under the bridge and would come to beg money from me here. Any time I see am, I go dey cry.  I still dey beg God to forgive me till today.” 

Àlàbá never recovered.

***

M. Okafor made a pact to stop boxing altogether, but his coach, Mensah at the Railway Club urged him to take a coaching course to stay relevant in the field. He could be around the ring, close to the sport, but not in it. He pursued a Grade 2 coaching course from the Sports Commission in 1992, becoming a part-time coaching assistant after retiring from the Nigerian Railway Corporation. The inner turmoil that sent him to the ring remained, and he sought healing elsewhere, in church. He found comfort in singing with the choir. 

These days, if you go to the National Library in Yaba, you’ll find him sitting close to the gate, agile and healthy for an 84-year-old man. He thinks about his youth a lot. He thinks about Isheri, the Olympics, Cameroon, the Soukous and Makossa, about Àlàbá. “Sometimes,” he said, “I forget things.” 

Most of all, he continues to show everyone that, despite his age, he’s not a weakling. Fate continues to test him. 

In 2024, a few months after he clocked 84, M. Okafor was at his security post at the library. At around 2 a.m., he heard footsteps and quickly hid behind a door in the hallway. Intruders. 

He peered through the window blinds to check if the three intruders were armed. He watched as they entered the admin office and turned over every piece of furniture, looking for something valuable to steal.

As a younger man, he might have been able to take them on. “Ahh-argh-hegh! One-two, lean back; one-two, low dock. But he knew he didn’t stand a chance against three of them. 

He stayed hidden for a while, checking to see if they had guns. He took a deep breath, felt for his Freemason ring, then sprung out, dragging his cutlass along the ground.“Kra-kra-kra-kra.” The screeching sound echoed through the hallway, sending the thieves fleeing for the fence and going off with a meagre ₦350 in the drawer.

M. Okafor felt pride, and then he went back into hiding.

It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together

• It was week one of the 2024 Paris Olympics, and I was researching a story, digging through old newspapers at the National Library, when I overheard an old man expressing his frustrations to the front desk staff with a heated intensity. 

• He spoke about his past as an Amateur boxer who had competed in many Olympic trials, criticising the government for neglecting the sport and its retired athletes, many of whom had proudly represented Nigeria and won medals. Coincidentally, I was reading a 1986 Nigerian Tribune paper that spotlighted many boxing tournaments in Lagos. I was intrigued. “I’m a journalist,” I said to him. That was the first time I said that to someone with conviction.

• I returned the papers and quickly followed him to the security post, impatient and thrilled to listen to his story. That’s where this story begins.

• For me, It's one rare encounter to find an 84-year-old boxer randomly. I couldn't wait to ramble about the story idea with my editor, Fu'ad, Nana, and the Vistanium team. They were just as excited as I was about the story.

• We assembled a team to bring the story to life. Faruq would recreate the 60s boxing nostalgia with his stunning black-and-white photography.

• I dialled up my cousin, Harun, and, together with Faruq, we took off to the library the following Sunday. We spent the entire day there, listening and waiting as he tried to remember the little details.

• After a while at the library, we headed to Rowe Park for photos. We couldn't get most of the boxing theme shots we wanted because the indoor sports facility had been under renovation for three years. Boxing training now happened in a school park at Alagomeji.

• We went to this school the following week and saw how rigorous their training was. Amateur boxers and coaches from clubs all around Lagos had come to train for an upcoming tournament at The Teslim Balogun Stadium in Surulere. I was invited, but upon getting to the stadium the next day,  the location was changed to Ikorodu. A coach promised to ring me when there's a new tournament.

• After several attempts at drafting a narrative structure, I finally found an arc structure that worked for the story. The editing process was rigorous, with Fu'ad doing the developmental edits, Samson doing copyediting, and Ruka asking the final hard questions.

• It took a lot of effort and time to get this published. The only reason this exists for you to read is because of Vistanium’s members. Their membership is what pays for this writing and allows it to exist. If you believe it deserves to exist, then help us make more here. 

I sat on a bench near an express road in the middle of nowhere, waiting. It’d taken me over two hours to get there from Lagos. I was going to Ibadan to meet a man and had to be there before noon. We’d been discussing over the phone for three months, but I finally insisted we talk in person.

I was enthusiastic about the conversation but also scared to meet an old man I barely knew, alone. I was waiting for my friend, who agreed to come with me. 

When my friend finally arrived, I called the man again for directions. One cab trip, and a short walk down a dirt road later, we arrived at our destination. First, it was just a wall, then on the other side, dozens of students were crammed into a long room partitioned into three sections. The roof was patchy, the doorways narrow, and none of the nine windows had burglary-proof or window fittings. Two chalkboards were hung on the wall, and one read “Agricultural Sciences.” This was a school; all of it. 

In the middle of the building, grinning and waving his hands, was the man we’d come to see, Kayode, in Ankara shirt and pants. I assumed he’d be many things; a farmer, a this, or that, but the one thing I didn’t expect was that he’d be an active teacher. He put the chemistry textbook he was holding aside to shake our hands and offered us the seats across from him. 

***

I struggled to hold a political opinion in the 2023 elections. I was 20, feeling overwhelmed by the media frenzy around the elections while trying to graduate from university. Despite fighting to get my voter’s card and finding my way to the polling booth, I remained undecided. The older folks where I live in Ilorin were convinced the young people supporting the opposition—whether Peter Obi or Atiku Abubakar—were ignorant. It also didn’t help that I knew so little about any of them.

I paced the polling booth nervously and panicked at the thought that my political decision could determine the trajectory of my life over the next decade. So I left the polling unit without voting; the guilt plagued me for months. 

It pushed me to a tipping point: I needed to understand what it means to vote in Nigeria, how people choose their leaders, and the factors that contribute to these decisions.

My curiosity led me to old newspapers at the National Library of Nigeria in Yaba, Lagos. I found stories through papers from the 1979 elections, the inception of Nigeria’s presidential democracy. I wanted to see how elections and leadership shape Nigeria. 

To ground my knowledge, I spoke to several people: my grandma who remembered nothing but held on to her 1991 NEC-issued voter’s card. An old man – Obe, whose apartment got burned down, alongside his landlord who had supported a different political party in 1983. My friend’s mum, who was an underage voter in 1979. Kayode, I was curious about more than most: he’s voted in every election since 1983, until his recent disillusionment with the political process – with his choices shaped by several underlying factors.

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Life in Ṣakí, Oyo State, was simple in the 60s and 70s. 

The first day Kayode showed up at school, the Universal Primary Education Programme had already paid for his tuition. Awolowo established this initiative as Premier of the Western Region in 1955.

Every day after school, Kayode would drop his bag and head out to help his parents on their cocoa farm or help his grandfather, a produce buyer. He observed how little they made and swore that one day, he too would become a farmer, but one that actually turned a profit. 

By 1979, just before Kayode completed secondary school, the military government of Olusegun Obasanjo asked every student not to pay school fees – his last school fee was ₦10. That same year, the military returned to the barracks and gave way to democracy. Shehu Shagari, of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), secured a narrow and controversial victory over Obafemi Awolowo. 

Kayode, then only 17, experienced his first Nigerian election. He’d volunteered as an electoral officer at a polling booth in Ṣakí. It felt like being part of a revolution; Nigeria was finally returning to civilian government after 13 years of military rule. This time, the Obasanjo-led military regime decided to go for an American-style democratic system as opposed to the British parliamentary system Nigeria had used throughout the first republic from 1963-1966. 

Kayode was eager to see how civilian democracy would play out in Nigeria. Over the next few years, Nigeria started to experience a severe contraction in federal revenue as a result of the global oil glut and the government’s deficit spending.  Kayode likened the government’s corrupt tendencies to that of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. The Obasanjo-led regime, he said, had introduced Peugeot 504s  for government transport, but when Shagari became president, government officials started to show up in Mercedes.

“They also started importing a lot of rice, which reduced local agricultural production. We used to farm rice at Ilero and Ilesha around where I grew up, which was even better (tasting) than the imported Thailand rice.”

When the government eventually restricted imported rice in 1980, the market price tripled. A bag of imported rice would arrive in Nigeria at a wholesale price of  $52 and be resold at $180—about ₦99 at the time. 

Through the economic decline, university tuition remained fully funded by the federal government. This meant Kayode didn’t have to worry about tuition or meal preparation at the University of Ife, where he was studying Agriculture and Economic Extension, in 1980. He only needed to take a 50 kobo meal ticket to the cafeteria, and he’d get a full-course meal.

Towards the end of Shagari’s first term, just before the 1983 elections, the economy had gone into turmoil. The government tried to keep Nigeria afloat through an emergency stabilisation plan that cut spending. The federal and state governments halted new employment, and reduced imports due to foreign exchange shortages, leading to inflation in basic commodities and food. They halted the “Operation Feed The Nation” initiative that was designed to revive small-scale farming and pay students to farm during the holidays. 

All indicators showed that Nigeria had already been driven to a dead end in economic, political, and social terms before the 1983 elections, but Shagari still wanted to run for a second term. In his campaign, he promised the basic needs of life: food security, effective medical care, electricity, water supply, housing, and industrial transformation—all the things he failed to do in his first term. 

Kayode looked forward to change, and he believed that only Awolowo and the UPN could bring about change in Nigeria if they held power at the centre.

“We had it very well in the Western Region, LOOBO states, where Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was the political party in power. We had many of Nigeria’s firsts—the first university and polytechnic, the first government secretariat, the first television station, the first to use Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) waves for quality TV sounds, and more.” 

Kayode credited everything to Awolowo. He played a major role in the government’s decision to establish the University of Ife in 1961. He also built Cocoa House, a 26-storey building in Ibadan, which served as the headquarters of “The Nigeria Cocoa Marketing Board” until 1986, when the board was scrapped. The board used to buy cocoa from farmers, process it, and sell it to international buyers, and the profits made were used for development projects and initiatives.

On a warm Saturday morning, the day of the 1983 elections, Kayode lined up with students from different faculties at the polling booth in Fajuyi Hall's courtyard. When it was his turn to vote, he pressed his inked thumb on the ballot paper and cast it for UPN—Awolowo for president and Bola Ige for a second term as governor of Oyo State. Professors from Western universities openly supported the UPN, and to Kayode, “If notable academics here can be with Awolowo, why not join them.”

Throughout our conversation, Kayode kept referring to “The Progressives” and the ways that, in hindsight, they shaped his political opinions. The Progressives Parties Alliance (PPA) was an opposition bloc and political reform coalition led by Awolowo to transform Nigeria radically. They addressed concerns raised about the economy, government policies, corruption, transparency in the electioneering process and more–openly supporting national interests.

Kayode consumed proceedings from their meetings in newspaper bulletins. Leaders from different political parties were members of this coalition – Bola Ige, Adekunle Ajasin, Olabisi Onabanjo, Olusegun Osoba, Balarabe Musa, Ambrose Alli, Muhammed Goni, and others. The only hope for Kayode was to elect a progressive federal government.

He was sure every student in his polling unit voted for Awolowo. But what he saw that evening was a total reverse of what he confirmed in the morning: the results had been overturned in favour of Shagari’s NPN. 

The 1983 elections saw the NPN clear 13 out of 19 states, including three western states Oyo, Ondo and Bendel, while the UPN won only Lagos, Ogun and Kwara. Kayode felt a rush of sadness, and it wasn’t just because Awolowo had lost but also because it made no sense that UPN had lost all of Oyo State too. The loss was nearer to him than the national level.

Awolowo described the elections as a tragic mockery. While the NPN called it a landslide victory, Awo's supporters cried foul, and violence followed. Kayode’s campus went into chaos. He saw Professor Wole Soyinka, a lecturer at the time, chasing a man everyone called 007 around the University of Ife campus in his Jeep because 007 was a member of the NPN. The police were also everywhere, intimidating and threatening people who dared to protest. 

Riots broke out in various parts of the Western region. In Ondo, when their incumbent governor, Adekunle Ajasin, was defeated, UPN loyalists boiled. Ajasin had lost to Akin Omoboriowo, his former deputy who had crossed to NPN to become the gubernatorial candidate.

The day the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) declared Omoboriowo the new governor, violence erupted in the centre of Akure, spreading to other parts of the state. In about a week, 40 people were killed in Ondo, and about 33 in Oyo, including two party congressional candidates who were reportedly set on fire by an angry mob. Eight election officials were burned to death.

Eventually, the country seemed to reach its own tipping point. On Saturday morning, December 31st, 1983, Kayode and every Nigerian with a TV or radio were dialled in. 

“Fellow countrymen and women,” the voice over the radio began, “I, Brigadier Sani Abacha of the Nigerian Army, address you this morning on behalf of the Nigerian Armed Forces. You are all living witnesses to the great economic predicament and uncertainty that an inept and corrupt leadership has imposed on our beloved nation for the past four years.”

The military suspended the 1979 constitution, dissolved the democratic government, banned political parties, imposed a curfew, suspended flights, cut off international communication, closed borders and airports, and threatened martial law. A coup was in full swing. 

On New Year’s Day 1984, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the new Head of State, provided a rationale for the coup, stating that, “The corrupt, inept and insensitive leadership in the last four years has been the source of immorality and impropriety in our society since what happens in any society is largely a reflection of the leadership of that society." This new regime’s hallmark was a War Against Indiscipline.

Kayode welcomed the coup as a relief from unrest since the soldiers restored law and order, but his expectations of betterment were shattered when, in his final year of university in 1984, Buhari declared that the government could no longer afford to feed university students. “In my first four years as a student,” he recalled, “I only had to take a meal ticket to the cafeteria, and I would have a feast. Buhari came, and all of that comfort just ceased to exist. Feeding became a la carte.” 

Buhari’s government ordered price control for essential commodities, and soldiers took over the streets, invading warehouses and shops to dictate the prices goods should be sold. It didn’t matter that inflation had hit the market. Soldiers with horse whips and rifles on their backs asked market women how much a commodity was sold and forced them to lower their prices. Despite the severity of the military enforcers, prices didn’t go down; things only got worse as traders began to hoard the goods to avoid selling at a loss.

Kayode had thought the Buhari-led government restored order, but it became apparent in 1984 that he’d only create more problems in every sphere of Nigerian life. 

In 1985, Ibrahim Babangida, himself a veteran of several military coups and regime changes, overthrew Buhari for failing to end economic mismanagement, saying the government had been too rigid and unpromising. IBB promised to release all the Nigerian journalists and critics Buhari jailed, subsequently detaining him.

Kayode began to perceive IBB as a better leader, but he realised he had been sold a lie when IBB promised to return Nigeria to civilian rule nine times, and reneged every single time. Whenever Kayode heard him say “Insha Allah,” after promising on TV, he knew it was a lie.  

When Kayode finished university, he was thrust into a wicked economic depression. He was convinced he had a shot working in a bank. Before leaving power in 1979, the Obasanjo-led government established a Rural Banking Scheme that mandated all commercial banks to open branches in rural areas. They also established the “Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund” which allowed farmers to get loans to facilitate their operations, an opportunity Kayode felt his degree would fetch him working in a bank.

He had worked as a clerk at a First Bank branch just before enrolling in university, and that gave him more confidence to apply again after completing his mandatory service year. But the bank had no money to pay. That was when Kayode realised that no entity or government was coming to save him.

Life in Ṣakí, Oyo State, was gloomy in the 80s.

After Kayode's First Bank rejection and the many that followed, he moved to Ibadan in 1986. He spent the next few months finding new means to earn a living and exploring different forms of farming, but nothing seemed to stick. “It was one thing to be a farmer,” he admitted, “and it was another thing entirely to make profits from your farm produce.” 

In 1989, IBB eventually declared a two-party system: the National Republican Convention (NRC), led by Bashir Tofa and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by M.K.O Abiola. And in 1993, after postponing the election three times in three years, IBB finally decided it was time. 

For Kayode, it didn’t matter if it was Abiola or Tofa, he just wanted IBB’s government out. Abiola had been a former member of the NPN, and Kayode remembered his Concord newspaper reporting anti-Awolowo stories during the 1979 elections. But the people loved Abiola, because he embodied the Nigerian dream, rising from nothing to contesting for the highest office in the country. In his manifesto, he promised to revive all the agriculture initiatives that had been cancelled, as well as the manufacturing industry, bringing back car companies like Volkswagen and Peugeot to employ Nigerians. 

“That was why we called it Hope 93,” Kayode said, “Most of the progressives in the North and the South showed support for the SDP.”

