Ibrahim Yahaya, a 45-year-old fried-yam and chicken seller at the Mammy Market gate in Effurun, Warri, says he married five wives to protect himself from emotional pain should one partner betray him.
A native of Kano and father of nine, Yahaya told Nigerian Tribune that relying on a single wife left him vulnerable. “If you have one wife, she can cheat on you and break your heart, so I decided to have five of them,” he said.
Yahaya, who moved to Warri two years ago in search of better earning opportunities, described the daily grind of keeping his family afloat in the face of soaring prices. He said his elderly parents and some of his children remain in Kano and depend on the meagre remittances he sends from the South.
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“Life was far better when Buhari was president than now under Tinubu,” he said, lamenting a sharp increase in the cost of food and raw materials. “The fried chicken I now sell for N500 used to sell for N100 or N200. The yam that cost between N3,000 and N5,000 before is now N10,000 to N15,000.”
Those price jumps, Yahaya said, have eroded his profit margins and forced him to raise prices even as customers struggle to pay. He described yam frying in Warri as a fallback after his provision business in Kano became unsustainable.
“We can’t stop hustling because we don’t want to go hungry,” he added. “What I send home is barely enough to feed them, but we are managing.”
The trader appealed to government authorities to act, warning that failure to address the cost of living could push more families into hunger. “The government should do something before people start falling down on the streets due to hunger and high cost of living,” he warned.
Yahaya’s story underlines the broader economic pressures facing small traders across the country: migration for work, diminished earnings, and the strain of supporting extended families across distant states.
He closed the interview by reiterating his resolve to keep hustling despite the odds, saying survival, for him and many others, depends on continuously finding ways to make ends meet.