Africa
Survival And Empathy: Two Currencies We Can’t Afford At The Same Time -By Kolawole Eniola Israel
The truth is, we don’t lack empathy because we want to. We lack empathy because the system has drained us of the strength to care. We are all busy trying not to drown. Sometimes, I walk through busy streets and see people who could have been engineers, writers, or architects, reduced to selling sachet water or pushing carts under the sun. I wonder: how many of us will make it? How many dreams will die quietly while we pretend everything is fine?
Humans really do lack empathy, hear me out. We rarely understand or feel people’s pain until we walk through it ourselves. You don’t truly grasp hunger until you’ve had to stretch a loaf of bread for two days. You don’t understand joblessness until you’re a graduate staring at an inbox full of rejection emails. You don’t feel the sting of rising rent until you’ve begged a landlord for more time.
As a fresh graduate from Lagos State University, my friends and I talk almost daily about the jobs we find online and how little they pay. It’s no surprise that most 9-to-5 jobs in Nigeria barely pay ₦70,000 a month. In this economy, ₦70,000 barely survives a week. When you break down daily transport, feeding, data, and electricity, an average worker can’t even afford a modest apartment without saving for a year or two.
But even “saving” sounds like a joke in today’s Lagos. The housing market is a wild jungle. A single-room self-contain now costs between ₦350,000 to ₦400,000 in many areas. Then comes the never-ending list of fees: ₦100,000 agreement, ₦100,000 commission, ₦100,000 caution, and agent fees hovering around ₦80,000 to ₦100,000. Altogether, you’re looking at close to ₦900,000 just to rent a room that’s barely the size of a cab. A place where, once you drop your mattress, you can’t turn without hitting the wall. Yet, someone built this space and had the audacity to demand almost a million naira per year. You start to wonder, did they ever have to hustle too? Have they forgotten what it’s like to start life from scratch? Or maybe they remember, but the system has hardened everyone. Lagos does that to you; it squeezes the empathy out of your soul.
You begin to see why people stop caring. The market woman who screams at you isn’t wicked, she’s exhausted The bus driver who insults passengers isn’t just rude, he’s broken by years of hustling with nothing to show for it. Behind every pepper seller, keke driver, and roadside trader, there’s a dream that didn’t make it. A man who once wanted to own a car, a woman who once wanted to send her children abroad. Now, they’re simply surviving.
This is where empathy dies, when survival becomes the only thing that matters. When we’re all fighting for oxygen in a system designed to choke us. This housing crisis is only one layer of the struggle. Prices of food have tripled in the last two years, transport fares rise with every fuel announcement, and even basic education feels like a luxury. The average Nigerian graduate is thrown into the world with a degree that employers say means nothing, expected to “hustle” in an economy where opportunities are fewer than promises.
The truth is, we don’t lack empathy because we want to. We lack empathy because the system has drained us of the strength to care. We are all busy trying not to drown. Sometimes, I walk through busy streets and see people who could have been engineers, writers, or architects, reduced to selling sachet water or pushing carts under the sun. I wonder: how many of us will make it? How many dreams will die quietly while we pretend everything is fine?
Maybe that’s what it means to live in Nigeria; to dream big and then learn how to shrink those dreams to fit inside the reality you can afford. Maybe that’s why empathy feels like a luxury now, because until you’ve been crushed by the same weight, you won’t understand why people stop caring.