By the time of the 1993 elections, Kayode, now 31, had gotten married and was with a child. The money he made – from trade or farming – never seemed to be enough, so he moved to Lagos for better opportunities. He ran a fishery consulting business with his friend while coaching science students for university entrance examinations. 

It rained heavily on the night of June 12, 1993. Kayode considered it a sign; many people did. A new era had come that would finally bring peace and progress.

Earlier that day, he stood in line at his polling station in Oshodi. It was the Option A4 system, where people lined up behind their preferred candidate’s banners for a headcount, eliminating the need for ballot papers or boxes. Convinced that an SDP presidency would help him live off his true passion, farming, he stood in line to be counted for Abiola. 

With the results halfway announced, Abiola had won 19 states, including Tofa’s home state, Kano. But a few days after the election, the NEC announced that the election results had been suspended. 

Nigerians began to voice their disapproval quickly. Labour unions announced workers’ strikes, and student unions flooded the streets. Protests took place across the Southwest and even in the North, and they remained peaceful for a few days.  

But the bubble broke in Lagos when thugs hijacked the protests, looting and destroying properties. They burned barricades, broke into shops, and burgled cars, and what started as a peaceful protest became an ethnic attack against Hausa and Fulani everywhere blaming them for the annulment because a Northerner was in charge. The protests ended the day after the military security forces intervened, killing scores of civilians all over Nigeria and arresting many more. 

IBB refused to renounce the annulment. Instead, he stepped down and installed an interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan. For three months, unrest continued; the military saw another opportunity. 

On November 17, 1993, 10 years after he addressed the country to announce a military regime, General Sani Abacha overthrew Shonekan’s government and delivered another speech. This time, he was going to run the country himself. 

Kayode’s hopes plunged again. 

Abiola still wanted to claim his mandate. With the backing of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), a broad coalition of Nigerian Democrats, he called on Sani Abacha’s military government to step down, declaring himself as the president of Nigeria. He was subsequently charged with treason and was detained for four years. It was only after Abacha died in 1998 that Abiola had any hope of regaining his freedom; he died the day he was to be released. 

By this time, Kayode had moved back to Ibadan to run a poultry farm because the agriculture sector had improved during Abacha’s regime.

The new head of state, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, organised new elections and oversaw a transition to democracy in 1999. After 16 years of living under military rule, former head of state, Obasanjo, jailed during the Abacha regime, was elected president of Nigeria under the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Kayode didn’t vote for Obasanjo in 1999 because of the stories he read about his term as head of state. In 1978, Obasanjo established the Land Use Decree which meant no one could own land, and everyone was now the government’s tenant by the law. Kayode also believed that Awolowo could have become president in 1979 if Obasanjo wasn’t against him. The military, Kayode believed, backed Shagari and the NPN. To him, It seemed like Obasanjo had sworn an alliance with the North and wouldn’t prioritise the South. 

Instead, he voted for Chief Olu Falae, an economist from Akure and a Yoruba man. He believed Falae could have carried out good economic reforms for the country. Progressives like Bola Ige, who was a columnist with the Tribune, were also against Obasanjo, forming public opinions about him. The progressives used to draw comparisons from other countries, envisioning what Nigeria could be if specific measures were implemented. Kayode would scour several newspapers for their ideas. Without intending to buy and take the papers home, he’d pay about 5 kobo,  read, discuss with others at newspaper stands, and place them back on the vendor’s table. Since he moved back to Ibadan in 1993, he’d do this every morning to read what the progressives had to say in Daily Times, Sketch and the Nigerian Tribune. 

But in 2003, when Obasanjo wanted a second term and his major opposition Buhari, was a Northerner, Kayode said, “He’s our own (Yoruba man); let him do it.” Obasanjo won. To Kayode, Obasanjo was fiscally disciplined with the nation's affairs as he was in 1979. “That’s the reason our debts were forgiven,” he said. 

Kayode’s life also began to pick up. 

He coached science students and ran his poultry and fishery businesses at a scale larger than he’d ever been able to accomplish before. “When the economy is thriving, it’s easier to do business. I found my bearing,” he said “I could plan my finances, and didn’t have to worry about my children’s school fees.” This was the time he got his first car, a Peugeot 504.

By 2007, Kayode was excited to vote. What stood out for him in that election was that Yar'Adua had a Master's degree in Industrial Chemistry, which meant he had great analytical skills. Yar’Adua was the first university graduate to become president of Nigeria. “He wanted to reform the Land Use Act. The man had good intentions for Nigeria, but didn’t live long.” Before Yar'Adua's 2010 death upended his government, Kayode bagged a Master's in Agricultural Chemistry in 2009. 

In 2011, he voted again. This time, for Goodluck Jonathan, who he later considered unprepared for the position. “As his administration progressed,” Kayode recounted, “the PDP had become a monster, looting left, right and centre.” His government was also criticised for its slow response to the Boko Haram insurgency, depletion of the foreign exchange reserve and an attempt at fuel subsidy removal. Buhari never stopped running for president since he started in 2003. Ahead of the 2015 election, Kayode recounted, his campaign, and the media presented him as the saviour: a morally upright man who was disciplined, frugal, and everything Jonathan was not.

But Kayode had no fond memories of his dictatorship in 1984, so he voted for Jonathan in the 2015 presidential election. When Buhari was declared president, Kayode felt betrayed by everyone and decided that was his last straw: he’d never vote again in a Nigerian election “I have seen all these leaders inside and out, there’s nothing they have to offer me,” he said. And so, after actively participating in Nigeria’s electoral process for 40 years, Kayode stopped voting.

My heart sank a little as he said, "Even the local election they did in my backyard last week, I didn't go. I won’t vote again." It felt like an exercise in futility as I wanted to hear insights that would prepare my mind for the next presidential election. Instead, I discovered his now profound disillusionment with the political process. 40 years of casting ballots had yielded neither strong leadership nor economic growth for the country. The once-burning optimism of the 17-year-old boy in Saki had been quenched. 

It was stirring to watch Kayode bustle around the small walls of his school, coordinating the students.  It was their lunch break when we visited. He explained that he founded the school in 2012 as a small effort to give back to the community. “The essence of knowledge,” he said, “is to navigate the circumstances at your disposal, and use them to your advantage.” What started as coaching sessions at his veranda, had grown into a school. As he sat across from my friend and me, in his Ankara prints, his eyes burrowed deep in mine, and he sighed, praying we never have to witness the economic depression he was subjected to in 1986. 

When Kayode last voted, I was barely a teenager casually vocalising, “Sai Baba, Sai Buhari!” I heard it repeatedly over the radio, every morning while commuting to school. My parents and the adults around me actively endorsed his change mantra.

Buhari was our new messiah. I was told he’d save the Nigerian economy as he did in 1983. He’d also release Nigeria from the constraints of the PDP’s 16-year rule. I stayed glued to the TV as INEC collated the results all evening. When Buhari won the election and was inaugurated as the new president, I was happy and certain it was an era of change. 

In 2019,  Nigerians gave Buhari a second chance after he argued his efforts only amounted to helping the country out of a ‘depth of decay’ and then a foundation, which, if re-elected, would serve as a basis for a stronger country – the next level. He insisted he had not reneged on the promises he rode on to win in 2015: security, economy and anti-corruption.

But when Buhari refused to condemn the attack on the young Nigerians in the 2020 #EndSARS protest, I was 17 and began to see him for who he truly was. In 2021, he suspended Twitter access in Nigeria after a tweet from his account was deleted for violating rules; it felt like a reincarnation of his Decree 4 of 1984. 

When I asked Kayode, now 62 years old, what he was hopeful about these days, he said he only wants his school to one day serve a greater purpose. If he had his way, the students wouldn’t pay school fees, but the times continue to be hard in Nigeria. As with most senior citizens I’ve spoken to, Kayode was happy to tell us stories from his life while we listened. As he walked us to the nearby junction, he continued recounting his experience. 

It was when I settled into a bus after I reached Lagos that Kayode’s life began to properly register. When I went to Ibadan, I knew little beyond the headlines I’d seen or books I’d read. I returned to Lagos weary from the long day, but awake to what feels like a new reality. 

I began to think through Kayode’s choices and the factors that influenced them: the media, his strong attachment to his tribe, his sense of intellectual belonging, etc. He participated in eight elections, and his desired candidate only got in thrice. For every time he tried and they didn’t get in, he could only imagine what could’ve been.

I could feel anger brew in my chest as I entered my home in Gbagada. I wondered how many people across the country stopped voting because they believed it wouldn’t count. Of the 87.2 million Nigerians who obtained their permanent voter’s card (PVC) before the 2023 election, only 27% got to decide who became the president, and I wasn’t one of them. The president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, won by a narrow margin with 36.6% of the total vote cast. His major rival, Atiku Abubakar, polled 29%, and third-placed Peter Obi, with  25%, even won Lagos State where Tinubu had an eight-year reign as governor, with a string of successors who gained his approval first. 

The only election with vote percentages this close was 1979, when Shagari cleared 33.7% of the total vote cast, while Awolowo polled 29.18%. One thing was certain: regardless of whether I voted, the leaders in power held the ability to shape my life and our nation’s trajectory for decades to come—this remains a constant source of dread. As I count down to the 2027 election cycle, I continue to sit with the consequences of my indecision. 

It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together

• Finally publishing this story brings me immense relief. It's been six months since I started researching - the longest I've ever spent on a story. This is also the most complex piece I've ever written. 

• The first challenge was deciding what story to tell. How do I tell a story about what it means to vote in a country like Nigeria and make it meaningful to me? 

• My editor, Fu’ad, asked me to start talking to people. And that’s what I did. In between speaking to over a dozen people, travelling, and becoming a regular library visitor, It felt like I was onto something. 

• One night, I decided on a whim to visit Kayode in Ibadan, and that changed everything. It was a turning point, and it was there that I gained the clarity I needed to ground the story.

• It took four drafts and countless revisions until it finally felt right. On the road to the first draft, besides Fu'ad's rigorous editing, there was Afolabi asking very tough questions about why this story should even exist. There was Samson, who’s covered the last two election cycles, interrogating my perspective. I'm grateful for them. Aisha Salaudeen constantly pushed us to get this story to the finish line. 

• I like to sketch, and so, it was great to work with artists to sharpen my sense of art direction; I’m grateful to Mariam for that. Also, Penzu for the character illustrations, and Kenny Owolawi for bringing the infographics to life. 

• I've learned that one story can lead to many others, and ideas can grow from a single question. I'd never written about politics before, but now I have a wealth of information to explore. 

• I'm grateful for the interviews, especially the one with my grandma; it turned out to be our last conversation. 

• Family, friends, and colleagues gave me many pointers. They shared their knowledge, referred me to people, and endured my endless chatter about the story. I especially appreciate Muhammed Bello for following me to Ibadan at such short notice.

• This story exists because The Election Network commissioned a story—a “just explore it” story—about what it means to be an electorate in Nigeria. Vistanium found an angle true to its values and curiosities. Most importantly, Vistanium’s members continue to back experiments like this. 

• This story is deeply personal and significant to me. Hitting publish felt emotional. My political awareness has improved dramatically. I began with a limited understanding of Nigerian politics, but now I have a clearer grasp of how it works. Still, there’s so much to learn. This story has helped form the basis of my political perspective. 

Thank you all for helping me bring Ballot Ballads to life.

One Thursday morning in late November 1999, my classroom was a hive of quiet anxiety. Parents and guardians checked their children’s notebooks for completeness, neatness, and other things adults wanted to see. Some parents looked pleased; others were livid. At his desk, the class teacher was talking to my mum, and she was nodding slowly, smiling whenever she looked my way. She nodded a lot and smiled whenever she looked my way. 

At the back of the class, beside his desk, my class teacher pinned a cardboard sheet with the class roster to the wall. Beside my name, there was one word declaring my status: “Excellent.” With just a few days to my eighth birthday, Primary 4 was off to a stellar start. 

Every Open Day, children's store vendors set up stands in my school; they sold everything from children’s books to films. As a reward, my mum took me downstairs to the stands, and a few minutes later, she’d bought me two tapes: Science for Kiddies and Superman. Each time I ended up at a toy shop—from Idumota to Surulere—I always begged to leave with anything Superman. 

Thursday nights in our house were for freshly made fufu, but I knew that night would be a Jollof one. My mum returned to her office while I waited for the closing bell when my brother would come to pick me up. 

My brother and I had a commute ritual. He’d pick me up at the school gate, and we’d walk to Ojulegba Underbridge Bus Stop. We’d buy a copy of Complete Sports or the afternoon paper, PM News—he’d take the Sports section while I dug into the Man Kills Neighbour Over Garri section. And whenever he had extra change, we bought roasted corn for the two-hour-long trip home to Ikorodu. 

That afternoon, the driver and his conductor at Ojuelegba ruined our routine. When we reached the bus stop, passengers stood outside the danfo, protesting the doubled bus fare, and we joined them. The conductor, unfazed, continued to call out the route in his raspy voice: “Ketuojota-Mile-twelveeeeee.” 

One by one, protesting passengers gave up and took their seats on the bus. We didn’t have enough for a newspaper, so we missed the front page of PM News, which was just fresh off the press. About thirty minutes into the commute, the passengers started protesting again. Just before we reached Ketu Bus Stop, one stop before ours, the driver parked and turned off his engine.

This driver and his danfo weren’t going any further. 

“See front,” the driver pointed. At Mile 12, almost two kilometres away, a pillar of black smoke surged upwards into the white sky; it looked like Darkseid.  If the driver had kept going for a few more minutes, he’d have ended up at the heart of the flame. 

“What are we going to do,” I looked up at my seventeen-year-old brother, scared and confused. He looked at me, held my hand tighter, and said nothing.

People were talking around us.

“Wọ́n jà ní Mile 12.”

Awọ́n OPC atí Mọ́là lọ́ ń jà.”

A loud bang came from the direction of the smoke, and while everyone had theories about what was really happening, every around had the same idea: run.

I remember half running, half gliding from the pull of my athletic brother. When we stopped to catch our breaths, we were at Ojota, a healthy distance from the chaos at Mile 12.

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Somewhere in Lagos, my mum was leaving work and going through the same motions we’d gone through. An inflated bus fare, some uncertainty about why, and black smoke. But when my mum saw the pillar of smoke and people running away from it, she had a singular thought: “My boys!”

And so, she pressed forward in the direction of the smoke. 

The central artery connecting Ikorodu to the rest of Lagos ran through Mile 12. At Ketu, side streets create a network of backroads, an alternative to going through Mile 12 on heavy traffic days—or days like this. 

With a small group, my mum turned into one of the side streets. She scanned for her boys, my brother and me everywhere she turned. They’d move forward cautiously, then run back when someone yelled, “They’re coming!” Two steps forward, “Go back!” and one sprint back. They edged further, on narrow streets and alleys between houses, until they reached a point where there was no forward or backward movement.

Suddenly, men wielding sticks and machetes materialised. At that moment, my mum realised with horrifying clarity—they'd walked right into an ambush. The men ordered them in a single file, and the interrogation followed.

“Where you from come?” a man in the mob screamed at the group. The first person in line was a Yoruba man. 

Two people dragged him and bludgeoned him till he became a bag of pulped flesh and blood while the line interrogators continued their questioning. 

Eventually, it was my mum's turn. 

“Oya, where you from come?” My mum froze, muttering a prayer under her breath, clutching her bags and heels to her chest. My mum, Àbíkẹ́, was born in Lagos Island to the Olaniyan family. A century earlier, one of her ancestors migrated to Lagos from Old Oyo. She couldn’t have been more Yoruba.

“Talk!”

Just as she was about to speak, one man from the mob slapped her head from behind. “This one na Igbo na. You no see as be?” Abike was also light-skinned. “Oya go!”

She started walking, part thanking them, part begging for her life. 

People were screaming, begging and crying, but she kept walking. She walked past more bludgeoned bodies. Ahead, the smell of burning flesh hit her before she saw the burned bodies. There was one thoroughly burned body that, from a little bit of unburned fabric, told you that a few hours earlier, it must have been a kid in school uniform. It wasn’t cream shorts or purple check, the colours of my school uniform.

“My boys. They'll be home.” 

She kept walking. Another burned body had simmering shit beside it. Whoever it was must have, in their moment of final painful breath, had a final dump. 

She walked to Owode Onirin, a bus stop about three kilometres from Mile 12 and a little closer to home. Another group of men wearing shirts with OPC printed on them were gathering and planning to stage another offensive against the Hausa traders or anyone they considered Hausa at the market. 

