Land, sand and savings in the old Abuja bush.
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Eight minutes in Abuja, the second half of a conversation with the same man, and this half is all money: what things cost, and how he got hold of any. It opens with the interviewer checking a figure from earlier, and the answer is not a wage but a savings club. “I said we are doing contribution of ₦10,000 in the working place”, eighteen of them paying in every month and one person taking the pot, “we pay every month to give somebody, and that month to give the other person.” When his turn came he spent it on land: “So they gave me my own. I use it and go and look for land and buy.”
The prices are the point. “That land that I bought that time was 35,000”, he says, and an earlier plot went for about ₦6,000, in a year he gives as 2010. He describes arriving in what was then nothing much, “I ran into this bush”, and building from the ground he stood on, “As I was packing sand, I start molding block with that sand.”
Money itself was different. “Nothing like ₦1,000 in Nigeria”, he says of that time, and small notes went a long way: “to suffer, to see ₦20, you’ll be happy”, enough that “you and your children will eat throughout the week.” Around him it was farmland. “All this area you see where the blue houses are full of farms at that time.” People carried yam on their shoulders down the road to Kuba to look for buyers, and the trouble was never food, it was cash: “we have enough food that time, but how can you get this money?”
The way in was a shovel. Printing had gone nowhere, so “I just go and buy shovel and be seeking for how I’ll be loading tipper”, and while loading he watched who got paid. “I said, ah, these people are getting money.” He asked to join, got a straight test, “You go fit? I say yes”, and worked. A tipper of sand went for ₦4,000 split two ways, “Then she took ₦2,000, me, I myself ₦2,000”, and by noon of the first day, “I became great.”
Then the habit that changed it. Eating in the canteen, sometimes “at times I eat without meat”, he splurged once on “a plate of pepper soup and bring one bottle of stout”, and mid-drink decided: “How can I start saving now?” He handed a thousand at a time to a woman to hold, and the tape ends on the first room he rented with it, three thousand for the year.
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