After watching the movie Worst roommate ever, we had to find out what Nigerians sharing apartments or hostels have been through. From fundamentally crazy roommates to the deeply disturbed ones, seven Nigerians talk about their experiences. They make living in your parent’s house look glorious.
“He’d pee without flushing and take a shit with the door open”
— Chuka, 28
In 2015, I lived in a three-bedroom apartment with three guys and one babe. The rent was about ₦450k and we wanted one more extra person so we could split the rent by six people — we were undergraduates looking to cut back on cost as much as possible. We finally got a guy after about three months. “Lucky us,” I thought. Mind you, it was already a nightmare living with five people and sharing one bathroom. I managed to deal with it until this guy came along. He was disgusting. He’d pee without flushing and take a shit with the door open. The most baffling thing was his smoking habit.
This guy was asthmatic but he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Clearly, he had some kind of death wish. The height of it for me was when he brought a dog to the house. Let’s note that he didn’t even ask anyone. The dog would piss and shit around the house. He had a babe that sometimes came over to clean up after him, but just imagine waking up to a house smelling of dog shit. The day I confronted him about it, he just said “Bro, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve already paid for the dog.” I was so pissed. We quarrelled. The next time we spoke, I was triggered by the pots he left piled up in the kitchen for almost a week. I was like, “Guy! Why the hell are you a fucking pig?” Next, he asked me how much money I made that gave me the guts to speak to him anyhow — On top the small influencer work he was doing o! We sha had to ask him to leave. When we started repainting the room, there were bed bugs everywhere. Cockroaches in the cupboards were literally falling from the door when we sprayed it. Talking about it now literally makes my skin crawl.
“She was always storing my used tampons for only God knows what”
— Sarah, 27
I’ve washed my hands from anything concerning roommates. I’d been looking for a roommate to share a one-bedroom flat at Surulere for a month. The girls who came along were either looking for something cheaper or not pleased with the rough road leading to the house. I didn’t have a car, so that wasn’t my business. When this girl came along — let’s call her Ada — she was interested and ready to pay on the spot. She didn’t ask me a lot of questions. Nothing about the light situation or the neighbourhood in general; she was just desperate to move in. In hindsight, I should have been bothered about that. Who rents a house without asking questions?
After a month, I noticed something off about her. She’d wake up at odd hours of the night and stand by the door murmuring to herself. I always assumed she was praying because sometimes she paced around. Two months went by and it stayed the same. Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., she was up by the door, mumbling inaudible things. As the weeks went by, I also noticed an odd stench in the room. Surulere is notorious for gigantic rats, so I thought one of them had died somewhere in our apartment. I searched but didn’t find anything. There’s no kind of diffuser or spray I didn’t try — nothing worked. My roommate wasn’t even bothered. But I found out why that evening.
By 3 a.m., she was up again with the same late night behaviour. Look, I was living a Nollywood film and I wasn’t even aware of it. In the middle of her mumbling, she pulled out a tile from underneath our bed. I don’t know if she thought I was asleep, because the room was dark. That’s how she brought out a box from underneath with stored pads and tampons.
I was the only one using tampons so clearly, they were mine — she had been storing them. She had been picking them from the bin in the bathroom… that was the smell that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t make a sound while she brought them out. She squeezed one of them and rubbed part of the blood on her chest. Look, all I can say is, people dey this Lagos. Nobody told me to pack my bags in my uncle’s house. Nobody.
“This guy tried to stab me”
— Kunle, 34
My roommate — let’s pretend he’s Emeka — tried to kill me. I had made some mad money from crypto and thought it was great to celebrate at the club with my guys. Little did I know that Emeka had other plans. On our way back, I needed to take a piss. I lived at Nyanyan, on the outskirts of Abuja, at the time, so the drive was too long for me to hold it in. It was 2 a.m. and the streets were practically empty. I asked one of my guys that came along to take the wheels while I got down.
Emeka decided to follow me as well. I wasn’t surprised because he’dd also had quite a bit to drink. We went into a bush. In the middle of peeing, Emeka pulled a knife on me. At first, I thought it was a joke, but he came closer and went for my stomach. I screamed for help. The guy was too big to push off. Thank God for one of my guys that came to check in on us. He dragged Emeka off and we left him there. I never asked him why he did that. Maybe I was too drunk to think that far at the moment. All I know is, that was the last time I stayed with anyone. In fact, the last time I talked about money with people. Silent moves all the way.
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“He banged my babe”
— Simon, 31
There’s nothing worse than finding out your roommate is banging your babe. Nothing! Let’s name this guy Andrew. I can’t even call him a roommate because I covered most of the bills and rent; Andrew was a squatter. My babe typically came by on the weekends to cook for us — I still miss that woman’s banga soup. Whenever I went on trips, she’d still offer to bring food for me. Her excuse was either Andrew might be too broke to buy food or she’d say something like, “Oh babe, you know Andrew would have finished the food.” God punish Andrew wherever he is.
On one of my trips back, I went over to her house to surprise her. She wasn’t home and wasn’t picking her calls. I decided to just head back home. I felt she might have even beat me to the surprise and wanted to shock me — well, she sure did. When I got back, I didn’t have to knock. I had my own keys. I got in, threw my bags on the chair and noticed my babes shoes in the living room. “She’s here,” I thought. I knew she couldn’t have heard me if she was inside the room, so I snuck in to surprise her. When I got closer, I heard moaning and that was it. The relationship ended and I moved out. I didn’t need an explanation from any of them.
“I found my dick pic”
— Yinka, 23
I knew I had to move out when I found a picture of me naked on my roommate’s phone. I needed to send pictures from his gallery and I stumbled on the photo. It was only one, but it was still creepy. I asked him why he did it and he said it was a mistake. Things weren’t the same after that. I was too cautious around him, so I decided I had to move out.
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“She had horrible body odour”
— Christal, 24
My college roommate had terrible body odour. The weird thing was that she always took her bath. Morning, afternoon, night, she was in the bathroom. She also took things and never returned them, the most annoying being my Rubyroo lipstick.. Anyway, that wasn’t the reason I moved out. Imagine living in a tiny cubicle with barely any ventilation and having to endure body odour. I couldn’t stand it. When I tried to come back to the room and take a few things, this babe tried to beat me up, ranting about how I left her alone in the room. That was the last straw for me.
“All he did was watch porn without headphones”
— Adam, 23
I and my roommate stayed on bunk beds. If it wasn’t the sound of FIFA keeping me up at night, it was porn playing at full volume from his Ipad. Like bro, get your headphones! He had zero self-awareness and made cingeworthy sexual jokes about breasts and penises. One day, he broke the bed and that was my cue to leave. Only God knows what he’d been humping.
CONTINUE READING: 17 Things You’ll Relate to if You Grew Up in Ibadan
