Two years ago, I quit an “international” job that wasn’t paying my bills and decided to stay at home instead and die if it came to that.
The job was for a multinational media organization that I’d loved and adored all my life, that my father regarded so highly, and I had gotten in as an intern, but seven months later, I wanted out. I wanted nothing else to do with them. I could no longer continue to subject myself to the slavery — because that was what it was, modern-day slavery.
I would die either way — whether I stayed back there or I left — and I chose the path that felt less horrifying. At least, in the comfort of my home, I would die with some dignity.
This is how I happened to be in that position, or as I like to put it, how I put myself in that position: I left a job that paid me N140,000 a month as a research assistant, ditched my bachelor’s degrees in economics and in banking and finance, and embraced a completely new field. I wanted to be a writer. I realized, after working so hard for a first class in economics, that I wasn’t really interested in the economy, neither was I interested in spending my life studying and teaching it. Thanks to my father who mandated me to fill economics in my JAMB form, I’d spent seven years of my life waiting to be admitted into an economics programme and studying it. Seven years of my life, gone, never to come back to me ever again. But my life lay ahead of me, I realized, and I needed to steer the wheel myself from then on, and that was exactly what I did. I shut my ears to people’s fears and insecurities and quit economics.
It was the first decision I took by myself, for myself, ever, and quite unfortunately but expectedly that decision was the beginning of a life of uncertainty and instability. What do I do now? I wondered. Now that I’ve quit economics, where do I go? How does one start all over?
A master’s in media and communication won’t be bad, I thought. I’d initially played with the idea of beginning all over again — write JAMB, apply to study psychology or English or Mass Communication, go through the four years of learning a new field — but after speaking with a couple of professors, I was assured that I would be just fine with a master’s.
That was how I enrolled in the master’s programme in Media and Communication and quit my research assistant job. That was how I spent nine months studying the media, studying writing, and learning theories of communication. At first, it was going so well, because I was studying and learning what I love, and I was honing my craft, but then my savings dried up and I had to rely on help from close friends, sometimes even classmates, and how ashamed I was, a grown man like me, penniless, hopeless. I wondered many times if I made the wrong decision, if I set myself up for failure. I cried many times. But I also worked really hard (as I always do) and finished as the best student in a class of 49. Surprising it was, because there I was, new to the field and still beating everyone at it — but somewhere deep down, I nursed an anxiety. What does the future hold?
Imagine my relief when I was placed at this giant multinational a year later, when my programme was over, for a three-month internship. I didn’t even ask what they were going to pay. I didn’t ask any questions at all. It was enough for me that I got in. That’s all that mattered. When I told my dad over the phone that I got an internship with this media organisation he loved so much, I heard him pause in the greatest surprise ever, the silence on the other end reaching out over the phone, filling my ears, and I imagined he couldn’t believe that his son was really there now, was one of them now.
But I wasn’t one of them, I soon discovered. I was never going to be one of them. I was there to be used, tossed around, and discarded. We’re training you, my boss (a Nigerian woman who’d lived in London for most of her life) said. We’re giving you new skills that you cannot get anywhere else in the world. “Do you know how many people want what you have?” my boss told me when I first raised the issue of pay and told her I wasn’t getting enough to take care of my basic needs. “Hundreds of people apply for your position,” she told me. But I already knew that. Nigeria is messy when it comes to jobs. Heck, the whole world is. Employees are always at the mercy of employers, but can employers have some conscience, some humanity? Can they stop treating people with disregard and recklessness?
When I checked online, talked with some colleagues in the same organization who were in the US and London offices, I realized they were being paid something different, something way higher. One of them who I chatted with was so shocked when I told him how much I was being paid in Nigeria, in the same organisation.
N70,000. That’s how much the “international” media house was paying me. Every month, I filled an invoice for $200 (about N70,000 at the time) and walked to the bank to withdraw everything and change it to naira. My rent was N250,000 per annum, which translates to N20,000plus every month. My transport fare was N1000, sometimes N1200 every day, translating to about N30,000 every month. My feeding cost was at least N1,000 every day (and that’s if I eat only twice or thrice going to the cheapest mama put), which translates to about N30,000 every month. How much does that add up to now? N80,000, yeah? And then, imagine that I haven’t even counted recharge cards, internet costs, money for tissue, soap, other household stuff.
Month after month, I felt so ashamed of myself, so worthless. People told me I must be fulfilled working for this organisation, even if as an intern, and I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t know how to explain the complexity of what I was dealing with. Sometimes, I sat in buses on my way home from work at night and cried. Never before had I been subjected to such cruelty. Never before had I felt so inadequate, like I was the scum of the earth. And, I couldn’t get my head around it: this was me, me, that earned N140,000 just a year before, that could at least afford the basic things and could save. Now, I could not even afford clothes or shoes or books or anything. Yet, every morning, at 6am, I was out of my house like a diligent servant. I endured crazy conductors and nasty Lagos bus drivers. I endured hours of traffic, morning and night, every single day, working for this organization that I’d admired all my life.
