Throwback video of all YBNL acts: Fireboy DML, Lyta, Davolee, Temmie Ovwasa, Yomi Blaze, Limerick, and Picazo freestyling on Cool FM in 2018. 👏🏿❤️
Best video you will watch today.
Today I decided to show how much it costs me to buy my weekly fruits. I love eating fruit and trying to live healthy… but that’s by the way. The real story is the cost.
My fruit shopping came to £50.87. If you convert that to naira, that’s roughly ₦94,000.
Now, if I wanted to gaslight Nigerians, I could easily say something like: “Nigerians don’t appreciate what they have. This same fruit would cost less than ₦20k in Nigeria.” That would give the impression that food is cheaper in Nigeria than in the UK.
But that would be a half truth, or what some people like to call being smart by half.
Here’s the part people conveniently leave out.
The minimum wage in the UK is about £12.44 per hour. That means someone earning minimum wage needs less than 5 hours of work to afford that £50 fruit basket.
And before someone says it, yes, if you’re on minimum wage here you’re probably shopping in Lidl or Aldi, not casually loading £50 worth of fruit into your trolley like a wellness influencer. But that’s beside the point.
Now let’s look at Nigeria.
Let’s assume that same fruit basket really costs ₦20,000. Sounds cheap, right?
Nigeria’s minimum wage is ₦70,000 per month. That translates to roughly ₦337 per hour.
So to buy that same ₦20k fruit basket, a minimum wage worker would need to work almost 60 hours. That’s about 6½ full working days.
Think about that for a moment.
Someone in the UK doing the same type of low income job works about 5 hours to buy it. Someone in Nigeria may need almost a full week of work.
So when people start comparing prices to gaslight you and say petrol is $4 in the US or fuel is £1.80 in the UK, ask them one simple question.
How does that compare to people’s income?
Because price without income context is just propaganda with numbers.
Now let’s take it one step further.
In the UK, the minimum wage is about £12.44 per hour and the Prime Minister earns around £83 per hour. That is roughly a £70 difference per hour.
In Nigeria, the minimum wage is about ₦337 per hour and the President earns about ₦6,770 per hour before allowances.
That is a difference of about ₦6,433 per hour.
In percentage terms, the UK Prime Minister earns about 577% more per hour than minimum wage.
Nigeria’s President earns about 1,570% more per hour than minimum wage.
And that is before we even talk about the endless allowances, benefits, convoys, security votes, and other mysterious expenses that seem to multiply like rabbits.
So the question is not whether things are cheap or expensive.
The real question is how long the average citizen has to work to afford them.
Because when people must work days for what others can buy in hours, something deeper is wrong.
I’ll leave you with this.
“Until all are free, all are enslaved.”