It is 2:00 AM. The heat in my off-campus room in Ife is not just hot, it is really thick. It feels like it is pushing down on my chest, making my shirt stick to my back. The only light comes from my HP laptop screen, which is shining with a blue glare. On the screen, a cursor is blinking as I get ready to send a batch of React code to a clients repository.
To this client, a startup founder in New York, I am known as "Caleb Stone", a web developer who always meets his deadlines. In reality, I am Praise Oshin, a final-year Mechanical Engineering student trying to swat mosquitoes in the dark and hoping that my small generator lasts for just ten more minutes.
It does not. The generator makes a loud noise, sputters and then stops working.
The silence in the room is really loud. Then the heat becomes unbearable. My Wi-Fi router stops working and turns red. I start to panic, feeling hot and scared. I try to find my phone in the dark and hold it near the window, trying to connect to a fading network so I can hit "Deploy" before the client wakes up and checks his dashboard.
Ten minutes later, the code goes through. I get a message on Slack: "Work as always, Caleb. Invoice approved." I breathe a sigh of relief. I just earned more money in one night than some government workers make in a month. As I look at the money in my virtual wallet, I feel a bit sad. I have a lot of money in the cloud. I cannot even buy a cold drink to soothe my throat. The neighbourhood transformer broke three days ago. None of the fridges on my street is working.
This is what it is like to be a person in Nigeria today. It is really tiring.
We are living in a world where two things are happening at the same time, and nobody prepared us for it. I spend my days working on projects for my final-year project. I study how things are supposed to work. As soon as I leave the university, I struggle in a country where nothing works. We have skills that are needed in the century. We build AI models, design platforms, and automate processes. But we are stuck in a 20th-century reality.
So we survive by creating identities. We become Caleb or Jason or Michael. We stop being Pelumis and Odunayos. It feels like I am betraying myself every time I use a name, but the world is biased against my country. The global market wants our skills. It does not trust where we come from. We hide who we are and where we are from to get a fair chance.
During the day, I wear a mask. As a Cowrywise Campus Lead, I stand in front of my peers. Talk about savings and financial freedom. I. Tell them that things will get better if we plan right. Behind the podium, I am just as tired as they are. We are all setting goals. We want to earn $5,000 or $10,000 a month. Not because we are greedy, but because we want to buy our way out of the problems in our country. We want to be able to afford our electricity, our own security and our own peace of mind.
People and politicians love to call us a "resilient" generation. They write articles about how great we are, how we can survive anything. From where I sit, sweating in the dark, being resilient is not something to be proud of. It is a way of dealing with the trauma of living in a country that has failed us.
We are a generation that is using code to escape poverty. We are doing it in the dark.
Tomorrow I will wake up, go to class, and study how things are supposed to work in a country where nothing works. I will come home, start my generator, and Caleb Stone will log online. Sometimes in the quiet dark of my room, in Ife, I wonder: how long can we keep building a digital future for the rest of the world while our own reality is falling apart?