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My father kept coins.
A tin of them, kobo pieces gone green with age. He would shake that tin at me and say, this is ours. He did not mean the metal.
I sell cloth.
Fifty-two years old, twenty-nine of them on the same stretch of Balogun Market. Ankara, lace, adire. My mother worked this stall before it was mine.
Nobody pays me in naira anymore.
They pay me in dollars, though not the paper kind. I have never once held one of those in my hand. They pay in tokens… little numbered dollars that live on my phone and move when I tell them to. And on the island here we call them blues, after the colour of the wallet. My prices are in blues, my rent is in blues, my son's school fees are in blues.
The naira still exists. You need it for tax, for a passport, for a land title, for a court fee. The state takes naira and nothing else. So we buy naira the way you would buy a postage stamp, in and out inside the hour. Nobody holds it. Holding it is how my whole generation lost everything, twice.
That is the part I cannot explain to my daughter.
Kemi is in Manchester, a nurse in her third year there. She sends money home on the first Sunday of every month. Last Sunday it landed while the two of us were still talking. Nine seconds… and the fee was less than a cup of water.
But I remember the old way. The queue at the bank, the forms, the man behind the glass who kept eight percent and made you thank him for it. My mother lost a whole month of profit to that man once. She cried in the back of the stall where she thought I could not see her.
So yes.
Some of this is better.
I can save now, and that is the thing nobody warns you about in this world. My money sits still. It does not melt while I sleep. And my wallet pays me a thin line of interest every month, because the blues behind it are backed by American government paper in a place I will never see. A cloth seller in Lagos earns a few cents a week off a treasury bill in Washington. It's nuts.
But I have no money of my own.
Do you understand what I am telling you? My country has an anthem, a flag, a football team… and no money.
So the central bank keeps gold instead. Thirty-one thousand bars, they tell us, in a vault somewhere under Abuja. They read the number out on the evening news like a football score. Gold went into that vault every year of my adult life, while the dollars went the other way. I understand why they did it. Gold does not take orders from Washington.
And still the dollar runs everything.
Every trader I know keeps her whole life inside it. We all read the same headlines in the thirties about the dollar ending, and it did not end. It stopped being paper, turned into code, and then it went everywhere… into every phone in every market in this city.
In other words, the empire never fell.
It dissolved, and got into the water.
I keep my father's tin under the till. There is a gold ring in it now too, my mother's. And the coins.
Last month a boy from the university came round with questions for a project.
He picked up a kobo, turned it over twice, and asked me what it was for.
I told him it is not for anything.
Then I sat down and thought about that for a long time.
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