Sack Your Landlord

No. 4 Banana Street By Gideon Chukwuemeka Ogbonna The thing about the house on No. 4 Banana Street is that it was probably built using tips from Zikoko Blog’s Guide, How to be a Nigerian Landlord. The rooms in the building, which are just a little bigger than a prison cell in KiriKiri, have brown streaks of water mark on ...

“Ene! Sheriff is throwing our things out. He came this morning to ask for the balance of last year’s rent but daddy did not have any money on him…please do something.” I was on my way to the gym that Friday morning when the distressed voice of my youngest brother told me of the embarrassing situation my family was going ...

Oh how I missed the good times! The good times when our compound was the most envied house on the whole street. The times when the serene environment of my compound rivaled that of a churchyard. All of that changed at the arrival of Shadow and Ghost. My landlord suddenly appeared with them with the flimsy excuse that his son ...

Vile Little Town The house seem spacious from an unusual scantiness. The air unshackled but tainted by sin feckly akin to Sodom and Gomorrah of the bygone era. The heavy stench of its usual infidelity rents the air— genitals unsheathed behind doors mostly shut airtight, salted by low humming music, cannabis and booze. We are close friends with my landlord’s ...

Houses in my opinion have souls. Souls gained not just by sheer longevity of years, but by having people live in them, they see myriad shades of life and characters, in the process accumulating a certain kind of encrypted philosophy, only lending credence to the saying that walls have ears. That was the tale of the house I grew in, ...

That night, inconsequential it had seemed, turned out to be the start of a cascade of unusual events that seamlessly dislodged the previously held ideology of life in Lagos and shoved in a new scary perspective. * On the 15th of May, a night that promised rain, I trudged past blaring Fuji music from various stores and the peculiar stench ...

When it comes to finding the right apartment to reside in on lease or permanent basis, many of us misplace our priorities. And due to the excitement of finally getting a place after months of rigorous search especially in a densely populated place like Lagos, we fail to ask the right questions, now that’s just a part of it. There ...

THE ‘SACK YOUR LANDLORD CONTEST’ comes alive this month. It’s a competition that creates the platform for writers and aspiring writers to share their worst and best Landlord/Tenant Experience. We all have different tales about our various rental apartments and how much our relationship with our various landlords does affect our lives; I am talking about those that are still ...

MY LANDLORD’S HEARTLESS RULE by Mbiataabasi Godwin Cold sweat trickled down my entire body as I fought tirelessly hoping sleep would come but it was obvious sleep had betrayed my eyes. I laid there wishing the lights would come so the chill of the fan could lure my eyes to sleep but I knew that was far-fetched. It was the ...

TIME AND CHANCE by Samuel Emmanuel I have always told my landlord that the race is not for the strong or swift but time and chance happens to all men. If it were for the strong we would have exchanged places. If it were for the swift, that rotund barrel of a landlord would have lived in the sewers. I told him this before ...