The Day My Oga Fired Me in Front of the Whole Office, Then Begged Me to Stay Before Closing Time

The generator had just died for the third time that morning when Oga Chidi decided to end my career on a Tuesday, in front of eleven colleagues, over a spreadsheet.

I had worked at the marketing agency on Herbert Macaulay Way in Yaba for two years and four months, and if you had told me that morning, while I was elbow-deep in fried plantain from the woman by the bus stop, that I would be unemployed by eleven a.m., I would have laughed and asked you which one you smoked. But Lagos does not warn you before it slaps you. It just slaps.

It started with NEPA, because in Lagos everything eventually starts with NEPA. The light had gone since Sunday night, and by Tuesday the diesel in the office generator was running low because the driver, Tunde, had “settled” the diesel supplier with money meant for fuel and used part of it to fix his Gokada instead. Nobody knew this yet.

All we knew was that the generator was coughing like an old man with catarrh, and the air conditioners in the open-plan office had gone silent, and everybody’s foreheads were shining like they had been oiled for a wedding.

Oga Chidi, our creative director, walked in at 10 a.m. wearing his usual crisp white agbada, looking like a man who had never once sweated in his life, and asked for the client presentation for Golden Penny Foods. I told him I was still finalizing it because the file kept crashing due to the power fluctuations frying my laptop battery overnight.

Amaka, I don’t want to hear NEPA today, he said, loud enough for the whole floor to hear. I want the presentation.

I opened my mouth to explain that half of Lagos had no light and that the client meeting was not until 3 p.m. anyway, but before I could say a word, his phone rang. It was the client’s account manager confirming they wanted to move the meeting up to 11:30 a.m.

That was when the real chaos started. Oga Chidi stood over my desk while I tried to open the file on a laptop running on eleven percent battery, no light, no functioning AC, and a generator that sounded like it was reciting its final prayers. My screen froze. He slammed his palm flat on my desk so hard my stapler jumped.

Is this how you people want to kill my agency? Is this the level of seriousness we are working with? he shouted, and by now everyone had stopped typing and was watching us the way people watch a fight breaking out at a beer parlor, pretending to mind their business while missing nothing.

Oga, the light has been off since Sunday, I said, trying to keep my voice steady. Even my phone is on ten percent.

I don’t care about ten percent, I don’t care about NEPA, I don’t care about diesel. If you cannot deliver, maybe this job is not for you, he said, and then, in front of everybody, in front of Bisi from accounts who was recording a voice note to her sister and forgot to pause it, in front of Emeka from the design team who had his phone camera up pretending to take a picture of the wall clock, Oga Chidi said the four words that would define my week.

You are fired, Amaka.

Nobody moved. The generator chose that exact moment to die completely, plunging the office into that thick, humid silence that only comes with a power cut in a Lagos building with no windows that open properly. Somebody’s phone alarm went off in the quiet, playing a gospel ringtone, which felt like the universe adding its own commentary.

I did not cry. I want that on record. I picked up my bag, said okay, oga, and walked out past the security man at the gate who asked if madam wanted a cab, and I stood on Herbert Macaulay Way in the sun, in the traffic noise, in the smell of roasting corn and exhaust fumes, and I called my sister to tell her I no longer had a job.

What Oga Chidi did not know, because he had never once cared to know, was that I was the only person in that entire agency who understood the password structure for the client server, the only one who knew how the invoice reconciliation macro worked, the only one who could locate three years of Golden Penny Foods campaign assets scattered across four different Google Drive folders with names like “final final REAL version 2.”

By 1 p.m., the client was on the phone asking where their presentation was. By 2 p.m., Bisi’s voice note, the one she forgot to pause, the one with Oga Chidi screaming you are fired, Amaka clearly audible in the background, had somehow found its way from her sister’s phone to a cousin’s phone to a WhatsApp status, and by 3 p.m. it was making rounds on X with the caption “Lagos oga dey embarrass staff for open office, see as e take fire the girl for network problem.”

By 4 p.m., Oga Chidi called me. I let it ring twice before I picked up, not because I was being dramatic, but because I genuinely did not know what to say to a man who had shouted me out of a job seven hours earlier.

Amaka, ah, Amaka, my sister, he said, his voice suddenly soft in a way I had never heard from him in two years. This thing that happened, we should forget it. Come back to work tomorrow. I was under pressure, you know how these clients can be.

I asked him, calmly, whether he had seen the video going around. There was a long pause, the kind of pause that told me everything. Somewhere on the other end, somebody had shown him his own voice trending, and suddenly the man who did not care about NEPA, diesel, or ten percent battery cared very much about his agency’s reputation and a client threatening to pull their account over the optics of a “toxic work culture.”

Come back tomorrow, we will sort out your, ehn, your leave days, your allowance, everything, he said, and I could hear him practically sweating through the phone now, the tables having turned faster than the generator itself could have managed on its best day.

I told him I would think about it. I did not tell him that I already had two other agencies reaching out to me by evening, one of them offering better pay simply because their creative director had watched the video and said, and I quote him loosely, that any company treating staff like that in front of clients deserved to lose good people.

I went back two days later, not because Oga Chidi begged, though he did, several times, but because I needed the salary while I sorted out my next move properly. He has not raised his voice at me since. He greets me now with a strange, careful gentleness, the way you greet a dog you are not sure has forgiven you for kicking it.

Lagos will teach you that dignity does not always arrive with an apology, sometimes it arrives disguised as bad network and a forgotten voice recording.