By By Michael Aromolaran
This Monday, a Nigerian Twitter user with the handle @FaruqBashar, raised an issue that went on to enjoy 24-hour Twitter fame. In his tweet, Faruq talked about an unnamed university girl, “whose dad [gives] 5k per month as pocket money.” This, according to Faruq, is meant to cater for the girl’s “feeding, transportation and other basic expenses.”
Faruq wondered about the impossible situation in which such meagre funding places a young female undergraduate. Such a girl, Faruq implied, can be easily sucked into that morally nebulous world of prostitution, otherwise known by its colloquial name: hook-up.
In Faruq’s words:
“What do you expect of such [a] girl when it comes to survival? Some parents put their child in a very difficult situation and end up pushing them to do the worst for survival.”
Like flies to dung, many Twitter users ventured into the comment box to stake a claim on the matter. For many, ₦5000 as monthly allowance for a university student, be it male or female, signals irresponsible, even callous parenting.
For some others, parents cannot be blamed because life in Nigeria is hard. I paraphrase the words of one commenter: That girl should be thankful that she’s even getting ₦5000. In my time, I had to survive on ₦2000 monthly.
One other commenter re-sounded the ₦2000 line. Then in that time-worn way that Nigerians like to brag about their high tolerance for sufferhead — borrowing from Fela Kuti’s 1981 album title — others tweeted about how they, too, had to survive on less than or exactly ₦5000 a month in their university days. The girl under review, they said in one voice, should man up.
Of course, after adjusting for inflation, the worth of ₦5000 five years ago is not the same as in 2022. But nuance is scarcely a staple of Twitter discourse.
Some other commenters chose to problem-shoot rather than gripe: they suggested that the student should get a part-time job or use her skills to eke out a living. The person who had created the Twitter thread himself suggested that parents should allow their children to learn a trade or pick up a skill before shipping them off to university.
Here is the most obvious question in the world: Can a university student survive on ₦5000 naira in a month? Three answers: no, no, and no. Not when each school week comes with a new money-sucker: a new textbook to be bought (and which the lecturer swears that without which you cannot pass his class), a new handout, a new this, a new that. Not when a tin of sardine, which has since become a metaphor of hyperinflation, costs a fortune. And let’s not forget faculty and departmental dues, which if you fail to pay could prevent you from getting your examination docket.
From experience, I would say that a university student needs about ₦25,000 to ₦50,000 monthly allowance, with the former having a student living on the barest minimum. With a 25k monthly budget, you eat boiled eggs five times a week, and meat or fish twice. You drink water most of the time, not soda, which at least postpones death by diabetes. When you use the Internet, you avoid data-heavy sites like YouTube and Netflix. And with that budget, romance is surely out of the window, specifically for the male undergraduate. Because though love may be blind, it is blindingly expensive.
It is true that parents shouldn’t send their younglings to university without enough cash or self-sufficient skills. Even more true is that parents shouldn’t have more children than they can cater for. It is also true that in the first two years of university at least, a full-time student shouldn’t have to split his attention between school work and earning a living. Many studies have, in fact, shown a strong link between economic lack and poor academic performance.
There are exceptions: students who brave all odds and turn up victorious, like the 2018/19 Best Graduating Student of Lagos State University, Oladimeji Shotunde, who despite mean finances, set a historic academic record in the state university. In his interview with Tunde Ajaja of The PUNCH, Shotunde said that he survived on ₦250 a day. In his words, “I could buy doughnut and sachet water while I reserved ₦100 for my transportation.”
Who knows, Shotunde may be one of those people blessed with a thin appetite. The overwhelming lot of students, however, would fumble when, in the same headspace, they have to worry about both Chemistry 201 and dinner — worry not in the sense that there is a food surplus, thus causing one to waffle between rice and yam. But in the sense that there is nothing to eat. The colloquial name for this condition: sapa.
Many students have cited this lack as justification for their involvement in cyber-fraud. This, I must say, does not excuse the crime, even though I understand the motivation.
When parents do not meet up (even though they try their hardest), and when the government refuses to interfere in any way, I think it ultimately comes down to the student to better his (or her) lot. There are many opportunities online that do not involve hoodwinking middle-aged white women. A student can try his hands at writing, photography, affiliate marketing, modelling. Anything at all that keeps body and soul together.
Michael Aromolaran is a Nigerian writer and journalist. He is a literature, football, film, and music enthusiast. He is @_michaelberlin on both Twitter and Instagram.