“My boys.”

After walking a few more kilometres, she finally found a bus heading home. 

“My boys. They’re at home.”

When she finally reached the gate of our housing estate, she broke into a half-run, clutching her bag tightly. An aunty who lived with us met her just outside our flat. Breathless and desperate, my mum asked if we were home yet. When my aunty responded, all her worst fears came alive. None of us had returned: my dad, my brother, nor me. 

Her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground, screaming. 

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After we’d caught our breaths from running and my brother could gather himself, he checked his pocket for his last change, looked at me, and made a decision. An hour later—heading backwards and two bus trips later, and a long walk that should have been a third bus—we were at my aunt’s house in Shomolu.

We got in early enough to catch playing football—one-touch and Monkey Post—with boys in the compound. Later that night, dinner was unremarkable, but the TV wasn’t—my cousins were playing Mortal Kombat, and watching was enough entertainment, even though I wanted to rub the pad as badly as they did. It was while they were playing my dad arrived. 

He looked worried and became more worried when he realised my mum wasn’t there with us. He’d tried to go home too but turned back: the violence had gotten too intense and spread to Ketu. I felt worried about my mum. I also remembered Superman and wondered if I should have held on to the tape instead of giving it to her. 

In the housing estate where we lived in Ikorodu, enough people had returned home that evening with stories of what they’d seen with their eyes and heard in the danfo on the way home.

Mile 12 Market is essential to Lagos' food supply chain. It’s one of the markets where agricultural produce from farms all over Nigeria, especially the North, first arrives in Lagos. When prices shift in Mile 12, it’s felt across Lagos, from smaller markets to roadside traders. A significant part of the supply network was controlled by people from Northern Nigeria, most notably Hausa. 

The stalls had opened, and the roadside sellers had come to Mile 12 as usual that Thursday morning. First, there were unusual movements of men across the markets as everyone went about their business. Then, people started to hear noises and whistles. What began as a long-wound power struggle between OPC members and Hausa traders in the market escalated into violence. The OPC, they said, wanted to rid the market of non-Yoruba people, especially Hausas and Igbos. The Hausas, in return, were carrying out reprisal attacks.

This was the story reaching home from people returning from a long, tumultuous day. Most families in our estate had marched to the gate out of concern for their loved ones who hadn’t returned or to be there for their anxious neighbours. 

They huddled together like airport arrivals. A fully loaded bus would stop, many people would hope one of their own had returned, and only one passenger would alight. One family’s worry would end, while the remaining families would get more worried. 

“My boys. My husband.”

My mum waited by the bus stop until the buses stopped passing through. Then, she returned home and sat on her praying mat. 

On Friday, there was no school, so I spent the morning at my aunt’s playing with my friends. While we were playing downstairs, we started hearing commotion at the gate. A woman was crying, running and falling while clutching her baby tightly to her chest. 

Some women in the neighbourhood, including the Alhaja always sitting at the gate, managed to get her to stop. She narrated her ordeal as she caught her breath. 

She’d been in the house with her sick mother and baby when a mob arrived on their street somewhere in Mile 12. They first tried to hide, but there was no hiding space in a single room. Her mother begged her to leave.

The last thing she heard as she escaped through the backyard was her mother’s scream piercing through the roar of the mob. 

I stopped playing ball. 

On the news that night, they reported about the riots. The state-owned station, LTV, said people had died in their dozens. People in the living room were talking about hundreds. Everyone went to bed right after the news, and there were no late-night movies or Mortal Kombat. My dad spent most of the night by the balcony. Everyone thought about the same thing, but no one could blurt it out. Earlier that day, he’d gone to my mum’s office to see if she’d come. She didn’t. Neither her colleagues nor us had seen her since she left work on Thursday afternoon. 

My aunty’s home had a landline, but no one we knew had one in our housing estate in Ikorodu. Everyone hoped.

By Saturday afternoon, after the news said Ketu/Mile 12 was under the firm control of the army, all of my mum’s men – my dad, brother and me – huddled into our family Toyota and began the trip to Ikorodu. I settled in behind the driver’s seat and slept off as we drove onto Ikorodu Road through Palmgrove. 

“Ketuojota-Mile-twelveeeeee.”

I woke up at the Maryland Bus Stop as we made our way to the bridge before Ojota. At Ojota, my dad was talking to my brother about the armed presence of soldiers and police officers. At Mile 12, I smelled badly burned things: rubber, meat, and the resilient smell of rotten tomatoes. 

I slept off again. 

When I woke up again, it was because of the noise around the car. My ears picked it up before my eyes could adjust. At first, it sounded like loud, angry voices, but as my eyes adjusted, it sounded like celebration and praise. 

“Adúpẹ́!”

“Alhamdulillah!”

“Olúwa oṣè!”

“Thank you, Jesus!”

Our neighbours were standing outside the car, celebrating: Mrs Ajani and her kids, Mummy Michael and Uncle Femi, who had run a pharmacy for so long that everyone started to call him Doctor. I heard the squeaky sound of our gate, and when I looked, my mum was standing there. 

“Dapo, so you’re at home?!” my dad exclaimed to my mum. He was loud, like he was telling a story and had gotten too excited, but my dad froze like he’d seen a ghost: shock and relief. 

I was also in shock, and I don’t remember if it was because my mum was safe or because I just heard my dad speak in clear, no-Yoruba English with my mum. 

She wasn’t saying anything, just standing there, smiling and murmuring something. I could barely see her eyes with the sinking sun on her face, but I could tell they were swollen and barely open from days of crying. 

She pulled us all into a big hug – my dad, brother, and me – and I could hear her murmuring from inside her chest. The neighbours were still jubilating, but I’d stopped hearing them. All I heard was the murmuring, the exact phrase, over and over: Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulilah. 

Before we could settle in properly, dinner rolled out, and she made everyone sit in the living room. The meal looked like it was made on Thursday, but it tasted like it was meant for that moment: Jollof rice, fried beef, and plantain. Just as I was about to start eating, she showed me my tapes. 

I blushed. It wasn’t a night for Science for Kiddies, so I grabbed the other tape. 

“Up in the sky! Look!”

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”

I moved from the chair to the floor directly in front of the TV. My mum didn’t stop me.

“This looks like a job for Superman!”

The laser beam from The Mad Scientist’s tower sent Superman tumbling to the ground. For a moment, Superman looked defeated as he fell to the ground. Then he got back up, pushed back against the beam, and began to punch, punch, punch. He punched back at the laser until he destroyed the source, rescued Lois Lane, and threw the Mad Scientist in jail. 

“Take coke,” my mum said as she returned to sit down on the mat she’d spent the last two days praying. As I watched Superman in awe, I peeped at my mum as she watched us from the side of my eye. I could see her, still murmuring, and even though I couldn’t hear it, I knew exactly what she was saying under her breath. 

In that moment, life was perfect.

Author’s Notes

• This story took one week to write, and it probably happened this quickly because it’s been sitting in my mind for 25 years. My own recollection and my mother’s recounting of the event cooked into this memory stew, such that her own sensory experiences feel like mine, even though I wasn’t there.

• This story has two more reasons for being:

• First, I’ve been worrying a lot about my state of done vs perfect here, looking at all the drafts that I continue to consider not good enough. And so, I told myself I was going to try to break free of the long drafts trying to kill me and blitz through something.

• The second reason this story exists is this tweet. I watched it, and it unlocked a very specific and intense memory. The first draft was ready in three days.

• I was going to make this a thread, but Seyi said, “You should make it an essay.” So here we are.

• Ruka is not satisfied with this draft, but I told myself I would publish it after one week. Whatever is good about it, she made it possible. Samson fixed some grammar at the last minute, too. Shout out to them.

• Whatever confidence led to me publishing is because Nana likes it.

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When NEPA brought light that evening,  the last flicker of Dami’s hope burned out. 

In front of her was a familiar scene as she walked home: people out on the street and balconies—sitting, walking, talking—and some light in the sky to feel like a day but not enough to pierce the gathering darkness burying the faces and buildings below.

One moment, there hadn’t been electricity for a whole week, and the next, just as her house came within view, NEPA brought light. The next instant, alarm bells and sirens started going off in people’s homes—loud enough to drown out the noise of generators so people knew to switch power to NEPA. Then came the people going berserk, screaming UP NEPA, on the streets and in their homes in one loud but dense roar. 

Dami was 27, lived with her parents, and had been screaming UP NEPA her entire life. That year, 2017, if you asked ten people living in Nigeria, a little less than five would tell you they had access to electricity. 

This fact was part of a larger reality setting in for Dami. The electricity that was restored was temporary. She knew with certainty that power would be out at best in a few hours or days. She’d organised her entire life around this unpredictable flicker: what to refrigerate, what to wear, when to charge her devices what times she woke up or went to bed. Beyond power, even more was happening around her. Whenever she landed a job, it didn’t pay well or consistently. When she started seeking writing opportunities abroad, she couldn’t be eligible for her income – PayPal didn’t exist in Nigeria. Other times, she’d try to seek out opportunities and have to fill out her country information and Nigeria wouldn’t even be an option. As the months passed, the opportunities became fewer and hope dimmer.

Her life in Nigeria—no matter how much potential it had—would constantly suffer interruption in many forms, leaving her teetering on the edge of frustration. 

“Why must it be so hard to do basic things,” Dami asked herself.

The more she considered her future—doing work that gave her joy, starting a family—the more she knew she didn’t want to create that future in Nigeria. As she arrived home, she texted her brother, who lived in the UK, and they started researching a path out of Nigeria together.

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I wrote a commercial for the first time in 2015. Dami was the friend who coached me through the fundamentals of writing ads and made sure I pulled it off on time to meet my three-day deadline. Dami had only a few years of experience, but she’d put in the hours writing ads at a small agency for several media: print, radio, TV, and the growing Nigerian Internet.

When Dami decided to leave Nigeria, her frustrations were familiar. I’d heard it in small talk at events and big decision conversations with friends, and I’d felt it in my own life. We had frustrations; then someone would reach a tipping point, go through the tumultuous process, pack or sell everything they owned, and leave the country, hoping for the best. 

Sometime in the middle of 2020, while spending lockdown alone with all the books I was reading, all the podcasts I was listening to, and all the work I was struggling to do, I arrived at a deeper understanding of what this clear and growing discontent we all felt meant.

Rewind. All the way back to Integrated Science class. JSS 3. 2004. 

I sat in a class with thirty-four other boys, listening in awe to a teacher, less for what he was saying and more for his technique. The teacher was the only one of our twelve who never used any notes, just straight from his head.

“What is osmosis?” he asked as he chalked the topic on the top of the blackboard. “Osmosis is the movement of molecules,” he continued before anyone could respond, “from a region of lower concentration to a higher concentration through a semi-permeable membrane.”

The teacher started illustrating on the board: he drew a two-dimensional bowl, one line down the board, to the right and back up. Then, he drew a line connecting the two tips. He added two squiggly spheres he called potatoes.

When potatoes are placed in salt water, he explained, they become limp because the water inside them moves out to the more concentrated salt water solution. 

“Now,” the teacher asked, “who can tell me the stages of Osmosis?” No one answered.

Osmosis is a biological process that mirrors a specific human desire. In the middle of 2020, I realised that just as water seeks a higher concentration, we, too, are drawn by natural law to seek out places where our greatest aspirations can flourish. We yearn for a world that resonates deeply with our ambitions and values. The world is our water bowl, and we’re the water trapped in a drifting potato.

In the first stage of osmosis, a concentration gradient is established: “The water is saltier on the other side of this potato.” 

Our world is only as big as the information accessible to us. A century ago in Nigeria, your world mirrored the breadth of your interactions. Expansion came from a teacher, a page of The Daily Times, a traveller who sailed back from Liverpool, or a pilgrim who just made the tumultuous desert trip from Hajj in Makkah. Our world expanded further as TV entered homes and global travel became more accessible. And, of course, the internet. Each click, a country, each swipe, a new scene to yearn for. 

By whatever means the world comes to us, one truth is constant: the moment the size of our reality stretches to accommodate new possibilities, something shifts. 

This is the defining displacement of our generation—the constant conflict of first-world aspirations within a third-world reality. We’re engaging with pieces of a world vastly better than our own—stable systems, smoothly run societies, more opportunities and most of all, hope.

When this difference in reality is established, a gap exists between clarity and the audacity to act on it. The gap is sometimes a leash, tethering us to our current reality, resisting the momentum for osmosis to happen. 

For starters, moving to another country is expensive, with costs ranging from proof-of-funds to certifications, applications, flight tickets, and finally, the money to ease settling into a new country. Only a small fraction of Nigerians will ever be able to take action or follow through. The gap is also filled with a mix of emotions. There’s the fear of grappling with identity, loneliness from being so far away from loved ones, the guilt of leaving them behind, and the unknown.

One way this gap manifests is optimism, the idea that incredible things are possible despite the bleakness. The nature of optimism is that it’s stupid until it’s visionary. The optimist finds a purpose, feeds it, and when confronted with bleakness, says: 

“This work matters; these small bricks will build the future.” 

Their optimism is an act of resistance confronted with harsh Nigerian realities. Some truths don’t change: optimism doesn’t immediately improve spending power, make the highways safer, or make the job market more friendly. Nigeria continues to bite for the time being. 

So, how do you survive with your aspirations intact in a society that mocks their existence? You build a bubble. 

In Nigeria, there are 200 million governments. We’re the custodians of our welfare. Without public utilities, we power our homes and provide our water. We hire our private security or privatise public security; about two in every three policemen in Nigeria are attached to VIPs who can afford it. When we’re lucky, we find communities—people who see the world as we do and with whom we can forget the nature of our reality.  It’s in the spaces where people affirm our aspirations, whether they’re corners of the internet or offline in offices and events. 

But the things to control—water, security, power—never end. For example, replacing public power with solar power can cost up to ₦22 million. Private security is expensive. The basic comforts of a dignified life that we pay for are, in fact, luxury.

There’s a small message in everything: the sound of the generator at close range, the news that an entire village disappeared overnight, and the tension as you drive up to a trailer carrying a container. 

Everything says the same thing: “Something is broken. Everything is broken.” Our panic is prophecy because the nature of bubbles, no matter how much we fortify them, is that they must burst. 

One day, someone in your family, maybe your aunty, would go to a hospital to complain about a pain in her chest. The overworked doctor in an understaffed hospital would prescribe painkillers for what would be discovered two years later as stage four cancer. One evening while watching TV, you’ll receive news that your in-law has been plucked off a highway in broad daylight by kidnappers, and his life will be snuffed out unless you pay a healthy ransom. 

You’re safe behind your private security, but one day, you’re at a checkpoint with a policeman who insists that what you know to be white is, in fact, red. When you’ve had enough, you protest with young people like you to demand change.

Everything you’ve learned from building your systems—logistics, security, communication, support—ensures you’re prepared, but it won’t be enough. Tuesday night, October 2020, the Nigerian army will show up in Lagos and open fire at tired protesters, then pretend it didn’t happen. It won’t be the first time they’d massacred Nigerians or protesters; they just happened to have their biggest audience. 

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A hedonometer measuring the degree of happiness or sadness showed that Bloody Tuesday was one of the saddest days of 2020. That night, something shifted in many people. 

Several months ago, a former colleague arrived at my house a few minutes before midnight. He was doing the final rounds before leaving the country. For my stop, he showed up with an extensive collection of twenty-year-old magazines he believed should be digitised. He also shared stories about the tumultuous process of finding a country, any country in the West, with a clear path to citizenship for him and his family. Bloody Tuesday was his tipping point; he called up another friend that night.

“We can’t continue in this country,” he said to his friend, who agreed. It took them almost three years, but now, they live outside Nigeria on two continents over 7,000 kilometres apart. They used to live less than an hour from each other. 

When hope is diminished and opportunity means little, we begin the draining journey through the semi-permeable border. 

Back in the classroom, the teacher drew two arrows pointing out the potato and into the rest of the bowl. “Now,” he said, as he added finishing touches to his crooked arrows, “the molecules of water start moving out and into the more concentrated solution”

Japa is in full swing.

As a child, seeing people off the airport always felt bittersweet; a loved one leaving meant I couldn’t see them again but also a toy or a shirt was coming back to me in my future.  

