Chinedu Okorafor moved from his village in eastern Nigeria to Lagos in 2016. As soon as he could afford the night bus, he took it straight to the city of excellence. When he got to Lagos, he had N1,000 ($2.70), a Bagco sack housing two jean trousers and two shirts; all his belongings. It’s January 2020, four years in Lagos, and Chinedu makes more than $2000 monthly, a minimum of N1 million ($2,738) solely from hawking. What started, for me, as a purchase of snacks from a seemingly regular hawker, turned into an in-depth discussion on the Nigerian direct-to-consumer business.
Every large metropolitan city has traffic, and this unarguably influences the daily habits and culture of these cities. For Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial headquarters, the heavy traffic determines sleep and wake times, and commute choice for most of the populace. The most amusing phenomena the Lagos traffic offers is the magical transition of a traffic situation into a shopping mall. The range of offers is wide, from the needful to the exquisite, from nylon-wrapped sausage rolls and carbonated drinks to chihuahuas and bulldogs. Thirty minutes in traffic and you could come out of it with a new inflatable bed and manual air-pump in your back seat and empty bowls from finished lunch in the passenger seat. The range of merchandise sold by the street vendors also includes household durables, electronics, apparel, accessories and book materials.
A study done by the Journal of Marketing and Consumer Research in 2015 shows that about 41% of street hawkers earn a monthly income of over N200,000 ($547) while the lowest earning hawkers earn about N20,000 ($55). This is particularly why Chinedu’s story is fascinating. How did he, in four years rise from the N20,000 income of the average starter to more than $2000 monthly a minimum of N1 million?
Chinedu, who made a point to tell me he is now a titled chief in his village, did a profit analysis with me. In his third month of hawking, he was making a N5 ($0.0137) profit on every unit of Gala (packaged sausage roll) he sold and made an average sale of 300 units daily, solely in the Mile 2 traffic. This roughly translates to N40,000 ($110) monthly because Chinedu, like many other hawkers work for limited hours on Sundays. They go to Mass, get some rest and return phone calls that have pended week-long.
In his sixth month in business, Chinedu had explored more than a few of the traffic hotspots across Lagos and decidedly moved to Oshodi. He started selling 10 cartons a day, more than tripling his previous average daily sales, and his monthly income jumped to N150,000 ($411).
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