So, American movies. I know, I always start with a picture, but please, indulge me one more time. I grew up watching American movies and in so many of them, one phrase kept coming up time and time again: the “American dream”. To paint the picture properly, let me take you back to when you were a child. Today, NEPA has been kind to you and your family, and the film is just starting. A young man from a humble background, who also happens to be an immigrant, arrives in the US with one bag. He lives in a part of town where the sirens never stop, where he gets the pleasure of walking past a drug dealer or two every night. Usually a black drug dealer, but that is an issue I will address in another article. He works two jobs, one as a delivery driver, and while working one day he meets and falls in love with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. They get married in a small ceremony, a ceremony more love than money, and with a mother-in-law scowling in the corner, who thinks her daughter could have done way better. Way better in this case is with the young, charming son of her best friend. Then things get hard. He is working so much that he forgets an anniversary, that leads to a fight that one honest conversation would have solved, and she leaves. *Gasp*.
Then, she goes into a bar and meets the charming son of her mother’s best friend. While she is contemplating her future, our protagonist gets the contract he has been working so hard for, opens a company, and becomes a CEO. By the last scene, he has gone from the ghetto to the palm trees of Beverly Hills. But then, he realises that life is nothing without the woman of his dreams. He finds her, confesses his love, and they live happily ever after. Let’s freeze the frame here. That image, we were told, was the American dream: start with nothing, work hard in the land of opportunities, and you can end up with the company, the house and the woman of your dreams. And every time I got to that shot, I was left wondering the same thing. If this is the American dream, what is the Nigerian dream?
To find the Nigerian dream, I looked for stories of different Nigerians that I could connect to the memories I have of people having conversations about their futures in Surulere. To be honest, since I started with a movie, might as well make this in form of a Nollywood movie. I came across the story of Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the man who led Biafra. This is not about Biafra, or the war, but about his life, before Biafra. When he joined the army in 1957, people were legitimately surprised, because boys from homes like his did not join the army. His father was one of the richest men in Nigeria. He had gone from King’s College in Lagos to Epsom College in England, and then to Oxford, where he got a degree in history. When he joined, he was one of the first university graduates to ever join the Nigerian army. It showed. By 1964 he was a Lieutenant Colonel, and in January 1966, at 32, he was the Military Governor of the Eastern Region. He was born with a name that got into every room before he did, and he knew exactly what to do once he was inside. He was born into a situation many Nigerians wish for, to be a child of one of the richest families. We know them. If you have ever gone to school with the child of a Nigerian politician, you know what I’m talking about. Life is good; there is absolutely nothing they don’t have, apart from, usually, a scandal-free parent, but, I digress. So, Nigerian dream part one - Golden Spoon!
But what if you are not born with a golden spoon? Well, the spoon itself had to come from somewhere. Taking the Ojukwu family as the example again, Sir Louis Ojukwu, the Colonel’s father, was not born with a golden spoon. After secondary school, he moved from Nnewi to Lagos in 1929 to work as a tyre sales clerk at John Holt. At the time, there was not a single university in Nigeria, so the only options after school were to find work, or to find a way out of the country to go to a university. He chose the former, and after a year of working as a tyre sales clerk, he moved into the textile industry and opened Ojukwu Stores in Onitsha. To move his goods around the country, he bought second-hand trucks and started a transport business. Those trucks turned out to be the real business. When the Second World War came, the British needed their supplies moved, and it was his fleet of trucks that helped move them. By the 1950s he had over 200 of them. By independence, he was regarded as Nigeria’s first billionaire. A tyre salesman!
Again, like his son, he worked hard, yes, but he was also a man who already owned trucks when a country suddenly needed things moved. Opportunity meets preparation. The story repeats itself multiple times in Nigerian history actually. In 1990, after the rules for new banking licences had been relaxed Jim Ovia started Zenith, and Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun started GTBank. In 2002, when Nigerians had to go to the banks every Friday to have cash for the weekend, an engineer called Mitchell Elegbe started Interswitch, a system that connected banks’ ATMs to each other. In 2019, Visa bought into it at a valuation of a billion dollars. When the naira redesign of early 2023 left the whole country looking for cash and the bank apps were failing one after the other, a green app called OPay was the one that was working. By March of that year, it had surpassed 26 million downloads. So, the Nigerian dream part 2 - Man Must Blow!