As an adult, the first friend I saw off at the airport left in 2019, a decade after he first got paid to write software. Farouq’s final straw broke over three months and multiple stress points. First, he felt like he’d hit his technical ceiling locally when companies couldn’t afford to pay him enough for his depth of experience. He’d contemplated an offer in the UK for a while, and just a few hours before the offer closed, he applied. He left with his family in three months. 

Murtala Muhammed Airport departures had an electric sense of urgency. If you had a flight ticket, it was easy to get in. Everyone else had to prove why they deserved to see their family one last time:

“I’m her mother.” 

“He’s my husband. See our wedding ring.” 

“I’m his brother.”

I managed to get in with a lie and one of my friend’s suitcases in hand. Everything felt hurried: getting in, the security checks. I watched him in the distance as he checked in, turned a left corner, and turned around to sneak in a final goodbye. 

It was Farouq’s first time leaving Nigeria, his first time on a plane and the last time he’s set foot in Nigeria. Every few months since then, I’ve had a last brunch, a last hangout, or a last excursion to the airport. For everyone japa-ing, there’s the bitterness of leaving a familiar world behind but the optimism of going to a new world with hope and opportunity. 

It was the same with Farouq; it was also the same with Dami.

After that night in 2017, Dami began the slow and tumultuous process of making a new home in a new country. She took any gig that paid and saved all her earnings. She, a writer of essays, papers, advertising and screen, took an English test. She got married—her wedding was our last hangout—and started a new life in Canada. All in eighteen months. 

I counted all the people who left after Dami. Friends, people I’d liked enough to hang out with at least over and over. I stopped counting at twenty-six. One Whatsapp group has twelve guys trying to catch up as we got busier and the stakes at our Lagos jobs climbed. Only five of us still live in Nigeria. We’re all forming new rituals across continents over WhatsApp and Google Meet. Every other month, they’ll send photos of the kids, and we’ll also say, “Oh wow, she has grown so much. She used to be so tiny.” Always over Whatsapp, never them in your arms. 

Every time there’s a departure—when someone dies, a colleague resigns, or a friend japas—the left-behind ask themselves, “Why am I here?” Whether the answers soothe or trouble them, the left-behind will have their loneliness to manage. 

Japa feels like a slow-burning refugee crisis. It’s migration driven by desperation. The fatalities are vastly different in scale to a humanitarian disaster as hope dies a slow, flickering death, but the human cost is real. In 2006, almost 2,600 Nigerians arrived in Canada as permanent residents. In the next decade, over 33,000 Nigerians became permanent residents. In 2022 alone, over 22,000 Nigerians landed in Canada as permanent residents. 

Nigerians have migrated for decades. Every year, thousands of young Nigerians scatter across America, Europe, and the Middle East, but the current drain scale is unprecedented by all indications. 

This wouldn’t seem like much of a problem. What are a few tens of thousands of people leaving every year when there are over 100 million of us? But it’s not just any tens of thousands—it’s people with skills critical for an emerging economy. Of the twenty-six people in my life who’ve left in the past five years, three are health workers, seven are designers and engineers, three are in finance, and eight are creatives. Most of them were at major inflexion points in their careers. 

Their destination countries—the US, UK and Canada as leading destinations—have immigration policies that say,  "Come to me,” but with a catch: “Come to me, the best of you who are tired and weary, I’ll give you rest.”

2004. 

I was at the back of the class, struggling to stay engaged, as were most other boys. The teacher was pacing the class, cane in hand. I don’t remember his eyes because he was such a prolific flogger. You held a gaze for too long, and then what? What if he asked you a question, and you didn’t know the answer? 

“The reason osmosis happens,” the teacher explained near the end of his 35-minute class, “is because equilibrium has to occur. The concentration has to become the same on both sides of the membrane.” The same concentration, within or outside the potato. 

I think a lot about what equilibrium means. It’s not an absence of movement; it’s a system in flux, an even movement back and forth. in this case. Sometimes, I think about it as people who’ve left for one reason or another returning home. 

In January 2020, I had a conversation with an engineer who went from interning at Tesla to returning to Nigeria. 

“I work in the off-grid industry providing electricity to the unelectrified,” he said. ”You can only do that in Africa, and Nigeria has one of the largest unelectrified populations in the world.” He sounded the optimist at the beginning of osmosis again. A force that holds people back had, in a sense, brought him back home.

Perhaps equilibrium could also mean maintaining a sense of connection with home, whether it be the balancing act of shuffling between two countries over months, years, or a lifetime. But one way it manifests is perhaps in how people, no matter what, choose to maintain some form of connection with home. It could be a bag of shirts and toys, a car, or a few dollars here and there. They add up. 

We, the people, are Nigeria’s second biggest export after oil. We leave weary, seeking to become more in the world and return refined ideas and, quite significantly, hard currency. In 2022, Nigerians sent home almost $21 billion, compared to the Nigerian government’s leading source of income, crude oil, generating $45.6 billion.

Our artists sell out the most monumental venues across the Americas and Europe at unprecedented scales, performing to thousands of audiences and singing back to them word for word. There are large non-Nigerian audiences, too, but the Nigerian horde in most of those halls is undeniable. 

Whenever I see a well-made Hollywood movie, I sit through the credits, looking for a Nigerian name. I do a small yay when I find one, wondering if they left sometime in the last decade or if it was their parents who left a generation ago. 

It’s bittersweet to seek out other places to reach your full potential, but any sweetness is welcome when you leave home because, as the poet Warsan Shire describes it, “home is the mouth of a shark.”

A few weeks ago, I was trapped in the airport's departure lounge in Accra; my flight back to Lagos had been delayed for two hours. While I was there, a loved one was dealing with a crisis: she’d received a job offer from Germany. It came in the middle of her crisis; she’d done impactful work for most of the past decade, working as a creative. But she’d also hit a ceiling; there were no longer enough opportunities for her locally. The job in Germany offered a better salary compared to her Nigerian income. 

There were buts. As a creative where the work you produce is largely tied to the context and environment you produce it, it meant that she’d have to leave a lot of it behind. She would move to a country where she barely knew anyone, live in temporary accommodation for six months, and begin to build a new life in a cold country. She’d spend a few years, and when she qualifies for citizenship, there’s a possibility she might revoke her Nigerian citizenship. A life in Germany would most likely offer her a much larger life. But at what cost? 

As I paced the lobby, I wondered about my fate. I live in Nigeria. I understand inertia in my personal life. I work on Archivi.ng, a product that demands to be nurtured from zero to one from here. I write on Vistanium, where most stories attempt to capture the Nigerian condition from the ground. 

It’s work that matters to me and the world, I believe. But I know optimism is not enough. Nigeria is on the offensive, and I need to maintain a bubble. I always have measures to make a living here more bearable. Worrying less about power. I use multiple internet providers to reduce downtime. I make new friends I know will leave, just as the old ones did. I save in dollars when the naira falls, then in naira when it puts up a fight. I step on my throttle when I drive past a trailer. I try to de-escalate every time I’m at a checkpoint. I’m in the gap between clarity and action. 

I know all the other tipping points have missed me for now, and I wonder what it’ll be. Will it be when the money in my hand is worth less than toilet paper? Or when I lose another loved one? 

Does it even matter what it will be? Because what kills a hundred-year-old, heart failure or natural law? 

It feels like sand in my palms; the harder I squeeze, the more sand seeps out. 

Dami has lived in Canada for over four years now. Everything she’d hoped and prayed for—light and safety—was now abundant. It didn’t come all at once; there was the struggle with adjusting, culture shock, missing the familiar, and landing opportunities that made her happy. The one thing that was in abundance from the first day was hope. 

Some things still linger. She turns off the lights, not just to save power but because she still struggles to grasp having it in abundance. She still catches herself heading home, wondering if there’s light. “That feeling of not having the basic stuff you should have,” Dami’s voice note said, “it follows you.”

“I miss home every day so much,” she told me in a voice note over WhatsApp one Monday in March. “Then I remembered things aren’t any better than when I left. There are things I want my children to experience about Nigeria that they never will, and that’s sad.” They’ll build new traditions and experiences over Zoom, WhatsApp, and holiday visits back home every few years.

Maybe this, too, is a form of equilibrium: missing her home country but feeling truly at home in her new home in Canada because, in the end, Dami is happy.

It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together

• I’m not sure when the idea for this essay first came, but I know it was in 2020 after reading The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, an exploration of consumption habits in contemporary America. Understandably, it was quite American in its lens. But it made me ask what that looked like in Nigeria and what the motions of this demographic might be. That question set in motion everything this essay has become. So, shout out to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett for writing. 

• This approach to the essay is a third attempt. The first one felt like a commentary on Elizabeth’s book, trying to explore the idea of a Nigerian Aspirational Class. Derin and Afolabi read it in 2020: it wasn’t working. So I abandoned it. The second approach was closer to this, centring the journey and phenomenon, but it felt hollow. But it was this third one that turned out to be the charm. 

• I was supposed to work on another essay based on Ope’s recommendation. But two things happened as I paced the airport lobby: the idea for the cover image, a remake of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, came to mind. I immediately sent a voice note to Mariam. Mariam and I, what we have is telepathic, so she responded with this cover art. There was nothing to improve. Shout out to Mariam. 

• The second thing I realised was that I was trying to write about this experience without writing myself into it. When I added my perspective, it started to make sense. 

• This version then went through a series of rounds of editing. Afolabi interrogated the argument, Solomon interrogated the copy, and Ruka interrogated the structure; Sonia and ChatGPT did a final sweep for typos. They made this bearable. If Ruka had asked me to make one more adjustment, I might have burst into tears. I’m tired.

• I spoke to many people to put this together; thank you to all of you, especially Zainab, Eruke, and most of all, Dami and Farouq. 

• It took so long to get this published, and the only reason this exists for you to read is because of Vistanium’s members. Their membership is what pays for this writing and allows it to exist. If you believe it deserves to exist, then become a member here. 

Director’s Notes

Words by

The writer, Gay Talese, wanted to specialise in writing about nobodies — people who weren’t considered newsworthy. People who were largely ignored because they hadn’t committed a crime, been involved in a scandal, or suffered a violent death. 

Similarly, N.R. Kleinfeld — formerly of the New York Times — said the people he wrote about were labelled ordinary because they weren’t famous or powerful. But he found that tag diminishing. His subjects were extraordinary to him because an authentic richness filled their souls, alongside a “keen sensory awareness of the way the world works.”

When Kayode and I set out to make The Gravediggers, our primary goal was to tell the story of everyday people living as authentically as possible. Our initial aim was to tell the story of a 90-year-old tailor shop that had passed through three generations of descendants. But when that story fell through, a serendipitous conversation at Papies Maetro [behind Atan Cemetery] after one of our failed visits to the tailor shop spurred the idea for this documentary.

As someone who has always been fascinated with the rituals of death, I asked Kayode, “Why don’t we tell the story of gravediggers?” A few fevered pitches later, Kayode bought the idea, became gingered, and our journey started. 

At its core, The Gravediggers is an attempt to capture a sliver of the day-to-day experience of the people who make a living from burying the dead. Our intention with this doc is not to be didactic, moralising, or to wring out global implications. Instead, we aim to [hopefully] magnify and probably amplify the realities of people who fly under society’s radar of what’s “important.”

Nothing hammers this point like this one scene from the documentary. We had spent 20 minutes trying to get [another] Kayode, a bricklayer at the cemetery, to open up to us, but we needed more progress. He had given mostly monosyllabic responses to all our questions while shielding his core behind the cool, dark shades he had on. At one point, I asked him a simple question. 

“What don't you like about your job?”

Kayode seemed taken aback, almost as if he wasn’t used to his opinion being considered as important. There was a sigh and a pause in the mix. But after the pause, as if a spell had been broken, Kayode took off his glasses and started talking like a person for the first time since that afternoon. There was no facade, no high walls, just a few ordinary people connecting over the shared experience of living — which was precisely what we set out to do.

Every Sunday evening, will take a personal dive into the world of money and markets: see what’s happening, help you make sense of it, and tell you how it affects your bottom line. More about Bottom Line here.

I was watching Wes Anderson's Oscar-winning short film, “The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar,” last Thursday morning when it hit. Not only was my Netflix buffering, but my social media apps were also not loading.

I started calling people to see if it was just a me problem, and it turned out I wasn’t alone. The internet was down. The impact was instant and widespread, affecting people everywhere—if it relied on an internet connection, it felt the shock somehow.

, my editor, was also trying to sort out his bills. He needed to pay his plumber and AC guy, but his bank apps refused to load, and bank transfers were not working. People couldn’t open their work tools. Nothing seemed to work for everyone who used a Microsoft tool—Docs, Teams, Calls, Designers. Bank apps and ride-hailing services had been cut off from the internet.

We were dealing with inflation, intense heat, poor electricity, and now an internet outage? Everything had gone to the pits. It wasn’t doomsday, but Thursday didn’t feel like 2024.

What’s happening to our internet?

Some subsea cables supplying internet to much of West Africa had been severed around Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire. Many countries across West Africa, including Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria, were affected—in Côte d'Ivoire, they were completely without internet. The undersea cables affected were the West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT 3, and the MainOne cable system. The MainOne cable network is a submarine cable stretching from Portugal to South Africa.

It’s bad, but how bad?

MTN, Africa's largest internet service provider (ISP), is connected to MainOne. MTN is my primary internet source, along with 290 million others, because, quite honestly, it’s everywhere you go. I could confirm that MTN users across West Africa and in South Africa were affected.

MainOne is one of the major internet service providers for people and companies. Every business in every sector that used MainOne—banks, fintech, media—was affected. One of the major companies affected was Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc, NIBBS. Simply put, they ensure that transactions happen almost instantly whenever you send money from one bank to another. To put NIBBS into context, they powered over 183 million transactions in February alone. But for a short time on Thursday, they were also down.

I asked an engineer who works for a Nigerian bank. He mentioned they were down for two hours at most because they had a backup system to fall back on. Most businesses didn’t.

It begs the question: how does the internet work?

The Internet is a network

Think of it like a postal service, but it delivers digital information instead of packages. I’ll start at the backbone: over 90% of all internet connectivity today is powered by a massive cable network deep in the oceans worldwide, laid by actual people. Imagine a network of 1.3 million km of cables at the bottom of the ocean—the backbone of the internet. Now, these cables branch out to deliver the internet into more localized regions. They carry the connection to local data centers. Then that’s further distributed to smaller cables (think of that digging project that’s happened somewhere in your city). Then it connects to your Service Providers, like MTN.

Then it arrives on your device. Some critical cables were cut off somewhere in the ocean before the internet branched inland to Nigeria and other African countries.

You’re probably wondering, “What does it have to do with my Bottom Line?”

It’s already affected my productivity, for starters. Most of my friends and I barely got anything done on Thursday. I wrote this from my friend’s house because they have better internet; they use Glo, which has cable and wasn’t affected. I’ve had to re-subscribe to Glo, and my internet was back to life.

This means I'll have to spend extra money buying more internet options to surf and get work done. Apart from Glo, another failsafe option people have resorted to is the Starlink Network.

Starlink users are completely unaffected. Take this user, Ezra, who has not had to worry about the downtime: “It’s a worthwhile investment if you care enough about staying connected at home.”

Starlink is a satellite internet product built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Instead of physical cables running under the sea, Starlink transmits internet data through radio waves from satellites in space. It’s dependable, it’s stable, but it’s also expensive. If you bought this in October 2023, it would cost you ₦338,000. Today, it’d cost you hanging out on a waitlist while costing you more than double at ₦800,000. You’ll still pay a monthly subscription of ₦38,000, but window shopping is free.

When will this end? 

I went looking for other examples of cable cuts in the past. In December 2008, the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable, which connects Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, was damaged by a ship's anchor lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It took about two weeks to repair the cable and restore connectivity to affected regions.

In 2011, there was a cable break in the AAG (Asia and American Gateway) submarine cable system that directly links Southeast Asia and the U.S. It also took 2 weeks to restore full internet capacity. In 2020, there were three cable breaks in Africa, including a breakdown in the South African Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT3/WACS) cable system linking Portugal and Spain. The WACS cable system that connects South Africa to the United Kingdom was also affected. The restoration of the cable break took well over a month. MainOne might take five weeks to fix, and we’ll have to wait with bated bits.

The inconvenience intensifies with each passing day. How much more will you spend on getting better internet? And how many more hours of work will have to go to waste? I’m wondering what the solution is. Beyond finding alternatives, how can this not happen again? It’s not about becoming less dependent on the internet; it’s about finding more cut-free options. The internet is a lifeline in the modern economy.

