Being a Diasporan Techie

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...

 Dec 2011 to Dec 2015 were very stable periods of my life. In this time, i started work in the financial services sector at the pension funds administrator and i made good strides in every aspect of my life. One area where I performed poorly was in my education. I was still working with a HND up till that point, and in Nigeria - which is so skewed towards degrees and academic qualifications - as opposed to skills and merit, which employers in Canada reckon more with, I was guaranteed never to rise in my career. I had switched jobs at least four times, and I never landed a team lead role. I was just rotating from technical role to technical role with more pay, but no job recognition. So I decided to get a Bsc. Almost all universities in Nigeria never want to have anything to do with a HND. The best they would come up with is to tell you to enrol for a Pgd or worst case, go back to 200L just to get a poorly rated Nigerian degree. Luckily, someone pointed me in the right direction tha...