The Real Hotboy of Lagos is not to be confused with The Real Housewives of Lagos

The Real Hotboy has no camera crew following him about as they show off his affluent lifestyle

The Real Hotboy flees from it, wise enough to know that all he has built in secret could come crashing down one day if the least amount of scrutiny is involved. He has tasted poverty and his tastebud no longer wants part with it.

Dele wasn’t your regular, around-the-way Lagos boy. He was more, and he knew it. Despite his tough upbringing, he always believed that a life of affluence was in his future. For Dele, that life was simple: a nice house in Ikeja GRA, four cars parked in his compound, and a live-in cook. That was all he knew from visiting his aunty, and that was exactly what he wanted.

His mother often said Oladele means “wealth has gotten home,” as if to cement the fact that he was destined for greatness. So he carried this reassurance with him, right from his adolescent days in Fadeyi through the rough four years of study at Yabatech. Still, Dele lived life as if it owed him something. He did gritty work with the smug confidence of someone who knew it was all temporary.

Dele also resented his dad, who drove a danfo. He resented his mother even more for getting with his dad in the first place.

“There were men with long cars and fine houses seeking my hand in marriage then, but I followed your father because I loved him.”

His mother would recount their love story, her eyes all misty, confusing Dele as to whether it was from love or from the smoke rising from the rickety stove she cooked with. In moments like that, he often felt a deep, simmering anger towards her for making a choice that seemed to have doomed him and his siblings to a life of lack.

And it was different for him. The girl of his dreams, Salewa, had laughed in his face after he wrote her a letter on Valentine’s Day confessing his feelings. He had presented the letter during lunch break, his greatest undoing.

“Is it letter I will eat? Your mates are taking girls to Mr. Biggs to toast them, and you are writing me a stupid letter? Omo Baba oni danfo.”

She and her friends had hissed at him as they walked away, their short school skirts exaggerating their catwalks. The following day in school, news filtered across about how Salewa had been gifted a Blackberry Bold 5 by Kalejaiye, popularly called Calypso by his friends. Calypso had always had enough money to spare. From time to time, he called out to Dele during lunch breaks when Dele loitered around, doing all he could to distract from the pangs of hunger threatening to tear his stomach apart. Like a benevolent deity, Calypso would call out to Dele and invite him to join him and his friends at Mama Kasu’s place for lunch. Then he would make her serve extra in a nylon bag for Dele to go with. Why Calypso was that generous to him, Dele never knew, but he always made sure to express his gratitude. Dele stopped accepting the invitations the week he saw Salewa saying sweet nothings into Calypso’s ears while Calypso looked on with a lazy smile.

Intense poverty made Dele an involuntary recluse. Whenever he visited his cousins in Ikeja for the holidays, he holed himself up in the room, reading or brooding, avoiding anything that would lead to interaction with his cousins and their bratty friends. The visits often ended with him leaving with Junior’s hand-me-downs, an experience that left a bitter taste in his mouth. He was two years older than Junior and taller too, but what choice did he have? Either wear the tops that stopped above his waist and shorts that barely fit over his gangly legs, or go without.

At thirteen, Junior had once bluntly asked why Dele’s clothes had holes in them. His mum shushed him quickly, but the damage was already done. As if in compensation, his aunty drove them to Allen Avenue and made Dele pick seven choice tops and trousers, a decision that made his mother lament painfully, wondering why they didn’t just give her the money instead.

When he got older and could make his own choices, he stopped going for the holidays. Only his younger twin siblings went. He stayed safe and far away from the stories they brought back about Abuja when they visited their dad, or their summer adventures in Disneyland. He was tired of asking questions and being mocked for it.

“You mean you don’t know what chopsticks are?” his cousin Mama would ask, wide-eyed and incredulous, as if everyone in the world was born knowing what chopsticks were and Dele and his sister were the big fools who had been living under a rock. She had stomped into the kitchen, her fat thighs jiggling like jelly under her knickers, and returned brandishing the chopsticks in her chubby fists.

“These are chopsticks! And you use it to eat,” she said, almost poking Taiye in the eye as she showed it to her. “Do you guys even know what sushi is? Never mind. You wouldn’t know.” She rolled her eyes as she spoke, and the indomie Dele was eating became a clammy lump in his throat.

It all came to a head the day Mama screamed at Kehinde for wearing one of her tops. It was at Junior’s fifteenth birthday party, one his mother had forced him to attend by blackmailing him with neighbourhood gossip about wanting to stay away so he could hang out with the bad boys in Fadeyi. He wore a Chelsea jersey and the only pair of pants he owned that wasn’t patched in multiple places. Mama demanded Kehinde take the top off, while Kehinde, strong-willed for a ten-year-old, vehemently refused, proclaiming the top as hers. His aunty shrugged, saying those were old clothes Mama had outgrown. Mama wouldn’t let it go. She was puffy and loud, clinging to Kehinde with all her weight.

