Lagos is full of people working for companies in London, Toronto and Nairobi from a spare room in Yaba. It works, if you solve the same three problems everyone does: power, internet and somewhere quiet.
Power, first
The grid will go off during your calls. Plan for it:
- An inverter and batteries carry a laptop, a router and a fan for hours, silently. Add solar panels and you are much less dependent on the grid and on petrol.
- A generator is the fallback, loud and dear to run.
- A power bank for the router keeps you online through the minutes it takes to switch over.
Internet: have two
No single connection is reliable enough to stake a job on.
- Fibre to the home or office, where your street has it, is the best.
- A 4G or 5G router from a mobile network is the common main connection, and a good backup to fibre.
- Satellite internet is available in Nigeria and works where nothing else reaches, at a price.
- Your phone’s hotspot on a second network is the backup to the backup.
Use connections from different networks, so one outage does not take both.
Somewhere to work
Coworking spaces in Yaba, Ikeja, Lekki and Victoria Island sell a desk with the power and the internet already solved, by the day or the month. For many people that is cheaper than a full backup setup at home, and it ends the isolation.
Choose by your commute before anything else. A good space two hours away in traffic is a bad space.
Being paid from abroad
Decide how your pay arrives before the first invoice. Payment into a domiciliary account keeps it in foreign currency; a transfer service may pay out in naira at its own rate. Compare the rate and the fees on a real amount, not the advertised one.
Tax
You are taxed where you live. Working from Lagos for a foreign employer or client, you owe Lagos income tax on what you earn, to the LIRS, even though nobody deducts it. File a return each year, and keep records of what you were paid.