It takes 10 minutes for the brain to be starved of oxygen to die. Look at what the internet did to us in only a few hours.

The new week is here. I’ll be spending mine doing a lot of market runs while trying to answer one question: Why did things get so expensive?

I hope you have a great week and the vim to win.

Choose whether you want to receive the next Bottom Line here: click the button, toggle Bottom Line off and break our hearts.

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Reader, 

Nine months ago, I shared an update about taking this little piece of the internet called Vistanium and making it into something more meaningful. To create a laboratory of curiosities that, at its heart, cares deeply about stories and making things that move us and everyone. 

It might feel early, but there’s much more clarity about Vistanium’s core purpose: to find extraordinary people and whip up extraordinary stories with them. Beyond talent, it’s finding people with great aspirations to do work that feels original and pushes the boundaries of the medium they choose a little further. 

Still, the fundamental measure of our success will be how it impacts you, the reader, watcher, or listener. I believe a piece from Vistanium has delivered when it offers you a new perspective on old things, however mundane, or opens you up to entirely new worlds. 

Now, this small space was created a few years ago to explore more ambitious storytelling that conventional channels in Nigeria might not have room for. Not because there’s no appreciation for it but because there just doesn’t appear to be a model to accommodate it.

I understand that; I just refuse to accept it. But I’m not alone in this lack of acceptance. Since July last year, a few dozen people have made commitments—actual paid commitments—to get this thing going. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that whatever we make of it won’t be possible without them. 

Make A Commitment

My Vistanium agenda is to make it the place for the best-told stories about the human condition. In the past, Vistanium has mostly felt like a place for me and my collaborators – editors, designers, researchers – with me at the centre of the creative process. But more and more, other people will be the centre of the process as part of a community of practice. There have always been indicators: 

For example, I understand that while I care deeply about telling in-depth stories, I don’t have enough hours in my life to tell all of them. Victor Daniel, for example, was in a much better place to tell the story of a flood that had affected his family.

Going into the future, it will mean even more people at the centre of the creative process. For example, brought her podcasts, I Too Sabi and I Like Girls, into Vistanium. I Like Girls started with her talking, in narrative format, about her episode of being gaslit by doctors for years. And now, 45 episodes later, she’s spoken to dozens of women from about two dozen African countries about what it means to be a woman. 

This weekend, she starts releasing three episodes of a limited series about what it means to be a woman running for public office in Nigeria. You should listen. 

Another Aisha— —is starting a series called Bottom Line, a personal exploration of what’s happening in the world of money and how it’s affecting her Nigerian pocket and yours. Every Sunday at 6pm WAT, she’ll look at some aspect of money in the trends, speak to experts about it, understand what it means, and explain how it affects you, and she’ll deliver it to you jargon-free. 

A bunch of other stuff are coming this year: 

The features will come, consistently

First, we're establishing a monthly release cadence. Then, towards the end of the year, we’re raising the ambition to establish a weekly features cadence. Last year, you and many others loved A Paystack Friendship so much that it was read almost 20,000 times in less than a week. We’ll look for more.

While we’re starting the year by working to establish a monthly publishing cadence for our features, we want to close out the year by delivering one per week. That’s ambitious, but it’s also curious. There are a couple of things we’ll be keeping in mind: where the stories are situated and who’s collecting them.

This experiment, as a question, is this: What will it take to find six strong storytellers from across Nigeria and work with them to produce hyperlocal stories with global aspirations? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out.

We’ll take some big swings; crack, crack

We’re building muscle across formats as we go. For example, Aisha has produced over a hundred videos for CNN. But she directed one short film, We Have Bleach, and felt like a rookie again. I did too. That’s coming later this year. 

But perhaps the biggest swing of the year, in scale and stakes, remains Sun and Country, a careful and comprehensive story about the Nigerian Civil War delivered in multiple formats—audio, text, video etc. There’s some last-mile fever there that will be cured with cold water and wads of cash. 

And talking about wads of cash, to pay for all of these, we’re going to be shaking many trees: growing the membership, taking on commissioned work, and exploring whatever means exist.

It’ll be hard, all of it.

Just as I was thinking about how to end this, Kayode, my friend and collaborator of five years, messaged me. He’d been watching an interview with the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had shared a saying he learned from Peruvians: " Perseverance is where the gods dwell.”

“There’s so much to do,” Kayode said as we discussed a short documentary he co-directed—it’s coming to Vistanium.

He’s right. There’s so much to do, and we’ll do it with vim. Life is so rich; we’ll bear witness, collect pieces of it, and transmit them to everyone for them to see, to hear, and to feel. This, to me, is what storytelling means.

All the progress we’ve made is a result of the effort of our community of backers and the collective brilliance of the editorial team. Thank you for bringing us this far. Let’s go further. 

Help Us Go Further: Become a Member

Subscribe to receive Bottom Line

Money is hard to understand – how it’s made, protected, or grown – and it’s not your fault. 

Look, I get it –navigating the world of money feels like a maze designed by a toddler. But when you’re doing this in a country like Nigeria, it’s on a whole new level of insanity. The entire finance industry – the old financial institutions and the new fintechs – promises they can help everyone find a path to financial freedom. And maybe they can when they’re not trying to sell you a new product, but there are also factors even the banks can’t control. 

How did we get here? 

In 2016, perplexed, I lay on a couch in my brother’s living room: “What the hell does the floating of the naira mean?” My brother, who’d spent almost a decade working in finance then, broke it down for me like I was five. 

I went on to write about it, and seeing how people reacted to it across the internet made something clear: I’m not alone in my curiosity and confusion about money. My curiosity about money kicked into another gear; I wasn’t just interested in the macroeconomic sense but in how it affects everyday people like you and me. 

A few years later in 2019, after months of experimentation, I started writing this series called Naira Life; a weekly exploration of people’s relationship with money. Every Monday at 9am for a hundred weeks, I published one story about a real person and their real financial struggles. 

I haven’t written an episode since December 2020, but it still continues to be relevant to audiences everywhere and to me. 

What’s the Bottom Line

Bottom Line is the overall financial health and stability of a person.

What we’re trying to do with Bottom Line is different. We’re looking at what’s happening in the rapidly changing economic landscape, looking for the clearest insights, distilling them, explaining why they matter, and, most importantly, showing you how they affect your bottom line. 

It’s an uphill battle, and we’re trying to find the path of least resistance for ourselves. 

Every Sunday at 6 pm WAT, we’ll look at what’s happened in the past week and how it affects your bottom line, and we’ll try to look into the future and keep you ahead for the new week. This time, another brilliant writer, will be diving deep, looking for signals, while I edit everything she finds and beat it into shape.

Read her first episode:

To make sense of everything we find, we’re creating a small council of people who work across various disciplines in finance. Their insights will help us navigate the complexities of the markets and how they move, including the policies and how they hit our pockets. We’re also going to be doing this jargon-free. 

This is what you should do

To make this work, we’ll need a lot of help from you. Tell us your questions, points of confusion, and the square pegs in the round parts of your life. Your questions will shape this dispatch into the meaningful thing it needs to be to improve your bottom line. 

For now, subscribe to this newsletter – if you’re already subscribed to Vistanium, subscribe here, too, since we haven’t added old subscribers by default. Share this newsletter, too: the more people see it, the more they read, and the more they have questions or perspectives you didn’t know you needed. 

That’s it for now; see you next Sunday, 6pm WAT.

Akobo, Ibadan, Nigeria

Around 7:44 p.m. Distance from Ground Zero: 13 km

I wake up at the sound of something tripping in the dark. I’d fallen asleep while watching a movie, my reward for a productive day at work. The sound was a loud thud that tore through the silence of the evening,¹instantly triggering memories of my neighbour’s recent robbery. I’d received a call that midnight, my shrill iPhone ringtone separating me from the arms of my babe. My neighbour was in disbelief: “I saw him escape through the kitchen.” “How did I leave the kitchen door open?” “My phones…”

I sit up; there is a lump in my throat. My palms are sweaty, and my mind conjures the image of the intruder in my home.

I call out my housemate’s name, but there is no answer. I stand up, my legs crippled with fear, walk to my front door and push it open. It is clear, quiet.

My housemate appears from the next room. I can see his darting eyes in the dark. “Did you hear that,” he asks. I tell him there’s been someone in the house. It’s the only way I can explain the sound I heard earlier: the jarring sound of the window, the burst of air, and the deafening silence that followed.

We stand outside the apartment, hoping to see a trail that confirms my suspicion. Nothing but the cold harmattan breeze slaps our bare chests. I have a new theory: it must have been the breeze. I forgot how cold it has been.

Twelve kilometres from my room, on a closed road in Bodija, two old men, gripped by the icy hands of fear, lock themselves in an embrace. An Okada rider is thrown off his motorcycle. A car alarm rings out; several car alarms ring out. This is not a typical dusty Harmattan night. 

There’s been an explosion.

The two old men break apart when the explosion and the roar of crumbling buildings subside. In the dark, foggy night, with their bodies buried in dust, the men ask each other if they’re okay. They ask each other before they even worry about their own selves.

These men – night guards for Bodija Estate Baptist Church – didn’t know it at the time, but they’ve just survived an accident that will remain with them forever.

My phone rings as soon as I step back into my room. It’s a friend who never calls.

“Are you okay,” she asks.

“I’m fine. Why’d you ask?”

“I heard there was an explosion in Ibadan. Are you okay…?”

Her voice trails off. A tight knot forms in my stomach. The thought of an insurgency fills my mind. It’s a –

“Did you hear anything at your side?”

“Oh no, no,” I respond. 

I drop the call and check WhatsApp; another friend, Anthonia, has a video up. She’s on a bike hurrying home in a haze of smoke. I can’t see her face, but she’s talking about an explosion only a few kilometres from her shop at Sango. 

“Me, I dey run go house,” I hear the fear in her voice. 

Anthonia is panicking; everyone is panicking. A former classmate says it’s the insurgency his pastor predicted at the start of the year. A co-worker thinks it's a kidnapping attempt gone wrong. 

I switch apps; X is raging with memes. 

The people on X are in their element. “Ibadan” sits at the top of the trends table, but every tweet with that word is either a question or a meme that plays on the word “bang.” It’s a party of panic on one side and influencers farming for engagement on the other. 

I switch back to WhatsApp, but my phone rings before I find any news.  It’s my mother. Her angry voice fills my left ear, asking if I’m home; she’s heard about the explosion. 

“Do you know what they say it is?”

“No, ma.” 

“Má jáde o, má jáde o,” she warns me to stay indoors.

The call ends.

Back on X, panic continues to spread from timeline to timeline. Some conspiracy theorists say it’s the start of an insurgency in the West. Some say a filling station blew up. The proximity to a gas station at Bodija, they say, and the presence of a large shopping mall — Ace Mall — must have amplified the explosion. 

“It can’t be a bomb,” I tell myself as I push out images of insurgents marching through Ibadan from my mind. Ibadan has been mostly peaceful since I started visiting when I was six. I am comforted that the state governor, Seyi Makinde, has always taken security seriously. He was instrumental in founding Amotekun, a regional security outfit in all South Western states. 

As the fear continues to spread, so does the sense of loss.

The time is 9:40 p.m., two hours since the loud thud in my Akobo apartment, two hours since two old men clung on to each other for life, two hours since hundreds of residents of Bodija watched their homes collapse, and two hours since two people breathed their last in a haze of smoke and panic. 

Two hours in, and the jokes and memes have remained. 

By morning, the facts have become clearer: the official story is that there’s been an explosion at the Dejo Oyelese axis of Bodija, and several buildings have crumbled to the ground. Seyi Makinde shares more details through his official X account: he estimates that around 230 properties were directly affected: torn roofs, fallen fences, broken windows, and, in extreme cases, total collapse. 

The losses extend beyond the material; two people have died, and another 77 were injured. 

Two days later, on the 18th of January, the state government updates the casualty figure: three more victims have died, and this brings the fatalities to a total of 5. 

Nigeria is a hubbub of calamity. Sandwiched between a crippling economy, it cloaks itself in robes of humour. We turn difficult situations into Atellan farces, make faces at our predicaments, and share memes about them.

Perhaps we are in a comedy of errors, and we are the players. 

“The ‘bang’ happened when I tried withdrawing money from my empty bank account at the ATM,” a tweet says. Others turn the situation into an opportunity to try pick-up lines: “The gas explosion in Ibadan made me remember how my love for you exploded, and I wasn’t able to control it. Anyways, you don’t have to respond, say hi to your mama fa me!”

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Sango, 11 a.m. (Two days after the explosion)

Distance from Ground Zero: 1.2 km

Sango is a commercial centre in the city of Ibadan. Busy, loud, and impatient, an abandoned railway track dating back to 1896 runs through the illustrious town, extending into Bodija, a calmer and serene part of the city. 

I stand by the shop of my friend, Anthonia, and I take some pictures of the busy town. It hums and screeches: nothing out of the ordinary. The picture I just took reveals the stark contrast from two days ago.

Two days ago, this town was in smoke. The shops were locked. Antsy legs filled the streets. The explosion had rocked their ears and shook their hearts so violently that Sango had become a ghost town. 

I reach a shop where the impact has cracked a window. The shop owner is a woman in her early 30s; she greets me in Yoruba. Her hand extends towards mine; I take it and ask about the explosion. 

“Everybody sáré,” she says about that night she fled on an Okada. 

“Ìgbà tí mo dé láarọ̀, mo wá notice pé glass mi ti fọ́.”

“It’s just a crack,” she explains about her broken glass, “but it could have been worse.” 

Ace Mall, Bodija

The first time I visited Bodija, I was sure I’d rent an apartment there after university. Bodija was a town that thrived on quietude. The tarred roads and upscale houses were a needed contrast in a city famous for its brown roofs and seventy-year-old buildings. 

Bodija wasn’t cut off from the rest of Ibadan. Everywhere in the city connected to Bodija, its huge food market brought traders from all over the state, and its restaurants – particularly Amala Sky – brought visitors from all over the country.

As I’m getting closer to Ground Zero – Google Maps says I am 3.7 kilometres away – the atmosphere changes. 

When I visited Ace Mall with friends for the first time three years ago, it was packed with an enthusiastic crowd. The gaming area was buzzing: shouts of “goal!” and defeat rented the air in intervals. The restaurants had queues that spilt out of their doors. Within its grand walls, bathed in the soft glow of its humming lights, a scene unfolded before my eyes: a picturesque background for the lens of an Instagram picture. The scene naturally captured the attention of people, who then took turns taking pictures. 

Today, the mall has suffered a massive stroke; only one-half of its body hangs for life. Its roof has fallen on one side of the building. The once-bright lights, which sat right beside the large “Ace Mall” banner, are dead, and most of the outlets are closed. It’s a funeral of what once was, its Instagram-coloured walls almost like a distant memory. I see a large polythene bag plastered across one patch of the building, a bandage for its broken part. It’s a mirror of the dystopian blast from two nights ago. 

I drive further down the road, and I catch a glimpse of a broken window. It is a Domino’s, operating despite its broken windows and shattered roof. The loss is minimal, lives are preserved, and business continues. 

DEJO OYELESE CLOSE: GROUND ZERO

After some difficulty with Google Maps, I arrive at a small, secluded estate. The area is deserted, save for a few cars packed on the side of the road.

I walk until I reach an affected building. Its stone walls are a sharp contrast to the heap of rubble only a few inches away, which used to be buildings. The windows and doors are broken, and several parts of the roof have fallen out, but the building stands; the Stone Technical College still stands. 

Straight ahead behind an estate gate sits Ground Zero, a small crater that’s the primary site of the explosion. Armed soldiers are now guarding the rickety gate to the estate, ordered to let no one in. I approach one of the soldiers. 

“I am reporting for –

He pays me no attention. I try again. 

“I just need to see the scale and I will be out before you know it.”

“ID Card?” he asks. 

I tell him I’m not carrying any, but would gladly provide any other proof he needs. He debates my offer for a few seconds, and then pushes open the gate. A group of sympathisers squeeze in as I walk into the estate. 

My heart breaks.

A man sits in front of his destroyed home, his eyes boring into space. His face sits on his hands, almost as if they no longer have the strength to continue. As I walk by, his gaze lingers on me as if he is protecting the last fragile pieces of his ruined home.  Across him is another fallen house – its gate the only sign that it ever existed. Two nights earlier, this house was a one-storey family home, its windows adorned with curtains, its walls bright with colour. Laughter and the smell of burning food rented the air. 

