Being a Diasporan Techie

2weeks have gone by already. The year has been off to a quiet, boring and uneventful start,  and thanks to Covid, we are back to a second round of lockdowns. Back to the matter. Once we got first passport request (PPR) in September 2019, we requested for extension to submit our passports for visa stamping (because we could not fly immediately as wifey was almost due), and IRCC (Canada immigration) graciously obliged us extension till December. We then got into action, selling property, packing food and clothing, and wifey did a fantastic job with the packing. She packed so much medication that our host in Canada jokingly remarked that we landed in Canada with a whole pharmacy. I still regret till today that I did not sell my major properties in Nigeria and bring in all the money with us in dollars. For context, while we were preparing to leave, a Canadian dollar sold at about N290, but today, 15th January 2020, a Canadian dollar sells at N370 (black market rate). It is incomprehens...

Happy new year! Thank you for starting this blog with me in 2020, and many thanks for your readership so far. I admit that my updates have become few and far-between in the past 2months, and I lost steam. I was conveniently forgetting, and becoming too lazy to write posts, but I had a chat with an old acquaintance, who I havent seen or spoken with in over 17years, and i was pleasantly surprised to know that she follows my updates. Thanks for the encouragement Bussy. I promised to write a post in the new year, so this is for you. 2020 was so good to me and family, almost too good to be true, and at the risk of sounding insensitive to anyone who didnt have it good. May 2021 be a year of recovery and positive turnaround for you and yours. I almost stopped posting because my story was getting to the point where we landed in Canada, and from that point, God took over the wheels, and it had been a great ride. I got paranoid about sharing details about how we settled in Canada, and financial ...

Still as broke as ever. I was always lamenting how my son's school fees was taking a toll on my finances and all that. Save for the loan repayment, I would have been a bit comfortable with my job in Nigeria. In hindsight though, I have come to agree that God makes people uncomfortable to make them grow. To be clear, the problem was not with my job at the PPP, the problem was with me and my finances. If i was financially well off in Nigeria, I may never have moved to Canada. The problem was also with the state of things in Nigeria. Epileptic power was a pet-peeve.. electricity bills were high, and the service was erratic. Noise pollution from generators from neighbors could drive one crazy. Traffic to/fro work was also a pain. Although i lived less than 1 hour from the office, the commute time could stretch to 2hours+ on bad traffic days. We kept hearing stories of friends who had relocated to Canada and were living the life, and we wanted to have the same experience, so we kept hop...

I wasnt exactly doing my core technical competencies at the PPP job, but I had to do it for the money. Not all loss tho, I groomed presentation and "marketing" skills on the job. We launched a mortgage software which I was sent on training to Canada for, therefore, the responsibility to present the software to our partner banks became my responsibility. I am not an exactly shy person, but talking finance (as a non-finance person) to finance professionals was a different ball game. I learnt to hone in on things which piqued the interest of my audience, learnt to control myself whenever i sounded like i was blabbing, learnt the carriage, learnt to infuse humor, learnt to defer to my superiors to handle tough questions  etc.  However, I was broke!. I was practically living from loan to loan to run my family, because i was repaying the N3.5m. My bank account had several holes through which it was bleeding..my son's school fees of N150k per term, my car (my first car ever whic...

My wife is one of the blessings I am grateful to have. She is prudent, makes do with what she has, down-to-earth and a plain-Jane. She's such a low maintenance chic. With a N3.5m loan, we scraped thru to have a wedding. I borrowed my friend's car which I used as groom's car. There was absolutely no plan for a honeymoon, we never had one, and my wife never complained. The property developer who I invested the money with, and had given us a completion date of 7/8 months took 1year 4months to complete the project. That meant that by the time we got married, the new house we intended to live in was not completed yet. Luckily, the developer gave us a room and parlor self contain apartment to live in till he finished delivering our apartment. We returned to Lagos the weekend after our wedding to our flooded 1 bedroom apartment. How my wife coped - downgrading from a 6 bedroom duplex which her parents live in, to live with me in a 1 bedroom apartment in a rough area in Lagos - i w...

Everyone agreed that the offer at the PPP was a good one. The base salary was top-notch, and there were lots of perks. Leave allowance, 13th month allowance, foreign training for all staff at least once in 2years, we were enrolled on the premium plan for health benefits, and it was - in several respects - like working for a multinational or an expatriate organisation in Nigeria. It was to be expected anyways, because the top 4 staff in the organisation were people who had worked and lived at least 12 years abroad, and the PPP was partly funded by the world bank. The HR manager (who is an avid reader of this blog) was a young chap, the best HR manager I have ever come across. He is empathic, humane, relatable and extremely efficient on the job. Right from the time when I went for the interview in Abuja, I knew they were a big deal. The office ambience was professionally and aesthetically done, my flight expenses to and fro Abuja was re-imbursed and during on-boarding, we (Lagos based st...