THE PRICE OF BEING A NIGERIAN 

This book is fiction. 

The characters are invented. 

The pain is not. 

Every scene in these pages has a real address somewhere in Nigeria. The 4 a.m. fuel queue has coordinates. The police checkpoint has a number. The landlord demanding one full year of rent upfront, two years if you are unlucky, he's standing outside somebody's door right now, while that person stares at a figure that represents everything they have saved for eighteen months and wonders whether they can negotiate, knowing they cannot.

I did not write this book to make Nigerians angry. We are already angry. I wrote it because anger without a name cannot heal, and because there is a category of pain in this country that does not make international news, that does not show up in GDP reports, that is not captured in any development index, the specific, daily, grinding cost of being alive and trying in a nation that extracts maximum effort and returns minimum dignity. 

That cost has never been properly calculated. This book is an attempt. 

For the international reader who picks this up and finds it unfamiliar: good. That unfamiliarity is the point. Somewhere in the world right now, a twenty-eight year old with a first-class degree is selling data bundles from a wooden stool because fifty job applications went unanswered. A woman who saved for three years to open a business had it taxed into collapse by men with no official authority and every unofficial power. A man paid one full year of rent upfront not because it was fair but because that is the system and then watched the landlord spend it and refuse to make repairs, because in Nigeria the lease protects the landlord and the tenant protects themselves. 

These are not edge cases. These are the terms and conditions. 

Read this book slowly. Some chapters will make you laugh in the specific way Nigerians laugh at things that are not funny because laughter is cheaper than therapy. Some chapters will make you ashamed of the country, of yourself, of how much you have normalized. Some will make you want to call your mother. 

Call her anyway. The book will wait.