But with dawn came a new reality; the once sturdy walls of the house now bear scars of the explosion. The laughter and sense of homeliness are replaced by an eerie silence interjected by the roar of an excavator.

The debris of ruin extends deeper into the estate. Two cars are squeezed into each other as if they have just come from the junkyard.

Ground Zero is nothing but a crater surrounded by a heap of stones, drawing the attention of sympathisers, large excavation trucks, and uniformed care workers nestling under a canopy a few feet away from the destruction.

It’s a rubble of broken appliances, meshed wires, clothes, and furniture items. In it lies the proof of life that used to be here. People used to live here. At 7:40 pm two nights ago, life bustled here; by 7:45 pm, it was rubble.

The atmosphere carries the stench of an old rag. A dusty haze hangs in the air. Dirt has taken over the land, its stench wafting through the hot afternoon. 

Some of the ruins hold the former home of Timilehin Oseni; his camera, lights, and other equipment are buried beneath the rubble. His family house is deserted, its walls torn down by the explosion's impact.

The loss here isn’t a crack in the window. It is a tear in the fabric of life that holds the Oseni family together. But Timilehin is optimistic. We’ll build a home again, he tells me. 

But things are different for Fatoba John’s aunt. 

Her home was the last thread of sanity. Thirty years ago, she and her now-deceased husband moved into a 6-bedroom Duplex at Dejo Oyelese Street. This massive house soon became a home for a family of five. Within those walls, she raised her three curious and wide-eyed teenagers whose hunger for independence preceded everything else. Eventually, this curiosity fueled their decision to fly far away from the familiar net of a family home. Shortly after the death of their father, these children moved to different parts of the world, leaving their mother with a large, empty nest. 

The loneliness tore at her heart. But she took refuge in the memories smeared across every room. Every tread on the stairs. The pictures on the wall. The familiar arrangement of the sofas in the living room. Sometimes, John tells me, she sits in the living room for hours, staring straight ahead at her television, her mind no doubt filled with the memories of her family in this house. 

When the explosion occurred in Dejo Oyelese on the 16th of January, she was deeply asleep. The impact cracked down the roof, instantly jolting the old woman to reality. Unable to make sense of the falling debris and wood, she screamed for help, but her voice got buried in the wave of calamity. 

She woke up in a hospital ward with a slight injury to her arm. Her pillow was soaked around the outline of her head, a consequence of the hot teaching hospital. A small crowd of family was gathered around her. She knew what was coming; their faces were cast in gloom, the weight of regret heavy in their eyes. 

The destruction of her family home in the explosion was akin to losing a part of herself. It wasn’t death; it was a loss perhaps greater. It was the loss of the only thing to live for, and isn’t that dying in itself?

John’s aunt refused to speak and had to be taken in for counselling. 

Five days have passed since the unfortunate explosion in the city. The Oyo State Government has completed its excavation exercises, and the Emergency Operations Centre has given the victims all the care it can offer. The official report puts the death toll at five, with over 100 injured and around 250 houses affected. 

The Oyo State Government promises a thorough investigation, but here’s the word on the street, according to someone who lived on it: a certain man everyone called Mali illegally stored dynamite in his rented home. On the day of the explosion, his wife and kids left the estate minutes before the blast. But in a recently published Leadership piece, Mali – real name, Alhaji Sawane Youssouf – denies any connection to the event. He claims he is a registered miner with an Oyo state licence. 

However, a certain Muideen Olalekan Olagunju, a former Oyo House of Assembly member, disagrees with Youssouf’s claim. While the Malian miner has a licence to operate legally in the state, Muideen believes this has never stopped him from engaging in illegal mining activities. The next accusation is more damning: Youssouf and a group of miners have formed a secret company which exclusively operates in illegal mining. 

These accusations solidify an earlier narrative, but it goes one step further to echo a warning into the ears of the state’s government: the possibility of hidden explosives in rented apartments loom large over us. 

The thought of another explosion turns my stomach. 

After walking through the ruins on my visit, two days after the explosion, I stand at the estate gate, my hands clinging to its bars. Night has fallen, and the rubble looks like a sleeping monster. Behind me, a group of Christians hum a hymn. It is a candle service for the departed souls. I let go of the bars, turn around, and join the wake. 

The candles burn at the gate of Ground Zero. A community of believers pray for souls they never met. Several miles away, at the University College Hospital, a group of undergraduate students queue to donate blood to the victims. Earlier, this same group of believers handed out food packages to government workers at the site. It is love. A sense of loss that unites. A sense of community. 

Ground Zero is an unneeded tragedy of errors, its rage tearing through a close-knit community in Bodija and its impact reverberating through the entire city of Ibadan. But it is also a tragedy that has tested the boundaries of our communalism as residents of Ibadan. 

A test, nothing more. 

I drive back home, humming a hymn: it is well, it is well with my soul. 

Editor’s Notes

Fu’ad here. As always, it took a village to put this together.

• When the explosion happened that night, I was on X like everyone else, trying to understand what was happening. I also texted someone on WhatsApp: I needed a writer willing to go to ground zero. Someone who was feeling it on the ground in a way that none of the Internet could. Everything picked up from there. 

• I found David, the author of this story, through another writer (the writer was too terrified to be around blood or gore). 

• I ran it by Vistanium’s Staff Room – the editorial Whatsapp group – to see if they thought it was a good idea. Ope thought it was, and everyone else agreed. I took the lead on editing.

• Then David got started. By the time he sent in his first draft, he hated it. We took multiple stabs at it, but it eventually came together when we tried a new editing approach. 

• I’d heard somewhere that as part of the editing process many years ago, some New Yorker editors would sit the writer down and rip apart a story, word by word, line by line. In this case, we spent at least five hours with David reading his words aloud to taste them, negotiating every word and sentence. Many darlings were killed, but some stubborn ones remain. Ruka thinks we did good.

• For art direction, Mariam was critical in shaping the direction and mood, designing the cover, while Precious made his Vistanium debut designing all the illustrations within the story. 

• Jolomi did some research while Aisha played enforcer to the finish line. 

• Most importantly, the hours were paid for by Vistanium Members, who continue to make chasing stories like this possible. They will always matter to me. 

P.S: This story is part of a broader experiment at Vistanium. I’m learning that I can’t write all the stories I want to see. Now, I’m beginning to explore a world where Vistanium has writers across Nigeria. I wonder what it’d take to get them to consistently craft stories about their world for you. I’m telling Vistanium’s members all about it here.

August 20, 2015. Ope was awake but dreaming: that sweaty Thursday, he sat in front of his computer and sent a cold email.

“Hi,” his email said, “I’m Aikomo Opemipo, a 23-year-old Nigerian, and I’d like an opportunity to intern with Bakken & Bæck in January 2016 as a frontend developer.”

Ope’s email was the first step of his grand plan. Bakken & Bæck wasn’t just any agency – it was the agency. A four-year-old product development studio in Oslo, Norway, Bakken & Bæck had an established design team, and Ope wanted to be a part of that for at least six months. He’d built a decent portfolio by writing code for two years and designing for longer. By the time his internship ended, he’d have figured out what he wanted to do. 

But his loftiest aspiration, according to his email, beyond gaining practical exposure with a team he admired, was to advance digital design in Nigeria as a discipline after his Master’s. Every day, he stalked their website. He learnt about the people and studied their work, from their blogs to case studies and pet projects – like the two beehives on their rooftop and the 100,000 bees.  So he sent the email. Norway remains one of 159 countries where Nigerians need more than desire and good intent to enter. So he applied for a visa.

To his internship request, Bakken & Bæck responded with an enthusiastic yes. But his visa request was an emphatic no from the Norwegian government. In December 2015, his visa was rejected without explanation. 

Ope felt stuck, but his friend, Ezra, had an idea. “Why not come here and work on this product with us until Norway clicks?”

Ezra Olubi was in America, working on a nifty little product out of a small flat in Sunnyvale with his co-founder and friend, Shola Akinlade. That November, Paystack had just been accepted into the W16 batch of Y-Combinator, YC, the biggest startup accelerator in the world, where they’d get access to mentorship, an ambitious network, and, most importantly, funding. 

Amongst the 3,000 startups funded since 2005 by YC, many have gone on to affect millions of people everywhere – from Airbnb, helping strangers host other strangers in their homes to Stripe and their mission to increase the GDP of the internet. When these companies first entered YC, they were often nifty little tools with big ideas. With a 300-person waitlist, Paystack was one of those ideas.

Paystack’s first application to YC was rejected early in 2015. It happened shortly after demoing this idea to his friend and another tech entrepreneur, Oo Nwoye. 

“Guy!” Oo said when Shola showed him his idea, “This is a company! This is Stripe!”

After Paystack’s rejection, Oo emailed Michael Siebel, who’d just turned CEO of YC. Michael replied, asking Shola to tell him about Paystack. A few improvements and one YC batch later, Paystack became the first Nigerian startup to get into YC.

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The decisive day for Ope’s next move came in December 2015.

“How far?” Shola said. “Do you have a US visa?” Ope did; his mum had helped him get a visa. “Come to Yankee.” Ope went.

In August 2015, Shola contracted Ope to work on some of Paystack’s frontend. Paystack promised a continuation of an old, flourishing thing: going with Ezra on a new adventure. Ope knew Ezra before Ezra knew him. Most young people who actively belonged in the Lagos tech ecosystem did. And If you didn’t know Ezra, you probably used some technology he built. 

In 2007, Ezra worked on SoftPurse, a product which helped people add money to a digital wallet to buy airtime. That year, up to 10,000 people credited their wallets. By 2010, when he was 24 years old, Ezra built the first version of Eyowo at Softcom. 

Three years later, he led the effort to take Jobberman from dedicated servers to the cloud as CTO. Shortly after they’d migrated to the cloud, an engineer accidentally hit delete on Jobberman’s entire database, wiping out the data of thousands of companies and job seekers. AWS, their cloud service, has a point-in-time recovery feature that helps them restore all the lost data by simply returning to a time before the deletion. They'd have lost everything if they still used their previous setup. 

Ezra joined Delivery Science as CTO in 2014, a startup helping FMCGs build efficient technology for their logistics. Ope and Ezra were coworkers at Delivery Science, but neither remembers precisely when they became friends. They agree it happened at Ezra’s house through a mutual friend and colleague, Yomi Osamiluyi, with whom Ope had been friends.

Yomi and Ezra lived in the same neighbourhood, so a visit to Yomi’s house inevitably meant they’d all hang out at Ezra’s. They spent their evenings bonding over Archer, ranting about being broke while eating whatever Ezra’s cook made, mainly rice dishes. 

In those moments in front of the TV, side projects materialised and became a lifeline. Ezra and Yomi were backend engineers, and Ope was the designer and frontend developer. There were the “let’s try this” projects, the “it might be worth nothing, but what if” projects, and most importantly, the “there’s this gig, let’s work on it and split the money” projects. 

By mid-September 2015, Ezra had grown disillusioned about his time at Delivery Science – the business was in dire straits. The company owed as much as four months’ salaries – Ezra, a senior hire, even longer. He’d lost confidence in the leadership of the business.

He spent less time at his office, but to ensure he left the house, he started working out of another office close to home: Klein Devort. One of the co-founders of this business was his friend, Shola Akinlade. 

Shola and Ezra met two decades ago as first-year computer science students at Babcock University. Ezra, who had applied for the same course, was assigned to the agric department. He eventually switched to computer science the following semester.

Every year at Babcock, there was a computer science students' exhibition. That year, many Computer Science students demoed exciting things. Ezra, an agric student, wrote a script that approximated the processor clock speed of computers by benchmarking how fast they could do math. Ezra's approach not only worked, it also aligned with the basic principles of computer science. It earned him Programmer of the Year – and a friendship with Shola. They exhibited every year, and in their final year in 2006, Shola and Ezra exhibited as a tag team: their winning demo was a program that helped them remotely control other computers. 

When they remotely ejected a disc from another computer in front of a crowd, everyone went berserk.

Shola went corporate after graduation, working in a Business Intelligence role at Nigerian Breweries. But he quickly grew disillusioned and started Klein Devort less than two years later with Mayowa Okegbenle, another friend from Babcock. For much of the next decade, Shola spent his time at  Klein Devort building software and consulting for businesses. Their flagship product was Precurio, a collaboration and document workflow tool for businesses.

One of Shola’s last projects at Klein Devort was with Access Bank, where he worked with their Digital Factory and Innovation team to build a product called PayWithCapture. The product helped customers make payments easily; the flagship feature was a QR scanner that helped customers make contactless payments in stores. 

PayWithCapture planted seeds in two people: Shola, the consultant, who went on to build Paystack, and Gbenga Agboola, the Head of the Digital Factory and Innovation team, who went on to build Flutterwave. 

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Before Ezra’s Delivery Science disillusionment, before the first YC application, much earlier in 2015, Shola dragged Ezra to a corner at a birthday party. He pulled out his computer to show Ezra something he’d been working on. He inputted his card details into the code editor and hit enter. His card was automatically debited. 

“Wait, what?” Ezra said.

In 2015, if you built a website and tried to sell stuff on it, you’d have to hire a software engineer to set up with a payment processing company like Interswitch, pay ₦150,000 for access to their APIs, receive a PDF with all the API documentation required to integrate and go through a review process before your website went live. 

In that corner with Shola, against a loud office party with junk food and cheap drinks, Ezra had just watched Shola legally enter a house without a gatekeeper. No payment companies and long review processes. Paystack progressed with Ezra reviewing  some of its architecture, testing and offering feedback. He hadn’t joined Paystack, but he enthusiastically followed its development. 

Before everyone took to Twitter to announce new raises and critique products, the ecosystem convened at Radar, a now-defunct online community forum for tech enthusiasts, to discuss everything. One day in September 2015, Ezra shared his longest post, then rounded up his rant about Nigeria’s online payments problem with a P.S. 

“Payments is still a real and interesting problem to solve in Nigeria today, and I am definitely interested in getting on board with anyone looking to do so, pro bono. A couple of friends over at Paystack are on to something interesting and are worth keeping an eye out for.”

It was the first time Paystack was mentioned in public. Ezra had started speaking to Shola about his general disillusionment and feeling stuck at the time. And so, when Shola asked him to be his cofounder a month later, Ezra said yes. They moved to Sunnyvale, California, soon after.
Ope joined them in January 2016. He planned to spend only three months working on Paystack before re-applying to Norway. 

Ezra, Shola and Ope built early Paystack features in that tiny apartment. Once they had an idea, they worked asynchronously to build it, from APIs to frontend and backend. Ope and Ezra shared a room but hardly ever slept in it at the same time – whenever one was awake or working, the other was asleep. Shola, too, spent some time in development, but he divided his attention between building features and meetings with potential investors. 

Consider software development like building a house. Before laying the first brick, a vision of the final structure is essential. The foundation of this digital ‘house’ is backend engineering, providing essential stability and form, much like a house's physical foundation, walls, and floors. 

The software also needs ‘plumbing and electricity’ – the APIs. These channels within the software allow seamless communication, just like plumbing and electrical systems ensure that a house's water flow and power distribution are uninterrupted. 

Then, there’s the frontend of the software that mirrors the tangible aspects of a house – everything you interact with and experience directly. It focuses on user interaction and design, ensuring that each element functions as intended, just as doors lead to the correct rooms and switches reliably light up a room.

Ope would write out the documentation for the APIs, and even before he had a backend, he’d start writing out the code for elements of the frontend and designing, knowing where everything would be. Ezra would focus on the backend while working on the APIs in places beyond Ope’s scope. It’s like a no-look pass in a game, where a player passes the ball to their opponent without looking, confident that their teammate will receive it.

In 1965, American psychologist Bruce Tuckman proposed a model for understanding team development in his article “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups”. Based on his observations on how they affect productivity, teams developed in four stages. 

In the forming stage, team members first meet and begin to understand the objectives and their roles in the team. It’s also when members begin to know each other. Then, they start expressing each other’s ideas and perspectives, which can lead to conflicts; this is the storming stage. When they resolve these conflicts, they develop a sense of cohesion, entering the norming stage. Things start to really pick up at the performing stage; the team’s energy is channelled into the objective, and everyone understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Many factors came together to help them reach their performing stage quickly in that Sunnyvale apartment. Ezra and Ope’s work history meant that tools, templates, and tempo were already familiar. Ezra was Ope’s manager at their last job and a collaborator on side projects. There wasn’t much of a learning curve for how to work, and so they worked as a unit.

