Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with soaring inflation, a collapse of its currency and millions of people struggling to buy food. Nigeria, Africa's largest economy just two years ago, is expected to fall to fourth place this year.
The pain is widespread. Labor unions are striking to protest wages of about $20 a month. People are crushed to death in crowds seeking free bags of rice. Hospitals are overwhelmed with women suffering from spasms caused by calcium deficiency.
The crisis is widely believed to be rooted in two major reforms implemented by the president elected 15 months ago – the partial removal of fuel subsidies and the introduction of a floating currency – which have combined to cause a sharp rise in prices.
Nigeria's 200 million-plus people are entrepreneurs, skilled at weathering tough times without the services the state normally provides. They generate their own electricity and find their own water sources. They take up arms to defend their communities when the military cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when their families are kidnapped.
But now, their wits are stretched thin.
I don't have money to buy milk
On a recent morning, three women writhed in pain, unable to speak, in a corner of northern Nigeria's largest emergency room. Every year, one or two patients with hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition show up at the emergency room at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city, says Salisu Garba, a kind-hearted medical worker who rushes from bed to bed and ward to ward.
Currently, many people are unable to afford food, and so the hospital is seeing a number of patients every day.
Garba was sizing up the women's husbands, deciding which nutritional sources to recommend depending on what they thought they could afford: baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor, boiled bones for the slightly wealthier. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could buy milk.
More than 87 million people live below the poverty line in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, making it the second-highest poor country in the world after India, a country seven times Nigeria's size. Raging inflation is expected to push poverty rates higher this year and next, according to the World Bank.
Last week, unions shut down hospitals, courts, schools, airports and even Parliament in a bid to force the government to raise the $20-a-month pay of the lowest-wage workers.
But more than 92 percent of working-age Nigerians work in the informal sector, where they receive no wages and there are no trade unions to fight for them.
For the Afolabi family in Ibadan, southwest Nigeria, the descent into poverty began in January with the loss of their electric tuk-tuk taxi.
After a difficult birth for their second child forced Babatunde Afolabi to sell his taxi to pay his wife's hospital bills, he took occasional construction jobs, earning little but keeping his family afloat.
“We never thought about hunger,” he said.
But since then, the price of cassava, the cheapest staple food in many parts of Nigeria, has tripled, he said.
He said all they could buy now was a few biscuits, some bread and 20 peanuts for their six-year-old.
A country built on gas
Despite being a major oil producer, Nigeria is a country that is heavily dependent on imported petroleum products. After years of underinvestment and mismanagement, Nigeria's state-run refineries barely produce gasoline.
For decades, the sound of small generators cranking up during daily power outages has echoed across the country. Petroleum products transport goods and people across the country.
Until recently, the government provided oil subsidies running into billions of dollars per year.
Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a negligent and predatory government. Successive presidents have promised to eliminate the subsidy, which drains a huge chunk of government revenue, but later backtracked, fearing widespread violence.
Bola Tinubu, who was elected Nigerian president last year, initially implemented this policy.
“This was a necessary step to ensure our country does not go bankrupt,” Tinubu said at the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia in April.
Instead, many Nigerians are bankrupt or working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
Garba, who works at a hospital, was once firmly middle class, despite relying on a family of 17 people, including 12 children.
After his shifts at the hospital, he starts the state's first ambulance service and also earns $150 a month in the emergency room, but then he heads to the Red Cross, where he occasionally gets a volunteer allowance of $3.30 for helping fight a devastating diphtheria epidemic.
At night, he works at a pharmacy he opened with a colleague, but few people have the money to buy drugs anymore. He sells about $7 worth of drugs a day.
Garba sold his car after petrol subsidies were removed last year and now commutes to work by tuk-tuk. He can't run his generator so he reads medicine labels at the pharmacy by light from a small solar lantern. He can only afford small amounts of rice and cassava.
He said life was very expensive under the previous administration, but not as expensive as it is now.
“It's a very, very bad situation,” he said.
The situation is so serious that there have been several incidents of crowds stampeding to get rice distributed free or at a discount by the government, including one in March that left seven students dead at a university in Nasarawa state in the central region.
Tinubu has pledged to create 1 million jobs and quadruple the size of the economy within 10 years but has not said how he will do so. The International Monetary Fund said last month that the government had resumed fuel and electricity subsidies, a claim the government has not acknowledged.
“There's still very little clarity about where the economy is headed or what its priorities will be,” said Zainab Usman, a political economist and director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Tapping becomes popular
A wave of new crypto-mining games promising users the more they play has people across Nigeria tapping away at their smartphone screens all day hoping to earn a few dollars.
In mosques and churches, people tap while praying, children tap under their desks at school, mourners tap at funerals.
There's no guarantee that you'll get any benefit from mindlessly tapping away for hours.
However, they cannot rely on the national currency, the Naira.
The government has devalued the naira twice in the past year in a bid to allow it to float more freely and attract foreign investment, causing it to lose nearly 70 percent of its value against the dollar.
Nigeria cannot produce enough food to feed its growing population, and food imports are rising 11 percent annually. The devaluation of the currency has made imported goods, already expensive due to high tariffs, even more expensive.
Nigerians can become poor almost overnight, so they are looking for things that will retain their value or, ideally, make them rich.
“People are looking for me everywhere,” said Rabiu Biyola, Kano's undisputed tap king, as he opened one of his five flip phones and counted his 2.7 billion taps on the TapSwap app. “Not to attack me, but to take something from me.”
A relaxed, businesslike 39-year-old who is flanked wherever he goes by a group of tech-savvy young followers, Mr. Biyola would say only that he made “more than $10,000” from the last wiretapping fad.
As he profits from the taps of others, he encourages them through social media posts and offering free internet to anyone who will sit outside their homes. Nigerians don't need much encouragement: despite the risks and instability, Nigeria boasts the second-highest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world.
So every night, struggling young people gather at Biyola's house to play taps.
Get help
In many parts of Nigeria, sharing with neighbours and giving to the poor is the norm.
Every day, people arrive at the gates of Freedom Radio Station in Kano and drop off pieces of paper with heartfelt pleas for help paying for medical bills, school fees or to help with disaster recovery.
The radio host chooses three each day to read out loud, and listeners who relate to them often call in and pay for the request.
But recently, requests have increased and offers of help have dried up.
In the past, good Samaritans would show up to the emergency room and pay for care on a stranger's behalf, Garba said. Now, that rarely happens.
Still, Garba said the number of patients visiting his hospital has fallen by almost half in recent months.
Many sick people can't even get to the hospital because they can't afford the 20-cent bus fare.
Pius Adeleye contributed reporting from Ibadan, Nigeria.