The city of Lagos is a concrete jungle of roughly 20 million people.
It's a gritty, hard, and sweaty metropolis brimming with ambition, dreams, hopes and sex. There is a lot of sex in Lagos city. Yeah, a lot of people in the 'Gidi are doing 'it' from the slums of Ajegunle to the posh villas at Banana Island.
Lagos is the city of hustles and sex is one of them. Sex has been packaged as a commodity and sold to the horny, sex starved and freaky.
Sex is sold by pimps/entrepreneurs or by women hit hard by life. Sex is also sold by starry-eyed women who understand that sex is a ladder to financial security especially in this tough city.
Allen & Opebi
Allen Avenue roundabout at night (Linda Ikeji )
Allen Avenue and Opebi are two popular linked roads in the heart of Ikeja, the capital of Lagos. These streets are known for affluence and commerce with abokis dealing in foreign exchange, surrounded by houses owned by established, rich families.
When the sun goes down, the darker side of these two streets crawls out. A drive through Allen and Opebi at night is a tour of some of the popular strip clubs on the mainland. There are least six strip clubs on Allen Avenue and Opebi together.
One of the strip club signs on Opebi, Lagos (flairng)
Tucked in between banks and boutiques are neon lights inviting you to cabarets. Kiss Danielcould have as well been singing about these two streets on his hit single 'Sin City'.
In other parts of the world, the concept of the strip club is paying to have lap dances and watch women dance naked. In Lagos, it's a slightly different deal, a sex hustle as usual.
At Unique Gentlemen, a strip club on Ogundana street, off Allen Avenue, the price for entrance is N1,000 on weekdays. On Friday and Saturday, it's N2,000. The gate fee goes back to N,1000 on Sunday.
The former Unique Gentlemen club in on Ogundana street, off Allen Avenue. The new strip club is a few buildings away from the old strip club. (VConnect )
A lap dance in the Unique Gentlemen is N1,000 but this cabaret just like many in Lagos is not meant for just lapdances. To gain access into the V.I.P of any strip club you have to pay. The fee ranges from club to club but when you enter anything and everything goes down. You can take a stripper in there and have sex. Oh yes, you have to pay her too.
The strip club business is big money. "In this place, a girl makes up to N150,000 in a day that is about N600,000 in a week and when she goes out to tell her friends that this is the kind of money she makes, her friend will want to come too and that is why they keep coming from different parts of the world. We have girls from Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana just name it" Shina Edo, owner of The Cave, a popular strip club in Ikeja G.R.A in an interview with iCampusNG in 2014.
Shina Edo, owner of The Cave Strip Club in Ikeja, G.R.A (nollywoodgists)
With a seven day, a week open policy and customers looking for more than lap dances, strip clubs are raking in big money.
The oldest profession in the world
Prostitution, as they say, is the oldest hustle in the world and in Lagos it has been going on for centuries.
For some guys, strip clubs might be too pricey and shiny. They prefer the dark hallways of brothels which are more friendly to the pocket of an average working man.
Prostitution is illegal in Nigeria, but many brothel owners and men of the police force have found a way around this. This understanding has helped many brothels flourish without disturbance. Guys looking for a quick fix can drop 5k or less. If you are looking for something longer, the fee depends on your negotiating skills.
And this hustle is round the clock. Apart from brothels, there are also red light districts littered across the city, from Peckers in Opebi to Simpson Street on Lagos Island. For the ladies on the road, N2,000 for short time is pretty much the average. If a prostitute has five customers in one night that's N10,000.
Sex is in big demand and prostitutes in brothels meet up most of this demand. Sex is a mass market commodity and the ladies of the night in brothels and on the streets are the suppliers. The Nigerian Police Force gets its own cut from the sex profit, well, because it is the Nigerian Police. They too must get in on the action. Most of these prostitutes are the breadwinners of their family, sending back money to their folks who don't live in Lagos. Sex is not only a big business, it is what puts food on the table.
Lagos is divided into two, those who have and those who do not have. The Mainland/Island dichotomy is the best example of this divide. The boys who have a bit of cash on the weekend drink on Alomo, Gulder or Star. The big boys on the Island pop champagne in the Quilox though. The hustling mainland guy and the Lekki big boy have one thing in common- sex.
Where they get sex and how they get sex shows the gulf in class.
If you are a big boy in Lagos, you are most likely not going to a brothel or a strip club to get laid. Yes, after partying hard in Quilox or any other club on the Island, there are a lot of call girls waiting for a rich dude to pick them up. Sometimes they get lucky and some days they don't. This is because a true Island big boy has a few runs girls on speed dial.
Run The World
Your typical runs girl in Lagos has an iPhone 6, bouncy Peruvian hair, moves around in an Uber and lives in Lekki with four or five of her runs girls friends. The runs girl is at the top of sex business in Lagos. She doesn't stand on the roadside or shake her ass on a stage. She is a professional sex worker that makes house calls.
The profile of a runs girl on Tinder (Tinder )
You can find these high priced runs girls in nightclubs or events and parties, where the rich and famous go to. They look like video vixens with exquisite bosoms and perfectly shaped bosoms. Their lips are glittering and moist. And their eyes are always in search for the next human ATM machine.
Back in the day, most runs girls lived on the campuses of Nigerian universities. At night time, all sorts of cars from the Japanese twins (Honda and Toyota) to the flashy German boys (BMW and Mercedes Benz) would converge at the female hostels.
In the 90s and 00s, campus prostitution was such a thriving business that pimps had photo albums of chicks that men could pick from. As Internet penetration became higher in Nigeria, the sex hustle became digital.
Sex with these Tinder babes goes for nothing less than N20,000. And the babes are willing to do everything except anal sex, well that's until you offer them money too good to refuse. To assist the Tinder hustle, these runs advertise their goods on Instagram and SnapChat also.
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