Should I start a business or look for a job in Nigeria?

This is a serious question asked by youths nowadays because of the current situation in Nigeria and its factors like inflation of prices in transportation, housing, and food. Employers are not making it easy by still giving the same salaries as previous years. Not that I am against getting a job, but let us look at this story of how two young men made the hardest decision of their life.

Shutting his laptop after long hours of research and trying to piece some ideas in his mind together to form a whole plan. It’s time to call it a day if not a forever. The enthusiasm was beginning to fall, this was draining than he had thought.

It’s been four years since Dapo completed his service in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria. And it feels just like yesterday when he and his friend Mike strolled into their university hall for the very first day of orientation. Neatly dressed in one of the new shirts his mom got him and a tie he had spent hours trying to knot in his tiny body that had left home for the first time in his life. After this orientation, they both had spent hours picturing how their six years from that time would be. The major highlight of this was waking up early in the morning to beat the major traffic on the Lagos mainland to get to work in their well air-conditioned car, gracely wound up to keep the cool music playing from the car’s stereo in.

Then came the final week of their third year in uni, Dapo and Mike, seated at their popular snack joint immediately after a seminar held, where they had just listened to a well-branded entrepreneur talk about his journey and about how entrepreneurship was key in being comfortable in a country like Nigeria. The dream they had three years ago had been challenged by his words, to them they saw a new and different path, even though at that point they still were not so sure as to whether it was one to hop on, but it sure did hit differently because as time moved on they began to have their major talks centered around building something they would own, they would control and they would use to help people be who they wanted to be. So their major highlights went thus, having a workstation together, where they would employ smart young adults like them, there would be days of serious work and days when after a major milestone, they would all take a break to cool off and return with rebranded ideas.

So all they wanted was to be done serving their country after university and put these dreams into reality but somewhere in them still lay their first picture of what their life would be after graduation, someone working for some other persons.

It’s been four years into the dream they settled into, and every day, they keep asking the same question if they made the right choice deciding not to work for a firm instead of owning something of their own.

What was their decision and did they regret it? Tune in next week as we continue our story.