Date with Nigeria

A friend of mine sent me a mail expressing her pain over the cashless situation in Nigeria. I was empathic with her but it was a very funny experience.

“Guy, what’s up?
You good? Hmmm yesterday were not the best days for me O!

You will not believe that just yesterday because I had no cash and to think it was barely 48hours before this incident that a padi of mine sent me a message to asked how I was coping with all the queues in Naija right now and my response to him was: “ I am not feeling it because I have no generator or a car to make me worry about the fuel queue, I do not have money in my account so I do not need to queue to get cash, and I had collected my PVC a long time ago so I did not need to queue for that too”  is very frustrating because little did I know I would be hit in this manner by the cash lessness in the country.

You know yesterday was Val’s day nah, and since I do not celebrate the day, I booked a ride that will take me home from work and at the last minute, the driver called to cancel on me. I did not take it to hear too much as I felt there would be others online, but to my greatest surprise, I could not find any and the one I eventually booked was just a few minutes away from me so I rushed out of the office to catch the lift so I can be at my pick up in good time only to get to the ground floor and all attempts to reach the driver failed, then I realised that there was no MTN reception and it was possible the driver had been frantically trying to reach me and since he could not, he left. Well next plan I joined my colleague who was going a bit towards my way then I mentioned the network challenge I was experiencing, and I was told there was no reception, luckily for me, someone in the car had a different phone network so I asked him to share his Wi-Fi with me so I could book another ride to get me from the bus stop I will be dropped off.

I managed to but the driver got to the pickup location before I did because there was serious traffic jam on the route, I was on heading to my pick up point and he had to cancel also because he could not reach me.

Long story short, I go to the bus stop, but before alighting, I quickly used the Wi-Fi available to me to get another ride, I then hurriedly got down and bade everyone good night; little did I know that was the beginning of my cashless problems. I had to cross the express to get the ride and after waiting for 45mins for the ride I had booked and saw was 2mins away from me before I left network reception, it then became awkward, so I checked my phone again and boom I realised I keyed in a wrong pick-up location, now I was stock with no cash and network reception to order another ride, I stood at the bus stop for over an hour hoping for a miracle or one of those days a posh vehicle will roll over beside me with the driver telling me how beautiful I was and asking if he could take me to my location, or a friend would by some chance drive by and give me a lift. None of these aspirations of mine came to reality so what did I do? Begin my long walk home.
If you know Lagos well, I walked from Salem bus stop to Ajah because the cash I had on me could only take me a short distance and walking alone at that time of the day from Ajah to the bus stop of my house, was not a wise thing to do with my PC and Mobile phones on me. As I narrated my story to some people the next day they laughed and said every one was booked for the valentine, hence the reason I did not get a lift, at that point, – it dawned on me that I had gotten a special Valentine date with Nigeria which of course was not funny at all.