When Nigeria Came For Us: Navigating a Broken System Until It Broke Us

We have been navigating Nigeria’s broken system for decades. It is entirely possible that we have been doing it all of our lives. To successfully navigate a broken system, you need a slew of fixers. “I have a guy” is the middle class calling-card.

The Middle Class Safety Net: How We Navigated Nigeria

When my father became the traditional ruler of our hometown, my mother’s socialite network was invaluable to him. We all learned first-hand the value of having “a guy”. My siblings and I recall hearing Dad at the breakfast table ask mum: ‘Who do we know at…?” And she would crinkle her eyes, cock her head to one side and come up with a name. Everything we needed was a maximum of 2 phone calls away. This was middle-class survival in Nigeria, not privilege, but necessity.

Early Lessons in “Having a Guy”

My first encounter with corruption in Lagos came after youth service. I paid a landlord for a flat on Moshood Abiola Crescent in Ikeja, only to learn he wouldn’t rent to single women. When he refused my demand for a refund, my father’s note to an uncle, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, produced results within 48 hours. Six months of chasing transformed into instant resolution.

Years later, a vindictive client weaponized the Nigerian police system against my husband. Accused of advance fee fraud despite being owed ₦1.5 million, we faced detention. The same uncle’s intervention saved us from the fate of countless architects before us; professionals locked up by the MD of a company that had “adopted” the police station as corporate social responsibility. We learned that the police served as his personal gestapo.

Living Off the Grid: Our Attempt to Escape Nigeria’s Dysfunction

As I said, we were doing fine navigating the system. We weren’t blind to the system’s victims. We were aware of the hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who are rounded up and locked up annually without bail or trial for months (sometimes years), for offenses ranging from ‘wandering’ to refusing to bribe an officer, or for merely holding a laptop.

Our children are socially conscious. They joined the END SARS protests, supporting justice movements and speaking out against the injustice suffered by Senator Natasha. We launched N-Report, a political satire show exposing governance failures. After ten years, we ran out of material; not because issues were resolved, but because the same problems persisted unchanged from 2010 to 2025.

We built workarounds to survive the infrastructure problems. One of our homes is completely off-grid and solar-powered. Every home has a borehole and we had the perfunctory 4-wheel drive in response to the bad roads. We home-schooled our children and sent them abroad for tertiary education. We were doing a good job of hacking the system.

We thought we were winning. We were wrong. We thought we could run forever from the dysfunction, until the day we were reminded that we can run but we can not hide forever from a broken system.

October 17, 2025: When Nigeria Came For Us

On Friday, October 17, 2025, barely a week after watching my uncle slowly exit this world, I woke to persistent doorbell ringing. Looking from the fourth floor master-bedroom window of our townhouse in Abuja, I saw what appeared to be armed robbers; a crowd of thugs on our terrace house porch! Armed robbers in broad daylight?! This was my first panicked thought as I dialed my husband while hurrying downstairs to the third floor to get my children. When I looked out of the window of my daughter’s bedroom, I realized there was a police van labelled FCT High Court Enforcement Unit, and then I saw officers in jackets.

The Illegal Eviction Begins

My husband was still in Lagos. He advised that we should stay indoors. Huddled with my children (my 21-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son) in my bedroom, we heard the sickening sound of our front door being broken down. This was an illegal home invasion, but it felt like armed robbery. Terrified, we threw belongings into bags and descended trembling. Would they assault us? Would my children be safe? I stood with them at the top of the foyer stairs, my trembling hands holding the recording phone, all three of us reciting Psalms of protection and hoping help would come before they gained access into our home.

After about 30 minutes of hacking at the lock, the door gave way. A dozen touts tried to rush in. Seeing me holding up the phone, one of them, turned his back to us and blocked the others with outstretched arms. “Let’s go,” my daughter said to her brother, doing her best to speak with a steady voice. “Please, we are coming out,” I said to the invaders. Still in pajamas, I led my children out of the house walking through the lot to the car while touts went in and started evacuating the equipment from the first floor which served as our office. 15 years worth of intellectual property, computers, and servers, were dumped on the wet grass of the sidewalk outside the estate. My sense of preservation kicked in.  Meanwhile, my daughter tried to speak to one of the enforcement officers, a lady who became verbally abusive, so I asked her to stand down.

The first person I called was a dear friend and brother who told me my husband had already called him and he was on his way. When he arrived, he came with a news crew but no one was in the frame of mind to speak to them. While we were all certain this was illegal, I doubt that any one of the families in the 12 townhouses in our estate knew what was going on for sure.

British Village Becomes a War Zone

Within hours, every house in our 12-townhouse estate had moving trucks. Though we knew this was an illegal eviction in Nigeria, the presence of armed police and touts made resistance dangerous. British Village looked like a war zone, impassable with shell-shocked residents introducing themselves to one another, bonding in the trauma and making frantic efforts to move possessions that were carelessly tossed on to the street.

The touts, victims of weaponized poverty, pounced on food from my kitchen and pocketed trainers and other small items they could lay their hands on. I was past caring. When we noticed their hunger, we offered them more food and my daughter bought them water. They were humans caught in the system too.

By 5pm,  except for installations that needed specialist removal, the fourth truck-load had moved our things. As I discovered, you can move a 4-bedroom townhouse with a fully functional office and BQ in a day – a feat that I would never have imagined was possible prior to that day. As we drove away, the heavens opened, weeping for injustice, yet rejoicing that we had been cast down but not destroyed.

The Aftermath: When Privilege Fails in Nigeria

From the safety of friends’ guest rooms, I reflected on what transpired. Our network, our “guys,” our decades of successfully navigating Nigerian corruption; none of it mattered. We’d lost more than possessions. Our sense of safety shattered. Our faith in justice assailed. I felt vulnerable, exposed, with no protection and no recourse to law.

I worried about the other occupants whose things were still out on the street. I remembered seeing a smug-looking man accompanied by two others who looked like they were his assistants. He walked past us into the estate, as if he was inspecting the chaos, while my friend and I we were seated on our furniture on the street, supervising the loading of the trucks. I thought: “Let him gloat,” and turned my attention back to the movers.

A Flame Fanned Into Fire

When I told the children, “We concede this round,” my daughter’s eyes blazed: “Never.”

In that moment, I saw a flame fanned into fire. “Some things would never be the same again,” I said. “We will all remember this day, and many others will thank God for this day several years from now.”

The Truth About Navigating Nigeria’s Broken System

For years, we had navigated successfully. We had contacts for every emergency, solutions for every problem. We protested injustice while simultaneously benefiting from the same networks that perpetuate it.

The Nigerian middle class exists in this paradox; aware of systematic oppression, occasionally fighting against it, yet dependent on insider connections for survival. We’re simultaneously victims and beneficiaries of a broken system.

Until the day the system turns on you.

Then you realize: you can run, but you cannot hide forever from the dysfunction. Your “guys” have their limits. Your connections can only protect you until they can’t. Nigeria will come for you eventually. The question isn’t whether it will happen, but how you’ll respond when it does. Will you concede? Or will you let the flame be fanned into fire?

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This account documents one family’s experience with illegal eviction, police enforcement abuse, and the limits of middle-class privilege in Nigeria’s broken system. While we successfully navigated corruption for decades, October 17, 2025 proved that no one is immune when the system is used against them.

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