A few years ago, I visited a friend somewhere in the U.S. We had just arrived from Nigeria, tired but excited to reconnect. After struggling to set up the TV to watch a football match, hunger kicked in.
That’s when it hit us — there was no one to cook. No chef, no “mama Precious,” no one to send to the market.
My friend sighed and said, “This is why I miss Naija.”
He’d lived in the U.S. for nearly two decades, owned a thriving business, and had several properties. Yet, despite all his success, he couldn’t recreate the small conveniences that once came easily in Nigeria.
“Back home, I have two drivers and a cook — all for under a million naira a month,” he said. “Here, I’d spend ten times that, if I could even find people willing to do it.”
That conversation stuck with me. It summed up the strange contrast between wealth and comfort across countries.
In Nigeria, someone earning ₦1.5 million a month — about $1,000 — sits comfortably in the lower middle class. They can rent a decent apartment, pay school fees, hire help, and still afford the occasional outing.
But in the U.S., $1,000 barely covers groceries and fuel. It’s around $6.50 an hour — below the federal minimum wage. The same income that buys comfort in Lagos barely keeps someone afloat in Dallas.
It’s a peculiar reality of global living standards. Western societies pay higher wages because they’re designed to support a broad middle class. That structure makes essentials affordable — but also makes domestic labour costly.
This is why immigration remains crucial. Someone still has to do the jobs others won’t. Interestingly, I recently read that NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said plumbers and electricians are the new millionaires — a reflection of how valuable skilled manual work has become.
Nigeria tells the opposite story. We pay very little for the same work that costs a fortune abroad. A driver might earn ₦80,000 a month, a nanny ₦50,000, and an electrician ₦20,000 per task. For the middle class, that affordability feels like comfort — but it also exposes an uncomfortable truth: our economy runs on underpaid labour.
That’s why a ₦1.5 million earner may feel wealthy, yet lives in a system that barely functions. Their comfort is self-funded — through generators for power, boreholes for water, and private schools for education.
In the U.S., the $1,000 earner struggles, but the essentials — housing, healthcare, infrastructure — are predictable. The Nigerian may look richer, but the American lives within a more reliable structure.
So who really lives better? It depends on what you value. The Nigerian may eat better, rest easier, and have more help. The American, though, lives in a system where comfort is built in — not paid for out of pocket.
It raises an important question: if labour and services are this cheap, does it mean the naira is undervalued — or that our productivity is too low? In theory, cheap labour should make us globally competitive. We should be exporting more, attracting manufacturing, and creating jobs. But instead, our low costs mostly serve domestic convenience, not industrial growth.
The government’s recent plan to raise the minimum wage is a good start, but inflation has already swallowed most of the gains. Still, Nigeria remains one of the few places where personal services remain affordable despite rising prices.
That affordability could be our edge — if we channel it productively. We could build, export, and create better-paying work, rather than defining our economy by cheapness.
My friend eventually moved back to Nigeria. He said he missed “the freedom of comfort.” Yet every time the generator rumbled all night or traffic locked him in for hours, he missed America’s calm order.
Maybe that’s the real picture of our economy — comfort without systems, wealth without stability, luxury built on imbalance.
The goal, perhaps, isn’t to choose between both worlds but to build a Nigeria where comfort and structure coexist — where wages reflect value, not survival, and where living well doesn’t mean escaping dysfunction.