They were huddled together in one flat, away from Lagos worries like electricity; the TV never ran out of shows, and the fridge never ran out of ice cream. Ezra made sure. They went grocery shopping for the house together every week. They’d bought the furniture for the house together from IKEA, too. Whatever ideas anyone had, Ope was always down for the adventure, whether it was seeing an observatory or trying out a Mongolian restaurant. 

By the end of 2016, the long toil over the years begun to take its toll on Ezra. He was tired, and everything took longer. Suffice it to say, he was burnt out. The way Ezra remembers it, he was setting the team back. But Ope disagrees; he barely even registered it.

A significant part of their friendship dynamic had been Ope looking up to Ezra. Watching him take extreme ownership of his work and be understanding, Ezra’s awe for Ope found new heights and remains to this day.  The work also didn’t slow down because Paystack had a growing formidable engineering team in Ibrahim, Loknan, and Douglas.

In their book about startups and scale, Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh discuss the five stages of team growth. They describe companies at the nation stage as having over 10,000 employees, city stage at 1,000-9,999, village at 100-999, tribe at 10-99, and a family stage at 1-9 employees. 

In this family stage, a team might be a high-performing team that won’t call themselves family, but they tend to have a strong sense of intimacy and shared purpose. 

Back in Lagos, Paystack was taking shape. Pockets of old friendships were nurtured as new ones formed. One of the first ten employees was Abiola, the Swiss army woman: she ran analysis, customer support, business ops, HR, and did whatever needed to get done. She’d followed Shola from Klein Devort. She straddled every role until a function needed deeper solutions, and someone had to be hired to do it. Seike, another of the first ten employees, joined Paystack as its customer support and operational needs grew. She’d worked with Ezra before Paystack. Loknan came from Delivery Science, while Ibrahim worked with Shola before Paystack.

Seun Runsewe joined Paystack from KPMG after her maternity leave to lead the newly formed Business function. Some days, she showed up to work with her four-month-old, and everyone took turns to babysit. Other days, she took time off for hospital runs without fear of reproach for being out of office too long. Seun Odusanya joined the business team as the tenth member of the team. 

Douglas would go the extra mile with his ingenuity, making tools that helped Seun’s work pitching businesses easier. Seike would go to bed and wake up to see that Loknan from Engineering had resolved all the support issues that popped up while she slept. 

Everyone owned something. Everyone owned everything.

By the end of 2016, Paystack’s growth strongly indicated they were up to something. They had 1,407 live customers who’d processed about 200,000 transactions valued at over 1.1 billion naira. Investors also believed that they were onto something, and so not only did they secure the standard $120,000 investment from YC, but they also raised another $1.3 million from other investors.

The small but enthusiastic team was now established. Their shared sense of values and purpose had brought them this far, but all of this first became ingrained in the culture code through Emmanuel Quartey. 

In mid-2017, a few months after Quartey rounded off his work as General Manager of MEST Incubator in Ghana, Shola asked him to come and advise Paystack on how to think about growth. He spent one month with the team, speaking to everyone and exploring what Paystack was already doing well and what it could do better. 

Everyone he spoke to sounded like they owned the business, in the depth of their knowledge and the intensity of their care. 

After witnessing a passionate debate over why the front desk had to be beautiful and observing the entire company transform a customer disaster into a moment of care, Quartey knew he wanted to stay. 

In the week Quartey’s one-month session would’ve ended, Shola asked if he’d be interested in joining Paystack to lead the growth effort. He said yes in a heartbeat. He’d effectively decided to uproot his life in Ghana to join Paystack in Lagos. 

Quartey would go on to codify how Paystack, as a team, viewed the world. Shola had an idea at almost twenty employees: he believed the team had the right vibe and wanted it codified somehow, so he asked Quartey to figure it out. And so, Shola led a session where everyone sat in a room and talked about themselves. His prompt to the room for everyone to answer was, “If you knew me, you’d know X”. He also went first and put everything on the table, sharing things people outside the team might never know.

And so, across the room, one after the other, each person poured. Quartey swears that everything good that has happened at Paystack originated from that day. The exercise made them always see themselves as whole human beings and created a deep well of collective understanding they continue to sip from. Shola still holds these sessions with new employees, albeit voluntarily. 

Quartey then spent the next few days collecting feedback from people on what they believed Paystack’s values were. What people sent back overlapped – what they had wasn’t ideals they aspired to, it was traits they already embodied as a collective. 

They created a decision-making mental model to guide how they hired, what they rewarded, what they discouraged, and how they solved problems. This became Paystack’s core values, a framework for how people at Paystack see themselves and the world.

In the 1970s, MIT researcher Thomas J. Allen developed the Theory of Proximity or Allen Curve, a pivotal theory in organisational behaviour at the time: the closer people are to each other, the more likely they are to communicate with each other, create spontaneous interactions, generate better ideas, and inevitably drive serendipitous innovation. 

Ope and Ezra’s productivity in Sunnyvale proved this theory; it also came in handy for Paystack’s growth. For instance, they had to rent an apartment close to the office to ease Quartey's relocation. Shola took out a room in that apartment and thus began the idea of a Paystack House, executed by Abiola, whose focus had been streamlined to HR and Admin. 

When employees who lived far away from the office at Ikeja needed to be closer to work, they moved into a room rented by Paystack. For about a year starting in 2017, if two Stacks – they call themselves that – wanted to rent a space, and it sat in a particular radius around the office, they could get support from HR. 

More and more Stacks began to live close to each other. They went to work and the gym and often hung out around the Paystack Houses. It felt like a closely-knit community had been created amongst the Stacks.

The Paystack team’s closeness took its first major beating in 2020 when COVID hit and the relentless flu tested their cohesion. Like most companies everywhere who had to go remote, they found inventive ways to huddle. Ope’s team, for example, would stay on Looms all day,  hopping into conversations when needed or listening for sounds of life to fill the gap created by isolation. 

As the company navigated its new COVID reality, something else was happening within the leadership team: Stripe had begun conversations to acquire Paystack. It wasn’t the first time Stripe’s possible acquisition was on the table, but Paystack thought it was too early. Stripe decided to invest in their Series A fundraising round instead in 2018.  The second time, it still didn’t feel like the right time, but when Stripe came back with an acquisition offer of over $200 million, the Stacks had a new home at Stripe.

You might get issued stocks – the atomic unit of ownership – when you join a startup, especially in its early stages. At the moment you join, they are not very valuable. But as the company grows and its value increases, so does your share. When a company like Stripe acquires the company you work at, they’re buying off your stocks for cash or stocks in their own company. For acquisitions like Paystack’s, people’s fortunes changed forever.

After months of due diligence and paperwork, Paystack’s acquisition was announced. This announcement also came in mid-October, as young Nigerians across the country and abroad organised around the #EndSARS movement, protesting against police brutality that often targets young people, including those who’d look like the average person at Paystack. 

There was some concern over the time of the announcement internally, and whether it’d distract from the protests, but when it went out, it was cogent proof of why people were out protesting: if young Nigerians feel safe being themselves, they make incredible things.

Many things have changed at Paystack. The team no longer works from just one office; they’re scattered across three continents, but Shola, who now runs a football club while leading Paystack, continues to advocate for the nimble spirit. 

Ope and Ezra haven’t worked as closely in years. Ope leads a team of designers at Paystack, while Ezra leads engineering. They’ll still be found on calls together, hashing out high-level stuff, but never really hand in the mud, shoulder to shoulder.

 In 1977, twelve years after he proposed his team development model, a fifth stage was added to Tuckman’s original model: adjourning or mourning. A sense of achievement marks this stage and sometimes a yearning as team members are separated and move to their next endeavour. In 2021, Ope yearned to collaborate closely with Ezra. But in November 2023, he remembers it differently. 

Their work at Paystack began as taking that code Shola had written and showed Ezra, building an experience around it, and then working with hundreds of Stacks to serve it to people everywhere, billions of times. You start out being a big part of a small toolbox, then become a small part of a massive engine. They formed, barely stormed, performed exceptionally, and now, this is their adjournment – what a run.

Now, you can have an idea at dawn tomorrow and start receiving payments before dusk. You could try to sell e-books; the next thing you know, you have the largest creator platform in Africa. You could have an idea to make cravings arrive faster, and after eighteen months, you’ve helped people pay 1 billion naira. Your idea could make it easy for people to automate their daily, weekly, or monthly savings. 

Consider that all these ideas and thousands more – every app or website that enables payments – were made possible because of Paystack and businesses like it. 

In the 90s, British musician Brian Eno described a word to his friend: Scenius. He believed that significant changes in history resulted from large numbers of people and circumstances to create something new. Scenius is the communal concept of genius, a collective intelligence and intuition that resides in the scene where it’s happening beyond the genes of the people in it. 

Quartey believes this is the point – to bring people together in good faith, work on a collective mission where people feel whole, and create pure vibes – to create scenius. 

In this way, Paystack’s mission as a business is not just powering a new generation of enterprises across Africa. It’s also creating a culture that won’t revolve around a cult figure but around a cult of Paystack – where people could become their best selves while building a community of practice.

Ezra, Ope and other friends – Tolu, Fatima and Tomi – meet every year for a week in Abuja. They get a lovely apartment, cook, and catch up while eating.  They want to buy a beach house together somewhere, each with a key to use anytime. And they’d hang out for no reason – dolce far niente.

Ope was supposed to spend only three months at Paystack, but he’s added another eighty-eight months to those three and is still going. He’s built a multidisciplinary design team at Paystack. Outside Paystack, he’s started a production studio for passion projects. 

One day, Ope ended up at a bar in Oslo, having drinks with people he knew and respected and who also knew and respected him. That evening was happening because Ope had sent another email, “Hi Johan, I’m in Oslo! Arrived today. Let me know when to stop by the office.” 

There had been many emails in between, but this last one landed on August 20, 2023, exactly six years since the first one to Bakken & Bæck. Ope has drank with his heroes. 

The date was unplanned. The date was perfect. 

Notes

It took a village and a lot of time to put this together.

• First, you’re reading this story because of Vistanium’s backers. It takes a lot of time and resources to make this happen, and they make it possible.

  Become A Backer

• There are many ways to tell a Paystack story or any startup’s story, but my curiosity about this angle began in 2021. I’d read James Somers’ essay about Jeff and Sanjay, two of Google’s earliest engineers. The story wasn’t about Google in the true sense, it was about friendship at work and the impact it can have in creating meaningful work. And so, I thought, what would it look like to explore this theme in the context of my environment? Thank you, James, for writing. 

• The first conversation was had in 2021. The most obvious person to talk to when exploring a company’s founding is the CEO. But I wanted to explore what it’d look like to do this without talking to the CEO. Thank you, Ope, for setting it up, Ezra, for taking the time, and both of you for talking to me. 

• Ope Adedeji and Ruka, my editors, left some early feedback on the outline, but the story just wasn’t there yet. They knew it, I knew it. 

• The story had to be about chemistry, so I tried to get some practice on another one: The Flutterwave Store.

• I kept taking stabs at it between 2021 and now, but reached a point of no return a few weeks ago. Solomon made some of the first edits, and asked good questions in this final round. The gaps started to become apparent. 

• So, I went back to look for more stories to fill them. Seike was my guide for this part, so thank you for guiding me through the rabbithole, and answering my plenty questions. And getting Seun on the phone.

• I was trying to figure out what the point of it might be. Why does this code and value system matter, and what can it make possible? I wasn’t sure of the language, but Quartey was the one who tied it up for me, especially introducing me to the concept of scenius. Many of the Early Stacks think of Quartey as some sort of oracle – I agree with them.

• I spoke to six people inside Paystack for this story across two years, and they all tended to say the same thing in different words. But I still wanted to get an extra perspective from someone who wasn't an employee but had been in the room a lot – Seyi – and it still checked. Dami and Seyi of Dá led the creation of Paystack’s timeless brand identity.

• In all, it was Ruka who dragged this story to the finish line, making me almost cry and throw up and wonder who sent me message. 

• One day, while I was whining about how stressful this story was, Binjo said, “Publish.“

• Penzu did all the illustration and motion.

• David did a typo check, and Ezra did a final factcheck. 

• I’m writing this way past midnight, so thank you, Nana, for not dragging me to bed, and tolerating me as I whined endlessly about this story.

• I really set out to explore teams, and how they come together to make incredible things. I hope I accomplished that for you too. 

An  extra PS: 

A few weeks ago, Shola announced that they were laying off people. Losing a job is hard, and I thought it was done as ethically/thoughtfully as possible, but it feels like anyone who comes to read this might find this context, especially the handling of it, useful.

Corrections: The “if you knew me“ prompt was Shola’s idea; an earlier version said it was Quartey’s.

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In Ikorodu, there’s the Majidun Creek. On the river bank, there’s a jetty and a few houses, one or two on stilts; you can see them when you cross the bridge. Beyond the bank, old houses are crammed on narrow streets to make up the Majidun Community. 

In March 2018, Tunde alighted with his friends at the Majidun Bus Stop one Sunday after playing instruments in church with them. 

“Are you sure?” one of them asked, giggling, as they hopped off the danfo with them. He knew they didn’t live in Majidun but always stopped there. On that day, he had his curiosity and time on his hands. 

A few minutes later, they arrived at a shed. Under it, there were soldiers away from their duty post huddled together. Thugs stood beside them, and next to those thugs stood children whose voices cracked from smoke faster than puberty could.  

They were all smoking weed. 

His friends came here off their church high to find a new high. Tunde wasn’t a smoker, so he sat quietly, soaking in the scene before him.

One of the thugs had a scar that ran from his right shoulder to his left waist. He’d gotten shot and attacked with a machete, he explained to Tunde when he caught him staring. When the attack ended, his intestines were outside his body, his life hanging by a thread. 

Tunde returned with his friends the following Sunday – there was no place more important to be. This time, he was comfortable enough to pull out his chess board and play himself while everyone else played with their wraps. 

“Kíni yẹn?” one of the kids asked, pointing to a chess piece in Tunde’s hand. 

“What does it look like?” Tunde responded in Yoruba. 

“It looks like a church.”

Tunde smiled. Other kids drew close, naming the pieces; the king looked like a bottle, and according to a teenage mechanic apprentice who’d come to smoke, the rook looked like a part of the gearbox.

Tunde didn’t know what a gearbox looked like, but he agreed. 

Maybe it was the second-hand high or the kids’ enthusiasm, but at that moment, Tunde knew what he wanted to do when he returned to Majidun the following Sunday. 

Thirteen years before that Sunday, Tunde stood in a tiny barbershop in Ikorodu. It was a school morning, but the shop was packed with schoolboys who gathered in a corner around a television, some with their school shirts in hand, others with Playstation pads. 

It could only have been Winning Eleven on the screen. 

Unlike the other boys, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He hadn’t worn one in over a year. 

As the match pressed on, Tunde’s mind wandered elsewhere. In another corner of the shop, a man’s face was buried behind a book, photocopied and bound between a see-through plastic sleeve and a blue cover. 

A chequered board with carved playing pieces was on a stool before him. He’d frown at the board, then back into the book. Then he’d move a piece, move another, take one off, then rearrange the board. 

It was as if nothing else existed, not the screaming boys, not Tunde staring enthralled, just his book and the board. 

“Bros B,” Tunde said, pointing at a playing piece on the board, “What’s this thing?”

“What does it look like?” Bros B asked as he lowered the book from his face, revealing a  frown. 

“It looks like a horse,” Tunde responded. 

“Yes,” Bros B smirked, “it’s called a knight.”

“What about this one?” Tunde pointed at another piece. 

“That’s a pawn.”

“Porn?” Tunde flinched. 

The boys overheard and teased briefly before returning to their game. 

“Pawn,” Bros B corrected. He was running out of patience. 

“Come and teach me how to play it.”

“No, no,” Bros B said, shooing him off, “you’re too small to learn it.”

Tunde was ten. 

Bros B was every boy’s È̩gbọ́n in the neighbourhood. The boys came for Playstation, fresh cuts, and sometimes, advice. They liked that he was an older person who didn’t force them to do anything or beat them. 

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Every day, after his parents left home for work, Tunde went to Bros B’s and stayed until his younger brother came looking for him when he returned from school or before dark, just as his parents were heading home from work. 

Tunde had spent months doing nothing: uniformless, schoolless. His parents worked hard all day but could only afford to cover one of their son’s school fees. To keep him engaged, his parents enrolled him as an apprentice to a refrigerator repairer. That didn’t last for long – his teacher beat him too much, so he stopped going. 

