"GeNS Transaction Alert [Credit: 256,200.00 NGN]
We wish to inform you that a Credit transaction occurred on your account with us.
The details of this transaction are shown below: Transaction Notification
Account Number: ******XXXX
Location: LAGOS
Description:
SALARY PAYMENT
Amount: 256,200.00
Date: 31/8/25
Time of Transaction: 7:42 AM
The balances on this account as at 7:42 AM are as follows:
Current Balance: 256,200.00 Naira
Available Balance: 286,560.00 Naira
Thank you for choosing Guaranty Trust Bank plc"
My phone buzzes. Salary alert.
For a moment there is relief. I worked for this. I showed up every day, ran the numbers that needed running, sat through the meetings, kept the operation moving, and survived another month. Then the moment passes, and reality starts doing its own arithmetic.
On paper, ₦256,200 sounds reasonable, more than a lot of people make, more than nothing, and in a country where unemployment eats young people alive, "more than nothing" can pass for a small victory. But before I even open my banking app to plan anything, the question arrives uninvited: how much of this money is actually mine?
Because I don't really receive ₦256,200. I receive ₦256,200 worth of responsibilities.
Rent has already taken its share before the alert lands, then electricity, and if I am honest, "electricity" now means diesel or fuel for a generator, because the national grid is more rumor than utility. Transport takes its cut, data takes its cut, and family, because I love them, takes whatever is left standing.
This is the part nobody prepares you for. Black tax is not a foreign concept dressed up for social media threads, it is a call about a hospital bill, a cousin who needs transport money to get to an interview, a sibling's school fees landing in the same week rent is due. I manage operations for a living, I keep things running so that other people's work can happen smoothly, and none of that changes the fact that my income was never entirely my own. It was always partly theirs, whether anyone said so out loud or not. And the difficult truth is that this isn't resentment, it is love colliding with a bank balance. I want to help, and I am also drowning, both things true at once.
Then there is the irony that sits underneath everything: I work to earn money, and then I spend that money compensating for systems that are supposed to work and don't. Power that should be public infrastructure becomes a personal expense, security that should be guaranteed becomes another line item, water and internet and even basic mobility all privatized by default because the public version failed me first. I am not paying for luxuries, I am paying, out of my own pocket, for the absence of a functioning state. There is a particular irony in spending my days managing operations, keeping systems efficient for other people, and still going home to the same diesel generator as everyone else.
If I am disciplined, truly disciplined, I might manage to save something, twenty or thirty or fifty thousand naira on a good month, and then the car develops a fault, or someone falls sick, or my phone gives up, or rent increases without warning, and months of discipline disappear in one afternoon. This is not financial irresponsibility. I am constantly told to save more, spend less, plan better, as though the problem is a lack of discipline rather than a lack of margin. The truth is simpler and harder: I am one emergency away from starting over completely, and so is nearly everyone I know.
The standard advice, get a side hustle, is not wrong, but it is incomplete. There is the job that pays the salary, and then there is everything I do around it to keep the operation of my own life afloat, the errands run for other people's businesses, the freelance work brewing somewhere in a notes app, the coursework waiting for whatever hours are left. At what point do I actually live? I have become someone who monetizes his own exhaustion, packaging every free hour into another output, because one salary was never built to be enough.
And still, from the outside, it looks fine. There are clothes, there are pictures, there is a job title that sounds respectable at a family gathering, and people assume the title means comfort. Nobody sees the salary advance taken before month-end, the small debts to friends, the bills quietly postponed, the mental spreadsheet running at all hours, sometimes even during Mass, when it should be the last thing on my mind. The appearance of stability and the reality of financial anxiety are two different countries, and I am commuting between them daily.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, the question turns philosophical, whether I want it to or not. When did survival become the entire purpose of adulthood, and when exactly do I get to enjoy what I work this hard for? I am working, very hard, but am I living?
This is not really a complaint about one salary, or one person. It is about the working Nigerian youth who did everything he was told to do, went to school, got the certificate, found the job, stayed responsible, tried to save, tried to invest, supported the family, tried to build something resembling a future, and still, somehow, is struggling to breathe financially at the end of every single month.
So yes, I got my salary alert. ₦256,200. On paper, I am employed, I earn a salary, I should be doing okay. But somewhere between responsibilities, family, electricity, food, transportation, and the unpredictable cost of simply existing, the money disappears. And by the end of the month, the question returns, unanswered as always: I work this hard, so where does all my money go?
Maybe this is the reality for a lot of us right now. I am not lazy, I am not careless, I am working and hustling and trying, all at once. But some months it feels like all that effort exists only to get me to the next month, and nothing more.
I am working hard, and barely living.
E no easy.