The Lagos House Agent Added ₦300,000 to My Rent, and My Landlady Had No Idea

The text arrived at 6:12 in the morning, before Seyi Balogun had found his slippers.

Good morning sir. Renewal for Flat 4 now ₦1,800,000. Agency and legal fees separate. Deadline Friday. Thank you.

He read it in the kitchen of his flat on Herbert Macaulay Way in Yaba, Lagos, with the tap running cold because the water heater needed twenty minutes he did not have. Last year the rent was ₦1,200,000. He did the sum on his phone calculator, then did it again, as though the calculator might feel sorry for him.

Six hundred thousand naira more. Add ten percent for agency and ten percent for legal, and the total came to ₦2,160,000 before anyone had said hello. His savings sat at ₦2,400,000 in Moniepoint, and every naira of it already had a name: hospital bills, a cot, the traditional wedding his mother kept asking about on Sunday calls.

Dara came into the kitchen belly first, one hand on the doorframe. She was seven months along and had stopped pretending the stairs were fine.

Who is texting you this early? she asked.

Kelechi.

Ah. What does he want now?

Six hundred thousand more. Plus his own share.

She said nothing. She took a packet of Indomie from the cupboard, looked at it, and put it back. She was not hungry. She just needed something to do with her hands.

Kelechi had been the agent for the compound for as long as Seyi had lived there. Six years. Every conversation with the landlady ran through him: the leaking pipe, the gate lock, the refuse money. He wore the same white shirt with sweat marks under the arms and drove a 2009 Toyota Camry the colour of weak tea. Every afternoon he sat at the gate with a pack of Gala and a cold Pepsi, like a man guarding a kingdom.

Seyi called him from the back of a Bolt crawling along Obafemi Awolowo Way in Ikeja.

Oga Seyi, na market o, Kelechi said, cheerful, chewing. Everywhere in Yaba is going up. Madam wanted two million. I begged her. I fought for you.

Two million?

Yes. I got her to one-eight. You should be thanking me, honestly.

Seyi thanked him. He did not know why. The words simply came out, the way they do when a man has been trained for years to be grateful to the person standing on his neck.

At work he ate rice and stew from a plastic bowl at his desk and read the same WhatsApp message from his mother four times without understanding it. A colleague, Bimpe, was complaining about her own landlord in Lekki, who had raised her rent by forty percent and then asked her to pay two years upfront. Everyone at the next desk nodded. Nobody was surprised. This was just what living in Lagos cost now, like fuel, like data, like breathing.

That evening he opened the drawer under the television and found the old tenancy agreement. At the bottom of the last page, in blue ink, was a phone number with a Houston code and a name: Mrs. Adeniran.

He told himself he was only checking. It was seven o’clock in Lagos, lunchtime in Texas.

She answered on the fourth ring, her voice slow and polite.

Kelechi’s tenant? Yes, my son. I told him one million five hundred thousand. I cannot lie to you, prices have gone up. Even my pharmacy bill has doubled. Still, I am not a wicked woman.

Seyi thanked her three times and hung up. He sat on the edge of the bed in the half dark and did the sum a third time. Three hundred thousand naira, quietly added by a man in a sweaty shirt, plus ten percent of that three hundred thousand collected twice over as his own fees. Nobody had broken in. Nobody had forced anything. A figure had simply been changed on its way from one mouth to another.

Dara was leaning in the doorway.

He is stealing from us, she said.

From her too. She is the one who thinks the flat is worth less.

So call him a thief tomorrow. Call him at the gate, in front of everybody.

She lives in Houston, Dara. He is the one she hears from every month. Who do you think she believes?

Neither of them slept well. Dara kept turning, the baby kicking against the pillow she had wedged under her side. At 3 a.m. Seyi was still awake, scrolling through a Yaba rentals page on Instagram, where a self-contained room and parlour was going for ₦1,400,000 and the comments underneath were all variations of the same crying emoji.

On Friday morning Kelechi was already at the gate when Seyi came down. White shirt, Gala, Pepsi sweating in the heat. He did not look nervous. He looked like a man who had been waiting for a customer.

You called madam, he said.

I did.

Okay. He nodded slowly and broke the Gala in half. Good. That is your right.

She said one-five.

She said one-five in September. This is November. Madam is seventy-eight, Oga Seyi. She does not remember what she said last week. He chewed. She remembers what the last person told her. I am the last person who tells her everything. The pipe that burst in Flat 2, who called the plumber? The tenant who was late for three months in 2022, who covered it?

Seyi said nothing.

I can also tell her you have been subletting, Kelechi said, gently, almost kindly.

I have not subletted anything.

Nobody has to prove it. A notice to quit takes three months. Your wife is how many months now? Seven? He tilted his head. You want to be carrying boxes in January with a newborn? Where will you find a flat this price in Yaba? Show me.

A woman went past with a bucket of water on her head. A keke hooted outside the gate. The whole street went on with its morning.

Pay one-eight, Kelechi said. Agency and legal on the one-eight, as we agreed. Then I will send you a small something back, for your trouble. Everybody chops. This is Lagos.

Seyi stood there for what felt like a long time and was probably forty seconds. He thought of the word no and how short it was. He thought of Dara upstairs with her feet on a stool. He thought of his mother asking about the wedding.

He opened Moniepoint and sent ₦2,160,000. Kelechi held up his own phone to watch the alert arrive, then nodded, satisfied, the way a man nods at a waiter who has brought the right drink.

Four minutes later, while Seyi was still standing on the stairs, a second alert came in. ₦100,000. The narration read for your trouble.

He did not send it back.

Dara did not speak to him until lunchtime. Then she put down her spoon and said, You took his money.

It is our money. It was always our money.

It is his guilt, she said. You are carrying his guilt in your account.

He did not have an answer. He went to the bathroom and ran the hot water, which for once was hot.

Two weeks later a new tenant moved into Flat 2. His name was Chukwuemeka, a quiet young man who repaired phones on Commercial Avenue and carried his toolbox up the stairs himself. Seyi met him on the landing on a Sunday evening, both of them holding black nylon bags of suya from the same woman at the junction.

Brother, Chukwuemeka said, lowering his voice. Please, I want to ask you something. Your agent, Kelechi. He is asking me for two million, five hundred for the flat, with fees. A friend of mine says it should be one-four, maybe one-five. Is that how it is in this compound? Is this normal?

The suya smelled of pepper and groundnut. Somewhere above them a baby was crying, not his, and a television was playing a church service too loud.

Seyi looked at the young man’s tired face, at the toolbox, at the bag that was already getting greasy in his hand. He thought of ₦100,000 sitting in his account like a stone he had swallowed.

That is how it is here, he said.

Chukwuemeka nodded slowly and thanked him, and Seyi went upstairs to his wife, who asked what took so long.

Everybody hates the agent, until the agent is the only one who still has your key.