He couldn’t afford to play Winning Eleven like the other boys, but with chess, there was no price, only curiosity. And so, chess filled the space that idleness had occupied in his mind.  He went there every day to watch Bros. B play himself. Bros B still wouldn’t allow him to play. He often said, “Chess is for smart people,” and “How you play chess reflects your personality,” but this didn’t stop Tunde from watching and learning. 

One day, all the watching paid off. Bros B’s friends, young but skilled players, came to play, and they offered him a seat. 

That was only the beginning. As he continued to learn, he decided to take practice home – he made his own chess board with scrap cardboard paper, a ruler and a pencil. For the pieces, he used bottle corks. Next, he taught his brother to play, unleashing everything he’d learned watching Bros B and his friends. 

He played him whenever they could, but this didn’t last long. Not long after, their mum walked in on them playing chess. She ripped the cardboard to pieces. It wasn’t the first time she’d ripped something to make a statement. Before then, it was the comics he drew with his notebooks.

For his parents, he was only allowed to be a doctor and a shining, focused example for his younger brother. Everything else was a distraction. They weren’t going out early every morning and coming back late at night for him to be drawing comics and playing funny board games. 

Tunde’s father drove a danfo on the Ikorodu - Lagos Island route every day, multiple times a day. He left home with the early morning commuters and returned as the markets emptied on the island. Tunde’s mother, a trader at the market in Idumota, moved with her husband on the first and last trips. 

And even with all their hours, it wasn’t enough to keep both boys in school or make Tunde a doctor. 

One morning, Tunde’s mother stopped going to the market. After a few days of staying home all day with Tunde, she’d had enough. She grabbed her purse, walked to a school in the neighbourhood, straight to the principal’s office and asked for a job. She didn’t want a salary; she just wanted her son to become a student at the school.

Mrs. Esan, the principal, said no without a thought. She terrified everyone, but Mummy Tunde’s desperation eclipsed Mrs. Esan’s wrath; she showed up every day until the principal asked her to return with her son. 

“What is a noun?” the principal asked Tunde when he showed up with his mum. 

“A noun is…”

Tunde hadn’t been in a classroom for most of 2003 and 2004; if he hadn’t stopped school, he’d have been in his second year in secondary school. But here he was, unable to remember what a noun was. 

“He’ll start in primary five,” the principal said. His mum would resume as a cleaner. 

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When he eventually made it through primary school and into his first year in secondary school, he could take one of the school’s extra-curricular subjects: chess. 

By the end of his third term, he received his first actual chess board – a small plastic set. Even though he did well at school and chess, his father still worried. Studies or nothing. 

Tunde’s dad was stern. It was a blend of his upbringing and his job. Every day, he had to fight traffic enforcers, officers and thugs alike, road accidents, and the endless battle with a bus trudging through Lagos on a weary engine.  Still, he always brought money home no matter what the day dealt him – nothing seemed to matter more. 

But nothing mattered more to Tunde than chess. He played every time he could sneak a game at home and school. The owner of the school Tunde went to, Femi Badejo, was a one-time UN ambassador who enjoyed writing children’s books. He had an undying obsession with chess. He’d set up a chess tournament with schools across Lagos, hosted from his school. Tunde remembers multiple schools attending – but none stood out for him like the boys from St. Finbarr’s, with their blue blazers and white pants. One carried a laptop with him; Tunde had come near one for the first time. 

Tunde’s world was the neighbourhood he was born in, Ketu; the one he was shaped in, Ikorodu, Bros B’s shop, his family and school. By the end of that day, his world had become larger, with all the other players from other schools with their blazers and laptops. 

The boys in blazers won that day, while Tunde and his schoolmates lost in every round. Mr Femi was livid, but he had a plan.  

Not long after that loss, the school got a new chess coach, Mr. Collins, and he was now coming to be a teacher on the same grounds he’d coached St. Finbarr’s to victory. 

At Mr. Collins’ first class, he didn’t teach any chess. Instead, he threw a challenge to the class right after introducing himself. 

“Bring any maths question,” he said, “and I will solve it on this board. Go and bring your seniors’ textbooks, too.”

The class mostly emptied, and when the kids returned, they all had maths textbooks. As they threw math problems at Mr. Collins, he threw them at the board and turned them into chalk dust – the class grew more excited by the problem.  

By the time the class was over, it was at its most charged. Tunde was spellbound. 

Mr. Collins didn’t even touch a chess piece. 

When Tunde was a child in the early 2000s, his father often left ₦200 at home for him and his brother to buy food before heading to work.

Then, one day, the money stopped. Tunde later learned that his father’s bus had plunged into the Majidun River. Somehow, he survived. He’d always provided for the home the best he could, but that day, he stopped trying.  It was the last time he ever left ₦200 for food. 

In 2018, Tunde returned to Majidun — over a decade after his father lost his bus — under entirely different circumstances. 

Tunde had gotten a lot of help to prepare for his first chess class. First, there was a thug from the smoking shed – you’d know him by his dreadlocks and the scar across his face – everyone called him Smile. 

“Kini chess?” Smile asked the first time Tunde told him he wanted to teach the kids chess and needed his help mobilising the kids. 

By the time the conversation was over, Smile was down.

Some of his bandmates were also down; even Michael, the pastor’s son, volunteered and showed up with his camera. They brought biscuits for five kids, but the rustle of biscuit wrappers drew almost thirty kids. 

After the kids had gathered and Smile managed to keep them quiet, Tunde stood before them.  

“See that uncle there,” he said, pointing to one of his friends volunteering. “I’m going to play against him, and I’m not going to look at the board.” 

And so he wore a blindfold and started to play. He couldn’t see the kids under his blindfold, but from their breaths behind his neck and the occasional “How did he do that,” he knew he had their full attention. 

By the day's end, the kids had learned the chess pieces and how each moved. Tunde’s friend, Michael, had also taken a lot of photos. 

In one of the photos, a little girl smiled as she held the queen. He remembered her: Basirat, 5. When he’d asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d said she wanted to become a nurse, probably because of the neighbourhood nurse to whom they went for medicine. 

Basirat herself had never been in a classroom. She lived with her parents and siblings in a single room, and school, her mum had said earlier that day, was beyond reach until she was old enough for free public school the following year. 

That night, he wrote about her on his Facebook and went to bed. 

When he woke up the following morning, his phone was blowing up. Everyone wanted to hear more about Basirat and the other kids.

There’s a lot of research to show that chess is great for kids: it helps them develop problem-solving skills and improves critical thinking and concentration. For his classmates, chess was all of these and perhaps a hobby – but chess was everything for JSS2 Tunde in Mr. Collins’ class. 

In chess, his dad wasn’t pouring his frustration from the day or avoiding his mother as she worked in school. In chess, he wasn’t ashamed of the quality of his uniform, and he could be the best at something. 

Tunde entered his first chess tournament that year. He played and lost all six games. After losing to a girl in one match, he ran to the bathroom to cry.

Mr Collins was waiting when he returned. 

“She can’t even play like that,” Tunde said. 

“But she beat you,” Mr. Collins said, “In this chess, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boy or girl; you’re either a fish or not. And you’re still fresh fish.”

“Cry well-well, and get used to it. Even the greatest players still lose.”

Then Mr. Collins asked Tunde for his recording sheet from the game; they analysed it together and noted the mistakes that cost him the games.

At the end of the school year, the tournament returned to their school again, and Mr. Collins’ former students at St. Finbarr’s came first again. But as Tunde walked home that evening, he had a brand new chessboard, a certificate, a trophy and an envelope with money. 

He’d finished third overall in the tournament and was now the best player in school. He was only 12. 

Neighbours stepped outside their homes to congratulate him as he marched home, shy but beaming with pride. 

His dad saw him first. His body trembled as he burst into tears – it was the first time Tunde had seen his father cry. 

The neighbours poured out of their rooms as Tunde’s mum’s praises grew louder. From that day, chess stopped being a distraction. It became a badge of distinction. It also helped that he finished top of his class that same year. 

The years rolled by for Tunde in secondary school, and as he progressed, things regressed at home, with the one predictable but little income from his mother selling snacks to kids at school. And so, he dug further into his studies and chess, and the world around him shifted out of focus. 

Until it was time to go to University. 

Every year, over 1.5 million students write JAMB, Nigeria’s matriculation exam for secondary school students trying to get into tertiary schools. They’ll be vying for tens of thousands of slots across Nigerian schools. Most will stay home for various reasons, from low scores and limited slots to high cut-off marks and unaffordable fees. Tunde was at risk of being one of the latter. For his first choice, the University of Lagos, he didn’t make the cut. 

For his second, the Lagos State University, he’d made the cut on the scores side, but there was one problem. In 2012, the Lagos State Government increased the school fees by tenfold to ₦250,000, more than most parents could afford. It was also the year Tunde was supposed to get into university. 

And so, whenever he had some change, he’d go to a cyber cafe, stare at his admission in the university portal, and then return home. As schools across Nigeria and the world filled up with new students, all hope left Tunde, and the emptiness filled with sadness, then anger. 

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He was angry at everything: his parents for not offering much for options, chess and all the hours he wasted moving the stupid pieces, God for not rewarding his faith, and life for offering such a tumultuous fate. 

When his friends returned after their first semester, Tunde was a teacher at a neighbourhood nursery school. He rocked a fat tie, pants, and chubby shoes. He’d even gotten a small promotion to teach primary school kids Computer Basics and Music by the time his university friends returned to school. 

A year later, in 2013, he tried to get into university again – he missed the cutoff mark by three points. 

His mother’s sadness slowly crept from her heart to her face and skin. The last time she’d been a student was in primary school. Her husband had also dropped out in his third year of secondary school. And now that his baby brother had also paused secondary school with less than two years left to graduate, she worried about her children’s fate. 

Sometimes, she told Tunde, she wondered how her life would have turned out differently if she’d gotten more education, especially seeing women drop off their kids at school in their cars. She talked about mums in their cars a lot. 

This time, Tunde accepted his fate and wrote the entrance exams to a polytechnic outside Lagos; he passed, but the only thing he hated more than feeling trapped was going to that school. 

The night before he left for school, as they gathered whatever provisions they could for him, his mum paused, standing across from Tunde in the silent kitchen. Then she asked:

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

A few days later, she returned home with the Yaba College of Technology application form. By December 2012, almost a year and a half after graduating from secondary school, he was admitted to study Computer Science. 

He never returned home; there wasn’t a home to return to, not in the true sense of it. His dad moved to Ibadan to work at his sister’s bakery. His mum moved to another part of Lagos, where she worked as a cleaner. His brother moved out of Lagos with some friends. 

One day, while walking around school, he stumbled on some people playing chess. It’d been months since he played anyone, so he stopped to stare at them from a distance. 

“Do you play?” a man watching the players asked. 

“Yes, sir,” Tunde said with some hesitation. 

“Come, come!”

The man was Coach Johnson, who coached the Chess Team of Yabatech. He paired Tunde with a young lady, and she beat him silly. He played her again, more excited than in the last game. She beat him again; Tunde was good, but she was so much better. Around him were all kinds of players, chess pieces clacking against boards – plastic, wood, rubber. 

Tunde ran into an old player from one of his secondary school tournaments who told the Coach all about him. And so he was placed in the school’s reserve Chess Team. That had great perks: free tuition and free accommodation.

Yabatech has a chess reputation for having one of the strongest chess communities in Nigeria. Students played, but even more competitive chess players came there to play. Daniel Anwuli, Nigeria’s youngest chess champion, used to play there. 

And so, to be back at the board again, with some of the best chess peers his world had to offer, Tunde felt electric. 

By 2015, Tunde’s three-year diploma was over, and his family hadn’t lived as one unit for three years. Leaving school didn’t change his family’s fortunes, but it now changed his living situation. First, he squatted with a friend, but only for long enough not to begin to feel like a burden. 

With nowhere else to go, he went to his aunty’s. They weren’t delighted to see him – they weren’t delighted to have any extended family living with them. So, they turned him back. 

When the family woke up the following day, they found him sleeping by the door. He lived with them for the next few years. From then on, he rolled from one stint to the other. 

The first thing he tried was a business he’d started with his friend. They called their idea Chess in Schools. They had a clear plan: go from school to school, make compelling pitches to the management to make chess a subject, and charge ₦5,000 per student. 

For a school of 200 kids, that meant ₦1 million. At ten schools? They’d be swimming in money! But there wasn’t much swimming to do  – they landed a few schools, but not enough to change their battered suits and shoes. 

By 2016, he’d gotten disillusioned and started daydreaming about japa-ing with another friend. But that friend had a passport and parents who had the means to remove all the blockers between Lagos and America. 

His friend was gone; Tunde was alone. 

And so he continued teaching, chess board in his backpack, squeezing in and out of his Keke NAPEPs and worn-out clothes. One time, while teaching students at a girls-only school, one of the girls said, “This chess you’re teaching us, is it so that we can become a chess teacher like you?”

He didn’t teach chess again for a long time after that. 

But it was between rolling from stint to stint he found the gig playing the piano at church for stipends and holy spirit, which led to Majidun, which led him to Basirat. 

A few weeks after that first visit to Majidun, two kids they were training in chess, including Basirat, had gotten lifetime scholarships from strangers on the Internet. 

In those weeks, Tunde's new sense of purpose came into focus. He’d shown up at Majidun and met the kids. He’d met Basirat and her family, and nothing stayed the same. And while it might be said that Tunde showed up and their lives changed forever, it’s also true that they, too, changed Tunde’s life forever. 

Tunde named his new idea Chess In Slums. With it, he would sustain their work at Majidun and replicate it everywhere. And so, they took it to other places over the next few years – in four years, their work has blitzed to reach up to ten thousand kids. The donors have come from everywhere, too, to push the work forward.

Everywhere they went, they taught the kids that the world of chess had 64 squares. Every piece had a role. They taught the kids that when a pawn moved to the opposite end of the chess board, it would be promoted to a more powerful piece, like a rook, bishop, knight, or the most powerful piece, the queen.

In Germany, they describe zugzwang as a situation in chess where a player is at a peculiar disadvantage: they must make a move, but every move they make will worsen their condition. And so, Tunde and his friends weren’t just showing the kids how to make moves; they were hoping that by expanding their world, they could help them break out of the zugzwang life had thrust upon them.

They taught kids in Makoko, a low-income riverine community in Lagos. They taught kids in Oshodi, Lagos’ busiest and most infamous bus stop. Everywhere they went, they turned urchins into boys and girls in blazers. They turned the willing thugs into planners and organisers.

Then they brought the world to witness – from diplomats to global stars and media – that it is possible to do great things from a small place. 

As for Tunde, the kids taught him that they could learn chess fast, compete, and have a good time. By watching the kids, they learned it was beyond chess; it was a gateway to a world expanding before them, far removed from their circumstances. 

They reminded Tunde of himself. 

Perhaps it’s why he starts by observing the most curious every time they teach new kids. One day, one of them will see a chess piece as he pulls it out of a bag. They’ll ask him, “What’s that?” 

“What does it look like?” Tunde will respond. 

“A horse.”

And Tunde Onakoya will smile as he sets the knight piece on the board. 

Author’s Notes

It took a village to put this together:

• It began with lunch that lasted for seven hours; I just knew I had to write about it.

• I wanted to enter a writing prize, primarily because one of the judges – Gay Talese – is one of the most influential writers alive to me. I couldn’t stand the version of the draft by the time the deadline reached, so I pulled it. But if Gay Talese wasn’t on that panel, the story wouldn’t even exist on Vistanium. I guess he deserves some credit too.

I was very unsure about the quality of this piece until:

• Ruka did some work on the early draft with Ope.

• But whatever is great about this version, Ope’s brutal but ultimately benign editing made it readable.

• We led with Mariam’s art direction, represented in the cover image. Then, Yinka expanded the art direction with the story's illustrations.

• Jolomi did a lot of the research this needed. Eruke caught a hectic paragraph or two. Nana gave it the final read.

But all of this is possible because of Vistanium’s members – they’re the reason you’re reading this. Their money keeps the stories coming and the publication going.

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In this episode, Spicy discusses the impact that this experience had on her as well as how she managed to find solace amidst the deluge of hurtful comments. She also addresses the societal tendency to exert control over women's decisions, including personal matters such as their clothing preferences.
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To get behind-the-scenes information about every episode, subscribe to our spam-free newsletter here. 

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