“But I never said I was done. I want my cloth back. That was for my Hannah Montana skirt. Whyyyyy?”

Mama wailed, almost stopping the party with her tantrum.

In the end, Kehinde was stripped of the top. His aunty handed her one of her own tees to wear. She smiled apologetically at Dele’s mother and mumbled, “You know how these kids are.”

His mother returned the smile, a soft, pliant thing, and it made Dele clench his fists in bottled rage. He walked out that day, vowing never to return.

So he hustled harder than before. He did all sorts of jobs to add to the meagre family income—fast food joints, nightclub waiting, bricklaying, even working in a quarry. When his parents couldn’t come up with his school and project fees in his final year at Yabatech, Dele began to sell weed to get by. It was easy. Josh, his plug, had grown up with him. He risked police arrest and NDLEA detention. He had to hustle dirty and fend for himself, since nothing was getting sent from home. His parents didn’t even offer anymore. The little money they could scrape together went straight to paying for his sisters’ school needs. His parents trusted him to find his own way.

As if fortune was playing a dirty, mocking game, his father’s bus got impounded by LASTMA when the twins were about to pay for their WAEC exams, further straining Dele financially and placing the burden of provision on him. Then the landlord became more overbearing, threatening to get the area boys to throw them and their panti, junks and clutter of rubbish, out of the house.

“Sadiku.”

His father pleaded with the landlord, who looked at him with deep revulsion.

“Kilode? Do you want to make me unfortunate too? You know how much a room self is? Inside this Lagos? Ask around! You’re paying only 150k per year and you still refused to pay me since last year. Shey mi o try ni?”

The landlord gestured wildly toward their neighbours, his big eyes bulging. The neighbours hmmmed and shuffled their feet. They all knew a hapless fate had befallen Dele’s dad after his LASTMA issue, but who would speak up before they too were threatened?

“Hello o.”

The landlord clapped in Dele’s father’s face.

“You have one month to gather all my money, including this year’s rent, or else I will get Rosko and his boys to handle you people.”

Dele quietly watched as his mother gingerly went back inside, helplessly spreading her hands, explaining how she couldn’t ask her sister for another loan. His dad sat on the torn settee, a broken figure, at a loss for what else to do for a family that now looked at him for all the answers. He could hear his sisters crying silently behind the curtains.

That evening, Dele left the house for Calypso’s with the last 2k he had on him. To grind was what Calypso called it as he ushered Dele into his boys’ quarters where teenage boys and boys his age sat, each with feverish excitement, wondering when they would start driving luxury cars like Calypso and bedding women who seemed way out of their league. Dele was lucky to hit a lick of 1000 dollars iTunes gift card five times in the space of a week.

“You dey baff soap?” Calypso questioned, looking at him with suspicion.

Dele smiled politely, nodding his head no. The boys held on to Dele, asking him to flex them for the weekend. Calypso asked Dele to walk with him to the main house where he asked him, “So, what really made you change your mind?”

Dele heaved deeply, musing over the times Calypso had stopped him along Ereko Street in his GLE Coupe, telling him to come to his house and watch his fortune change. Dele had turned down the offer due to the stories he had heard about Calypso sojourn in Dubai before settling in Lagos and masquerading as a night club owner. He looked up at the tinkling chandelier in Calypso’s gigantic living room before saying.

“I guess we all have our breaking point.” Calypso smiled and rested the conversation there.

When Dele returned three weeks later to Fadeyi, it was to tell his parents and sisters to get into a waiting Uber. They packed nothing from their house. That was the last the people in their neighbourhood saw of them.

Months have gone by, and what is heard of Dele is that he has a large house in Lekki, among several others. They say the twins are now in Canada, or the US, or was it the UK? Nobody knows the full details, but everyone knows Dele’s fortune has changed for the better. They say his parents live in a choice estate in Yaba because they refused to live anywhere except the mainland. Someone said they saw Dele’s mum in Sabo market buying chicken with two housemaids following after her.

“She even has a driver,” they added.

They also said Dele and some group of men sold an airport for 500 trillion dollars, and the money each of them got from the deal was so much that they can never finish it in this lifetime, even if they spend millions every day. They say Dele has a harem of women at his beck and call, different shapes and sizes.

Those who are on Dele’s social media say he is always buying Rolexes and designer wears with complex names, but he never posts his face.

“So how do they know it is his Instagram if the account is private and faceless?” someone asked.

“Because we remember when he opened it and was using it to sell footwears.”

Like a scene from a Yoruba movie, they said Dele’s cousin, Junior, went to his house in Lekki to plead with him to help with Proof of Funds for his japa movement. Nobody knows whether Dele obliged or not, but they hoped he did for the sake of God.