Waking up from the Nigerian repat dream
Earlier this year, I decided to take a break from full-time employment and go on a sabbatical. It had been a few extremely busy years building a corporate jet airline in Nigeria and then scaling operations at a high growth startup in Nigeria and across Africa. By late 2018 to early 2019, I was leading cross-functional teams across 6 countries and 4 time zones, which had direct management of more than 1,000 people, representing well over 60% of the employees in the entire organisation. I’d never been busier in my life. By the end of 2019, I just needed to rest. So I did.
My initial plan for my sabbatical this summer was to travel, attend the Tutu Leadership Fellowship Program, visit some old and new places, get inspired with new exciting ideas, setup learning sessions with startups, maybe even meet people I’d want to build or grow a company with, and just generally re-energise during my time off. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic (known to some as covik-one-nine), I was forced to stay at home in Lagos, Nigeria for several months, initially under full lockdown for weeks. This turned out to be a very important period for taking care of myself, and for reflecting on the past few years as a global citizen with Nigerian roots.
A sabbatical is one of the most amazing decisions one can make mid-career. I’ve since been approached by several people in my network who are contemplating taking one, and who just needed to hear about the experience from someone they know personally. I’ll write about my take on sabbaticals in a separate article. Back to the topic of this one.
An African investor once told me that many of the Nigerian founders he invested in began making plans to move their families out of Nigeria once they were in their mid thirties to early forties. In some edge cases, he said, the entrepreneur would find a replacement for herself or himself, pack their bags and relocate with their families. I didn’t fully understand why that was the case, having myself returned to Nigeria after over a decade of living abroad and being so excited to be back ‘home’. I had only been in Lagos for 3 years when we were having this conversation, and I was still living the repat dream. It was the first time in my adult life that I lived in an environment where I felt like my knowledge, capabilities, character and interests had an exponentially larger impact on my experiences than the colour of my skin. So I couldn’t possibly have understood why anyone would give it all up and relocate.
With the pandemic forcing us to stay at home, I cancelled all my overzealous goals of stimulating myself externally and began to look inwards. Who do I want to be when I ‘grow up’? Contrary to the belief in some circles, I’m not yet 40 years old :). Next, where do I want to live? What kind of experiences do I want my family to have (I was single when I moved to Nigeria)? Who do I want to be surrounded by at work and in my daily life? My wife and I both had a rare opportunity to be thinking through these questions at the same time. She owns a ready-to-wear fashion business that paused operations during the COVID lockdown in Lagos, and then grew even larger after she reopened. While she was closed for business, I was officially funemployed. It was a great time to introspect a little.
When you live in Lagos, you’re always on the go. You barely find time to stop and smell the proverbial roses. In other words, it’s difficult to objectively assess the ‘situation on ground’. For most people, life in Lagos (and perhaps Nigeria) is the epitome of motion without movement. People spend so much time and effort on unproductive tasks resulting from issues that should never exist in the first place. These things don’t actually move you forward, but they make you feel busy and active and take up a lot of your ‘free’ time.
In many ways, it’s like running a 100m race with 50kg of weights attached to your body. You might feel accomplished for doing more work than someone else who doesn’t have this burden, but they’ll get farther than you in the same amount of time and possibly with less effort. So in the everyday hustle and bustle of Lagos, you tend to just not pay as much attention to the many signs of a dysfunctional life.
The quality of life in Nigeria is terrible and Lagos is one of the worst places in the world to live. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying outright, trying to sell you something, or spends a significant amount of their time outside the country. Over the past four years, I spent significant time traveling for work. During these past few months, I had countless hours to slow down, reflect, and face the reality of life in Lagos. And it’s not pretty.
Yes there are some pockets of exciting sources of entertainment and fun in Lagos. There are some fancy restaurants, hotels, lounges, and the likes. Yes there is a growing creative community that hosts everything from wine tasting to creative picnics. Yes there are some opportunities to take walks and go jogging, or even join online spinning classes right from your home. There are some opportunities to send your kids to good schools. And yes there are some hospitals that give you some confidence that if you get into a medical emergency, you might live to tell the story.
But like everything else that’s needed for a decent (not even high) quality of life, many of these things are all insufficient in quantity and quality, require more effort than should be needed, and in many cases require you to endure high-friction interactions to truly enjoy them. As someone who has lived in about 10 different cities and visited about 30 countries around the world, I can say without a doubt that it is virtually impossible to have a single week of seamless, frictionless, decent quality living in Lagos.
