"Account Reading FM" - by Matthew Okibe

There's a level of broke that every Nigerian carries in their chest like a frequency. And the thing about broke is — it is not an amount. It is a ratio. It is the distance between what you have and what life is currently demanding from you.For students, broke has a very specific broadcast. Your account stops reading numbers and starts reading radio stations. 95.1. 50.1. 1.1 — that last one, the one naira kobo. That is the signal. That is the transmission that says: *you have arrived.*But broke is not the same for everybody.A student's broke is 2k with a data subscription due. A fresh graduate's broke is 20k when rent is 80k and the landlord has started greeting you with silence. A young professional's broke is 100k — looks like money on paper, but it is standing in front of problems that cost 300k, 500k, and it cannot reach any of them. So it just sits there, aware of its own inadequacy. That is a painful kind of broke — the kind where you *see* the problem clearly but your hand cannot touch it.And then there are people walking around with millions who are also broke. Their account has 10 million. Their life is asking for 40. The zeroes are different but the feeling is the same. The gap is the same. The chest tightness is the same.Now here is where it gets interesting. Because it is not just life that works against your margin. Sometimes it is the system itself.MTN recently suspended Xtratime — that service that has quietly been the last line of defense for millions of Nigerians. The one that says, *okay, you don't have data, but you can borrow and pay back on your next recharge.* Gone. Suspended because of new FCCPC digital lending regulations. And before the suspension, the system had been forcing people who were owing to clear their full balance or lose access entirely.And this is where it stopped being a corporate announcement and became a human story.Someone on TikTok shared what happened to a brother. This man was owing MTN Xtratime 7,500 naira. Not a big amount on paper. But during that period, that 7,500 naira was essentially everything he had. Then JAMB released cutoff marks, and he needed to check his younger brother's result. But to get access — to even be able to browse, to check — he had to clear the Xtratime debt first. The whole 7,500 naira. So he paid it. He squeezed himself and paid what was practically his last money, just to see one number on a screen.The boy got around 150.You know that silence that is not peaceful? That silence that comes after you have done something irreversible and the outcome did not justify the sacrifice? That was the silence in that video. The man had just handed over everything he had, and now he was standing in the middle of both broke *and* heartbroken. Two arrivals at once. And that story stayed with me because it captures something very true about this country right now. It is not just that you don't have money. It is that the environment is designed so that every time you almost have something, something else opens up to collect it. The phone port that was fine since forever suddenly develops a personality. The debt you delayed suddenly grows urgency. The fund you needed resurfaces at the wrong moment. It is almost like the universe is specifically allergic to your margin. I had money recently. A sum. Enough to settle debts and still keep something aside — or so I thought. I was even planning it in my head. *Keep this amount separate. So there is always something there. So I am never completely without.* But before that plan could breathe, a problem came and ate into it, and then another problem came dressed as the first problem's cousin, and I was back to calculating. Eventually I settled everything I was owing. Let it all go. Kept nothing back. I thought I was losing. But something strange happened. Almost immediately — the cloud lifted. Problems I had been mentally wrestling with just quietly stepped back. No dramatic resolution. They just stopped pressing. And I started thinking: maybe the stress was never just about the amount. Maybe it was also about the weight of owing. The mental rent you pay when you are carrying debt inside you alongside the debt on paper. When you clear it, something in you exhales that you did not even know was holding its breath. Everyone has their broke level. And you have to know yours — not to celebrate it, but to respect it. Because the moment you fall below your own threshold, life does not just get harder financially. It gets complicated in every direction. The relationship tension. The short temper. The overthinking at 2am. All of it is connected. The account reading FM is not the worst part.The worst part is when you forget that everyone around you is also tuned to a station — and you start measuring your frequency against theirs without knowing what their signal is carrying.

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