If you have ever been ‘broke’, hungry and bored at the same time, you have definitely considered a job that is way below your qualification. Your thought is, ‘I just need something to take me out of the house daily’. Let’s start with commercial vehicles that are not on the app. It is estimated that Danfo drivers make as much or as little as ₦780,800 per month especially if you are on the Obalende/Ajah axis. They share this with conductors, mechanic, traffic officials, the bus owner and the National Union Of Road Transport Workers’ (NURTW) officials. Yes, officials even though they strike you as touts. The truth is that they have bosses that require remittance of the money collected. We’ll leave that for another conversation.

With regards to this monthly income, the driver can still go home with as much as ₦ 400,000 if he is careful enough to obey traffic rules and maintain his vehicle properly. That’s a sum of ₦ 4.8M per year. Now, let’s talk about your income; you work as an accountant at a factory, earn ₦ 90,000 per month ( ₦ 1.08M per year) and look down on a danfo driver’s dirty job… We should talk about the income of our friends on the taxi apps, right? We will do that before this conversation ends but first, you should know what some graduates think of being commercial drivers.

Tboy Bolaji says that, ‘there is no big deal in going for a petty job as a graduate. People do a lot of dirty stuff travelling abroad. Yes, I can do it.’ Wait, I hear that bus drivers in Canada earn as much as $80,000 per year. At the rate of

₦ 275.43 per Canadian dollar, that is ₦22.03M per year. Edward Oparugo observes that, ‘there are a lot of okada riders, taxi drivers and keke drivers who are graduates. Was it not in your studio in Metro FM that we talked about PhD holders who applied for Dangote’s truck-driving job? Degree doesn’t put food on the table anymore in Nigeria…’ At this point, we should talk about the fact that when you hail a ride on the Uber or Bolt app, the driver is very likely to be decently educated. Statistics from alvia.com show that an average Uber driver in Lagos works about 30 hours per week and makes as much as ₦3.06M per year. I also observed a number of drivers are on multiple apps so that for every outing, the chance of getting a customer increases.



Read full gist & drop your comments


http:///sdde7d5a191216en_ng


Excerpts from Ife Ajagbe's Stories on Opera