A Three-Act Renaissance
Beyoncé, the internet and my relationship with money.
Like many millennials, I have a little nest egg I have carved out of my earnings as a writer and communications expert and guard jealously. I feather this nest egg infrequently with surpluses I get from side hustles or benefactors instead of channelling these cash infusions into my more hedonistic desires.
It is a big deal for me as a writer in Nigeria to earn enough to have savings. I wasn’t formally trained in media and communications and it is common knowledge that even for professionals, the industry offers very little economic prospects. The basic writer’s salary is less than 100 dollars a month. For a long time, I convinced myself my nest egg was a first step to capitalist prosperity, raw material I could trade for more solid wealth creation tools that finance experts tell us we need, such as stocks and bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, and real estate. Technology made it easier to do this; instant transactions meant I could move this money around at the speed of thought and retrieve it just as easily. I believed I was playing the long game, one where the desired outcome was early retirement, underwritten by multiple streams of passive income.
But then the Coronavirus pandemic happened in 2020, a singularly sobering global event. It started in far-away China, a part of the world so technologically advanced, it might as well be alien to the average Nigerian. The information and images that trickled in at the start of the pandemic focused on markets where zoonotic viruses made the evolutionary leap from exotic animals to people, massive hospitals erected at speeds inconceivable to my Nigerian mind and forced isolation made possible by government surveillance. Then it spread to America, which was as familiar to me as my own backyard, thanks to nearly 30 years of Western media. This time, the news came as a deluge of verifiable reports, gross misinformation, and deaths by the thousands. The world, horrified by how quickly the virus overwhelmed America’s state-of-the-art, for-profit medical complex, shut down its borders and turned away the ‘vital’ commerce it had convinced us was worth bombing sovereign states and killing millions for.
I was on a work trip to South Africa, my first professional international travel opportunity, when the country decided to close its borders. My trip was immediately suspended, and I was rushed through O.R. Tambo Airport and back to Nigeria on an aircraft where flight attendants mandated the wearing of masks. When I returned, a total ban on non-essential activity was ordered, and life in Nigeria as I had left it had ceased. We were ordered to shelter at home for six weeks, enough time for the government to rally whatever skeletal defence it could against a disease that had humbled almighty America...
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