---
type: Place
title: Lagos
description: Nigeria's largest city across two markets — Oshodi, a market built on live train tracks, men who demand payment to film, and an average wage of $27 a month behind every request.
tags: [lagos, nigeria, oshodi, victoria-island, markets, poverty, afrobeats, transport, filming]
coordinates: {lat: 6.4551, lng: 3.3942}
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Lagos

Nigeria's largest city, on the south coast, with a population Harry gives as
approaching 20 million. It is not the capital — that moved to Abuja for being
more central, which he admits he hadn't known.

The population is a migration story: people have come from the villages for work
and opportunity, and many arrive without a job to come to, so they buy stock and
become their own salesmen. That is the market.

Harry calls Oshodi the craziest market he has ever been to, and the day is the
most intense encounter in the [Nigeria](/countries/nigeria.md) cluster. He is
also completely clear about why: **the average wage he is given is $27 a
month**, and he says more than once that he isn't going to judge people for
what that does to how they treat a foreigner with a camera.

## Oshodi Market

- **The floor is mud**, worn down by foot traffic and never resurfaced.
- **Armed security.** The first man Harry speaks to is carrying an AK-47, and
  says it is for bad people at night.
- **Oyibo** is what you'll hear shouted — it means white person.
- **The camera splits the crowd**: some people love it, some don't.
- **Health and safety doesn't exist.** A live building site with bamboo
  scaffolding runs straight through the middle of the market, and you walk
  through it.
- **No refrigeration**, so the fresh food has to move fast, and the butchery
  uses every part of the animal.

What things cost, in naira:

- Socks, 500 each — and no discount for taking three.
- Counterfeit Nike Air Force 1s from China, 12,000, with a dance thrown in.
- Catfish, 3,000.
- Fish, 100.
- Puff puff (fried dough balls), where he was quoted 1,000–1,500 for five and
  refused it as a tourist price — see below.

## The train-track market

A new metro line is under construction, which Lagos needs because the traffic is
severe. Its side effect is that the traders who used to work the railway have
been pushed onto the surrounding streets.

Harry then walks the tracks themselves, which are live and which people use as a
footpath, and finds a market operating on them. He describes the area off the
tracks as noticeably sketchier than the market proper — and it is here that
someone threw a rock the size of his fist at him from across the tracks. It
missed by a few metres and he says plainly it would have knocked him out.

## Being asked for money

The theme of the whole video. Requests are near-constant, and Harry's phrase for
it is that he is a walking ATM. He records two things he does about it, both
worth copying:

- **He refuses openly and without hostility**, and says why to the person's
  face — if he gives to one, everyone comes. Once, having bought a drink for
  one man, four were taken from him at once and a crowd closed in; he got
  himself out of it by staying friendly and firm.
- **He refuses a dishonest price rather than the seller.** The puff puff seller
  quoted 1,000–1,500 for five and, pressed, argued that Harry was wearing Gucci
  and could pay. Harry told him the price was the problem, said he would have
  bought more at a fair one, and bought a little anyway.

His closing, and the reason the video isn't a complaint: there are good and bad
people everywhere, you should ask what it is like to be in their shoes, and a
government and its people are not the same thing.

## Marina Market, Victoria Island

A second market in a smarter part of the city, and the one where the friction is
about the camera rather than about money directly. Sellers work outside their
shops as well as inside; stock is ordered in bulk from China and Vietnam and
shipped in; neighbouring traders describe each other as neighbours rather than
competition.

**The men the video's title warns about.** Twice Harry is stopped and told he
can't film. The first is a stallholder who, Harry judges, wanted about a dollar
to allow it. The second is more serious in appearance: men in uniform who say he
should have seen them first and that they work for the local government. Harry
asks for ID. None is produced, and the phone number he's given doesn't work. His
conclusion is that it was a man who wanted money — though he admits on camera
that he'd wondered whether he was dealing with something worse. His answer to
all of them is the same and it works: *I'm filming me*.

Worth setting against the Oshodi day above: nearly everyone here is friendly,
and the friction comes from a small number of men who have positioned themselves
as gatekeepers.

### Anger at the government

The strongest material in the Nigeria cluster, and it is volunteered rather than
prompted. Seller after seller tells Harry that the country has every resource it
needs to live well, that the leaders are corrupt and treat those resources as
personal business, and that people survive by hustling with nothing coming back
from the state. One tells him plainly he must hear the truth about it.

Harry's response is that he would feel the same in their position, and — a
sentence later — that it makes him grateful for where he happened to be born.
This is the day that supplies his closing line about
[a government and its people](/tips/separate-a-government-from-its-people.md).

### The tailor and the shoe cleaner

- **A full Nigerian outfit, made the same day**: 10,000 naira for the shirt,
  20,000 for the whole thing.
- **A shoe cleaner charging 100 naira** who is too nervous to speak to the
  camera, doesn't know how old he is, and has come down from
  [Kano](/places/kano.md) to find work while his family stay there. Harry pays
  him 5,000 — and then has a queue of people wanting to clean his shoes.
- **Sunglasses**, 3,500 asked and 3,000 paid. He notes he was braced for tourist
  prices and didn't get them.
- **Twenty young men** standing at the roadside waiting for work that isn't
  coming.

## Money and cash

Practical, and the most transferable thing in the cluster —
[Muhammad](/people/muhammad.md) explains it:

- **500-naira notes are worth so little** that paying for anything ordinary
  means handing over a brick of them. Harry swaps his for 1,000s, which he
  reckons at about 70 cents each.
- **ATM withdrawals are capped** at 20,000 naira a day, or 40,000 at some banks.
- **For more than that, use an agent.** They will hand over cash — Harry is told
  up to 1,500,000 — against a bank transfer or a card payment on their machine,
  taking a commission scaled to the amount.

## Notes

- **Afrobeats** is everywhere. Names that come up are Asake — dismissed by one
  seller as too mainstream — Davido and Burna Boy.
- **Football is the icebreaker** here as in [Kano](/places/kano.md): Chelsea,
  Arsenal, Man City, Liverpool.
- **Emigration is the ambition** of nearly everyone Harry asks their dream. The
  UK or the US, and told the UK is cold and unfriendly, one man's answer is that
  he'd adapt.

## Harry's tips

- **Refuse clearly and stay warm.** Saying no to everyone is unavoidable; saying
  it badly is what turns a crowd.
- **Push back on the price, not the person** — and say you'd buy more at a fair
  one, which is the version that works.
- **Watch your footing on the tracks.** They're live, people walk them anyway,
  and the area around them is the one place Harry felt genuinely unsafe.
- **Understand what $27 a month means** before you form a view of how you're
  being treated.
- **"I'm filming me."** The answer that defused every objection to the camera,
  said cheerfully and without stopping — see
  [when people don't want to be filmed](/tips/when-people-dont-want-to-be-filmed.md).
- **Ask a self-declared official for ID.** The men who claimed to work for the
  local government had none, and the number they gave didn't ring.
- **Carry 1,000-naira notes and know the ATM cap.** 20,000 a day at most banks;
  an agent will do more for a commission.

## Source

- [Inside Nigeria's Most Dangerous City 🇳🇬](/videos/KHN2N_jx7LQ.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHN2N_jx7LQ
- [I Visited Nigeria's Biggest City (Avoid These Men) 🇳🇬](/videos/JlXqwy1C6po.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlXqwy1C6po