But what if you don’t have a business idea that looks like it will blow anytime soon? Well, if you don’t have, at least be part of a company that has the idea. This time, we go back to GTBank. Behind the founders we discussed earlier were two guys who were executive directors, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede and Herbert Wigwe. In 2002, they both resigned and bought a bank called Access bank. They transformed a company that was the 65th largest in the country to a bank that by 2024 was the largest in Nigeria by assets. They learned in someone else’s bank and bought their own. This story also repeats itself everywhere you look, across Nigeria. There is a Nigerian working in a hair or barbing salon, watching, cleaning, waiting for a day to come where they own their own salon. There is a driver that’s working unholy hours, from 6am to 10pm, Monday to Saturday and the occasional Sunday, hoping, praying, saving up to buy his own car to start a logistics business. So, the Nigerian dream part 3 - My Destiny Helper!
But what if you can’t locate your destiny helper? I can hear you saying “God forbid!”. Maybe you are one of the thousands of graduates from a university in Nigeria and, you can’t land a well-paying job, or even a job at all. You are living a life you do not like, and you do not want your children to go through the same. Well, then, maybe you follow the story of Charles and Veronica. They were two regular people in Lagos who could not find work, so in 1991 they left for Europe, Greece to be exact, in the hope of a better life. They made the hard decision, a decision many families have to make, to move and leave their first son behind with his grandparents. They had no papers. Charles worked as a handyman, and Veronica babysat. They had more children, sons, who bought watches and sunglasses in the markets of Athens to sell on the street after school. One of those sons, Giannis, who just so happened to be, let’s say, decent at basketball, still had no citizenship of any country until he turned 18. He got his Greek passport in 2013, the same year he was drafted into the NBA. By 2019 he was the league’s Most Valuable Player, the first Greek to ever win it. He plays for Greece, and he will tell anyone who asks that he and his brothers are Greek-Nigerian. Charles died in 2017. He never saw his son win the MVP award, but the journey to that day started with a man and a woman who could not find work in Lagos deciding that their children would not have the same problem. They are not alone either. Look across the sports world, and you will see Nigerian names on the backs of the jerseys of so many countries. I mean, sports aside, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK is named Kemi. So, the Nigerian dream part 4 - Japa!
The Nigerian dream is not so simple. It never has been, and it never will be. The Nigerian dream is a dream fuelled by people who crave survival, utilising their shared strength, resilience, drive, hope, want and longsuffering. Plenty of longsuffering, that one, we have in bulk. The American dream is a Hollywood movie. You already know how it ends, but you still watch it anyway. The Nigerian dream is a Nollywood movie. A movie with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, all of which have little to no connection with the one before, just vibes and To God be the Glory.
Or, to be honest, maybe the Nigerian dream is just:
“I beta pass my neighbour.”
| 1. |
Vanguard: “The man, his life and his times” |
| 2. |
Pulse Nigeria: “Before Dangote, there was Ojukwu: The story of Nigeria’s first billionaire” |
| 3. |
Forbes Africa: “The Small Town Of The Super Rich” |
| 4. |
BusinessDay: “Meet faces behind Nigeria’s banking industry innovation, expansion” |
| 5. |
Guaranty Trust Holding Company: “Our History” |
| 6. |
Vanguard: “Mitchell Elegbe: A giant stride of a visionary who transformed electronic payments in Nigeria” |
| 7. |
Nairametrics: “Interswitch: The story of one of Africa’s earliest unicorn companies” |
| 8. |
TechCabal: “In the midst of Nigeria’s digital banking struggles, OPay is rising to the occasion” |
| 9. |
Access Bank: “Our History” |
| 10. |
Andscape: “‘It’s our duty to give back’: Giannis Antetokounmpo and family’s charity inspired by his late father” |
| 11. |
Al Jazeera: “Seven things to know about NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo” |
| 12. |
UK Parliament: “Parliamentary career for Mrs Kemi Badenoch” |
