Before the Chaos

Chapter 8: Through the Eyes of a Survivor

By 2016, everything felt like it was moving backwards. What was once seen as a stepping stone to greatness—education, hard work, patience—began to look like a poorly lit hallway with no visible end. I had entered university with plans and precision: five years of engineering, then launch into a bright future. But plans don’t survive the environment they’re birthed into, and the country I called home was becoming a hostile space for hope.

The early years in university were a cocktail of ambition and disillusionment. Inflation crept into every conversation, every plate of food, every ride to class. A meal that cost ₦100 became ₦300. Fuel scarcity returned like an uninvited guest, dragging along power outages and paralyzed businesses. Students were no longer just students—we were managers of crises. Cooking with candles, sharing electricity from a barely working generator, scavenging for signal to submit assignments, and praying our laptops survived long enough to finish a report.

But the economics weren’t the only ghosts haunting us. There was an air of frustration, a collective exhaustion that hung like fog over the youth. The #EndSARS protests would later serve as a c****x to years of pent-up anger, but even before that, everyone I knew was quietly boiling inside. Conversations in class shifted from exam preparations to survival strategies—who had started coding? Who had gotten a remote gig? Who knew someone that could help with migration?

I began to notice something else—something heavier than the weight of poverty: the loss of belief. That old belief that we were being prepared for something great if we just stayed disciplined. People started dropping out emotionally even if they remained enrolled. We weren’t sure what we were still holding onto.

2018 brought with it a new wave of reality. Graduation didn’t seem as close as it used to, thanks to unending strikes. The university shut down, again. We stayed home waiting for government disputes to resolve while life outside school moved on. My peers in other countries had internships, some had jobs. I was stuck—paused in time by decisions I had no control over.

By now, the cracks in the system were no longer subtle. They were chasms. Hospitals couldn’t save the sick, schools couldn’t educate the willing, and jobs couldn’t hire the ready. We lived in a contradiction—surrounded by the sound of ambition but nowhere to put it.

I started freelancing—writing, designing, helping people build their small online businesses. Not because I had it all figured out, but because I had to stay sane. Work became therapy. Creating became my form of protest. Every small win was a shout into the void that I hadn’t given up yet.

Still, I felt it—the weight of comparison. Seeing others thrive in countries where systems worked, where your intelligence was an asset not a liability. I saw the difference structure makes. It wasn’t about magic or superior brains—it was about environments. And mine was bleeding talent dry.

I didn’t give up, but I also didn’t stay the same. The fire in my chest wasn’t just ambition anymore—it was survival instinct. I realized I had to be my own safety net. No one was coming to fix things. My generation had to build our own ladders.

So I took courses, built portfolios, applied for remote gigs, failed at some, succeeded at a few. I stopped waiting for things to stabilize and started creating my own versions of stability.

And in all of that, I learned what it meant to be resilient—not in the romanticized way of movies, but in the real, gritty way. In the way that says, "I don’t like this story, but I’ll write myself into the next chapter anyway."