What it means to be a 22-year-old Nigerian Male.

Shots were fired repeatedly, it was a Friday night if I remember correctly, sometime in 2003.

Between the voices of the men yelling and shooting outside trying to get in and my mom running about the house trying to get me and my siblings out, it was chaos.

We ran out through the back of the building, my little brother on my mother’s back and my brother and sister on either side of her.

This is one of many times we had to run away from our homes because of gun violence.

Now here are some common things that come with being a 22-year-old Nigerian male :

You must be street smart

This is one of the requirements to survive around here, young men who aren’t street smart often get duped and put in very bad situations.

On one occasion I went to get AirPods on the roadside because it is cheaper and some from the street gang stopped me and asked me to check the time on my phone, my sense immediately detected that he wanted to do a grab-and-run.

So I pulled out my broken iPhone4 (I do that in these kinds of situations) and he immediately backed out, I could see the frustration on his face.

You long to leave the country

Nigeria is arguably the most corrupt country in the world.

Government-owned universities and institutions go on strike at least once or twice a year due to non-payment of salaries, as I write this the doctors have been on strike for over a month.

Well-to-do young men are hunted down for no just cause and recently the country has banned Forex and cryptocurrency trading, no reason given.

This among so many other happenings has pushed a lot of young people to crime.

For people like me that love freedom, I’ve longed to leave here since I was 6 years old and part of the reason for this blog is to record the transition.

You will most likely be emotionally “thick skinned"

I will use my life as an example here, in the course of my young life I’ve been in some life-threatening situations involving guns, I recall and have heard stories of nights when I was young that we had to run away because of some gang war.

Moving on to a boarding military high school in my teenage years didn’t make things any better, in that school we were beaten with everything you can imagine, wood, machete, belts, etc and so many nights on punishment not to talk of all the violence from seniors.

Now for someone like me, that has experienced this and at least 80% of people my age has experienced some version of this, we tend to be unmoved when we hear that the army or someone has shot some 100 people.

This is not because we do not care but over time we have seen and heard stories like this and our brain has kind of put up a defence mechanism.

As a young man I like to think I’ve seen it all growing up here, the beauty of the country and all the pain that comes with it, thank you for reading part of my story.

#11

24th September 2021.