Work

For now, I don’t have any plan or any hope, apart from this government.

We are not on the payroll, not on any union list. It is like we are living a lie.

The cost of coming to work every day is the source of my biggest debt.

Sometimes the money comes late; sometimes it is the correct amount; sometimes it is less than expected.

Imagine I have a law degree, yet I’m earning what a street hawker might get in a few days.

We are called “temporary” with our names written in pencils, until the temporary becomes the life we know.

Hope! It is what is still keeping me in this work, not because I love the work I do.

Every naira is budgeted down to the last kobo. But I never complain too loudly. They never complain, either.

Day after day, I come here doing the same thing over and over again. I sweep and mop. But this place knows me only as a cleaner.