Meet a young beautiful lady named Shirley. She drives a Volkswagen Bug, lives in a flat in Lekki, owns a pair of the latest blackberry phones and is an undergraduate student of high flying university. Next is Dami, she is a middle level employee of an Insurance company. She rents a luxurious flat on the island in Lagos and like Shirley is highly fashion conscious and drives a Honda S.U.V. Unlike Shirley though she has a job but obviously cant afford her luxurious lifestyle. However, both girls are your typical Lagos big girls. You can find them in clubs and major events centers around Lagos. You might even have sat next to them on a flight overseas or in some luxurious fashion mall overseas.
So what gives them that extra income that allows them afford the luxurious lifestyle that they live? It all boils down to an asset, an irresistible asset. An asset that most men lust for and will do anything to have a piece of, even if it’s for a night. These girls don’t just give their priced asset away for pleasure, it comes with a hefty price, both materially and physically.
By now you must think I’m talking about prostitution. Your close but dead wrong!.Lately it’s become rebranded, remodeled, fashionable and a lot more socially acceptable. At times some say its part of “fun”. You don’t have to stand on the street anymore to practice it and you probably don’t need a pimp or a brothel to be fished out. All you need is a phone, not just any but a blackberry, the very latest. You also need not come from a poor background or a broken home or be an orphan. Even the rich “spoilt”ones indulge in it. Look, even chics who have good jobs do it too. So the stigma is minimal if there is even any. Also, it need not be with a man, even women need sexual satisfaction. Its no more prostitution, it is DEAD, reborn and simply called RUNS
Some make an average of N20k a day by just having some “fun” doing “runs”. Multiply that by 25, you get N500k a month. To put it into better perspective, that’s about a take home pay of an average Bank Manager with a wife and a child. In some cases, suitors buy them cars and often pay their house rents. Their trips abroad are sponsored by men or women as the case maybe. Ask a lot of guys out there, 1 out of every 5 girls you meet expect some form of monetary compensation before or after consensual sex. If its not love then its got to pay the bills. It’s no more about mutual likeness, payment is an instinctive responsibility of the host.
Take a subset of 100,000 girls who you will typically refer to as “chics”. We trim that further to 20%, giving us 20,000 chics who indulge in Runs in Nigeria. If you then multiply that 20,000 figure by N10,000 and then by 25 days and finally 12 months, it gives you N60b in annual income that is made by the 20%. Or simply put N200m a day. Forget my purely arithmetic valuation as it excludes inflation and other factors that will frequently be included. Whatever measure is used won’t differ much and even if it does, might even be more alarming. And remember I excluded rents, cars and other gift items and used a grossly conservative figure in my valuation. It’s no wonder child trafficking and female prostitution is a billion dollar business in the world
So, in the unlikely event that you come across Shirley or Dami someday, don’t look down on them. See them as investors or business owners or even professionals in an evolving, dynamic and multi billion Naira industry -RUNS.
LOL!Ugo, have you read Super-Freakonomics? There's a treatise in there about a former investment banker who became a high-class prostitute, after being convinced of the economics of the trade.