Anyway, I thought, it was just for three months. Three months and I am done, I thought. That was the light at the end of the tunnel. But three months later, my internship over, the head of the bureau (my boss) asked me to stay on (still as an intern, lol). She said they loved my work and my work ethic, and that they’d like to continue to have me. Okay, I said. Are you going to raise my salary? I asked.
I’ll speak to my boss at London about that, she said.
But she never did, and she never brought it up again, and I continued to suffer for another three months, leaving my house at 6am, sometimes 5, and getting home at about 10pm. When the time came for me to renew my rent, my landlady whose husband had recently died said she wanted to renovate the house and could we please move out? And I realized then that I couldn’t afford to pay rent for a new place: I just didn’t have the money. After a few weeks of stalling, the landlady threatened with police and army and one day just locked up the gate to the compound. It was a friend who reached out to a friend who helped find a temporary arrangement for me where I could live and pay rent per quarter. It was also with the help of colleagues and friends that I was able to pay the first installment of that rent.
Anyway, when I brought up the issue of pay with my boss again and explained to her how difficult life had been and how it felt so unjust that I was being paid what I was being paid given my previous work experience and my master’s degree and the value of my work and my work ethic which she was always bragging about, she told me that I could do extra work for her after official work hours and during weekends. “Reply my emails, do some typing for me, run some errands, things like that,” she said. “I’ll pay you extra.” She was fiddling with her fancy pen. That was when I knew that I had to go. There was no place for me there.
This is the closest I’ve come to describing this time in my life in detail. When it was happening and even after it happened, I could only tell a few close friends. Not even my family knows the truth of what happened.
Hope, you see, can be a dangerous thing. People will weaponize it to harm you. They will dangle it in front of you, only just so you can do their bidding, just so they can keep you beneath their feet, and sometimes it is you who will weaponize it against yourself. You will hope and hope and hope and stay in spaces where you don’t belong, spaces where you wear rags and are covered in filth.
I thought about it: if I stayed and remained subservient, I could become full-time staff with full privileges at some point. I could one day become the Moni Basu of Nigeria, which was what I dreamed of. Or, I could not. It could be how the system thrived: on the sweat and blood of slave-workers who are dehumanized, trampled on, denied the pay they deserve, health insurance, benefits, and who are afterward thrown back out into the streets. If I continued to stay in a place that did not see any worth in me, what was I teaching myself?
In a meeting with my boss, in the small, lifeless room that was her office, I told her that I had decided to leave. I fixed my eyes on the back of her laptop.
“I didn’t know things were that bad,” she said, her face a flurry of emotions. And then she wanted to know if I would be able to live in the boys quarters of one of her friends if she spoke to that friend — to ease my burden, she said. “No,” I said. “I think I’d rather just go back to my village in Anambra.”
She would add $80 dollars to my pay, she said, let me work remotely. How about that? She must have thought, “he’s going to be so depressed and die and people will think we killed him.” She was feeling pity for me when she should have done the right and just thing. She had the power to make these changes but for some reason chose not to, and that was what broke my heart. How different was she from the colonial masters who tasked slaves, sapped them body, mind and soul while letting go of the barest minimum themselves? What does it take to at least pay people a living wage in an “international” organization?
I took her offer nonetheless. Additional $80 dollars while working from home was good. But after one month, when she started insisting that I come into the office every day, it was clear to me that this ping-pong had to stop. “Since you did not go back to Anambra, you might as well start coming into the office as usual,” she told me over the phone.
I had written a couple of articles by that time. I had written a couple of scripts for some digital videos. I had managed the bureau’s Twitter and Facebook pages. And most of all, I had done these things because my boss had let me do them, had shown me how to. I was supposed to feel indebted to her, but I couldn’t, because somewhere deep down it felt like I had been robbed, like something irreplaceable had been taken from my life.
After I quit, I felt hollow. I was lost and confused. I did not know where to go or what to do with my life. I stayed at home for a month in complete silence, contemplating my life, all my social media accounts deactivated, my phone turned off. I did not want to be spoken to or reached. Sometimes, lying on my bed, I felt a heavy weight in my chest and stepped outside my room to catch my breath. I spent hours on hours doing nothing, just collecting myself.
Those seven months of my life are behind me now, gone. Granted, I learned so much about journalism then, but they were also some of the worst months of my life. I’d never been so despondent, so hopeless, so battered. Now, looking back, I know I would never put myself through anything remotely close to that, not for anything in this world. I regret that I didn’t have a conversation about pay before I started work. I regret that I stayed on, longer than I had to. I regret that I put myself in harm’s way. Sometimes, we give people permission to treat us without dignity, without the care we deserve. We must do better.
THE MOON-CAVE BLOG 