For most people who live in one, you can’t earn or buy your way out of a failed state. You deal with unnecessary daily challenges augmented with slaps in the face like inflation, currency devaluations, and the unmitigated crumbling of societal values and rule of law where morally compromised individuals attain celebrity status and make decisions around governance. While many Nigerians argue about inconsequential topics on Twitter, the actors in the system are making important decisions that might result in a future that is worse than the present, and make life even more challenging for most of the people who live here.
This was not meant to be an in-depth analysis of Nigeria’s problems — you can find that in many other places. So let me get back to the topic of this article.
As I begin to slowly return from my sabbatical, having spent a few months with my eyes wide open, I feel at a bit of a crossroad about the next step in my abusive relationship with Nigeria.
Do I continue to operate in a city and country where there’s so much opportunity to make a difference, yet where the system is so broken and quality of life is so terrible? Or do I count my work over the last few years building an airline and connecting software developers to global opportunities as sufficient contributions to Nigeria and begin looking outwards to the ‘West’ again? Who is creating more impact and experiencing more fulfilment — the person who built the ECG feature on the Apple Watch that enables thousands of people to intercept a cardiac arrest (and lives in Cupertino), or the person running an agribusiness company which empowers thousands of farmers in Nigeria (and lives in Lagos)? How does one compare things as intangible as impact and fulfilment, when the trade-off on quality of life is so high?
Do I pursue one of the entrepreneurial ideas I’ve gotten excited about, and risk operating in an environment where one of any number of unexpected factors could render the business unviable? Or instead search for an opportunity at a later-stage multinational organisation where I can immediately take on a leadership role and de-risk myself, yet continue to achieve career and financial growth? I’m exposed to entrepreneurs who have done really well, some who are in the process but have realised that Nigeria is not what they thought it was, and some who feel like they lost years of earning potential and career growth after trying for years and failing. Regardless of the financial outcomes, are entrepreneurs here even happier, more fulfilled, or creating more impact than the rest of their peer group?
And lastly, while I don’t yet have any yet, I have to think about what life I’m setting my future children up for. Do I want to raise them in a country that has a fundamentally broken value system in addition to the aforementioned quality of life issues, but where they will be first class citizens with a strong identity and grounding? Or would it be more responsible as a parent to raise children in a developed country with excellent education and healthcare, significantly higher quality of life, infinitely more opportunities, but where they are at risk of encountering racial inequity? Will my understanding of being ‘Nigerian’ even matter in 20 years given that the global elite are continuously migrating towards a shared culture and identity that cuts across borders?
In conversations with many of my friends and people in my network who are based in Nigeria, these are some of the most important questions that so many of us are asking ourselves. A lot of ‘successful’ people typically shy away from sharing their fears and anxieties publicly, because they don’t want to come off as ungrateful or insecure. I don’t have those concerns. This is real life, and we’re all having these same conversations in private anyway.
I am very aware that I sit in a very privileged position, with global work experience, degrees from top universities, sufficient savings to exit the workforce and take time off during a global pandemic and economic crisis, and the ability to land a high-paying job whenever I’m ready to return to work. I am very aware of these things, and I’m grateful to be in this position, which I worked incredibly hard to arrive at. Yet it doesn’t seem to reduce the anxiety around finding good answers to these massive life questions.
The goal when I bought that one way ticket back to Nigeria in 2014 was to create or scale products and services that improve the quality of life for my fellow Nigerians. I wanted to feel like I had done something tangible for Nigeria, after many years of doing things for other economies. Building a highly reliable corporate airline and scaling access to global technology jobs both do exactly that. But the journey is frequently filled with doubts and big question marks. After every day of creating value at Bristow or Andela, I would stare out of the window of the car on my drive home, pondering on how to make life 10x better for millions of Nigerians, not just hundreds or thousands.
Six years later, I have woken up from the Nigerian repat dream where Nigeria gets its act together, and where we see an acceleration in quality of life for millions of Nigerians. We’ve seen this TV show before, and watched all the seasons and episodes. There’s no happy ending in the near-term. It’s just a series of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. Many of us keep hanging on because we feel a strong sense of responsibility to try to do something. And this frustrates me, because how can I possibly feel like I’m making that much of a difference when there are so many people suffering around me.
While it might sound like I’ve lost faith in Nigeria (the legal entity), I definitely haven’t lost my belief in talented Nigerians. Nigerians (just like me) excel when given the right opportunities, at home and abroad.
The problem to be solved, then, is how to help talented Nigerians circumvent the structural limitations and glass ceiling that they have by virtue of where they’re born. And the question, therefore, is how to enable thousands to millions of Nigerians to reach their full potential, in terms of capability, productivity, income and quality of life.
But this time, the solution would probably need to be one that accommodates me splitting my time more generously across both Nigeria and ‘abroad’.