The library › Readiness
Not a prediction. A parent falls ill, a contract ends, something happens locally. The difference between inconvenience and catastrophe is what you set up while things were calm.
This is not a chapter about danger. It is a chapter about ordinary life, which occasionally requires you to be somewhere else within forty-eight hours.
A parent abroad is suddenly ill. A contract ends early and the income with it. A child needs treatment that is easier to get elsewhere. Something happens locally and staying for a few weeks stops being sensible. None of these are predictions about Nigeria. They are the ordinary reasons anyone, anywhere, needs to move quickly.
The people for whom this becomes a catastrophe are almost never the unlucky ones. They are the ones who had everything in one place.
Could you be on a plane in seventy-two hours without losing access to your money, your documents, or your children's education?
Work through it properly, because most people fail it on a detail rather than a principle.
Every passport in the household valid for at least a year at all times, not six months. Renew early, treat the renewal date as a standing appointment, and note that renewing a foreign passport from Nigeria takes longer than you think.
Residence permits, visas and re-entry paperwork current. Know exactly what you need to get back in after you leave, because the thing that traps people is not departure, it is the assumption that return is automatic.
Scanned copies of everything, encrypted, stored somewhere you can reach from a borrowed phone. Passports, birth and marriage certificates, immunisation records, property documents, insurance policies, the lease. Do not rely on a laptop you might not be carrying.
This is the one that decides the outcome.
Keep meaningful funds accessible from outside Nigeria. Not all of it, but enough for flights, a month of accommodation abroad, and a medical bill. A person whose entire liquid position sits in one local account, during a week when transfers are slow, has a problem no amount of planning solves afterwards.
Keep at least one working card issued abroad, and use it occasionally so it does not get frozen for dormancy at the worst moment. Know your transfer limits and your realistic timings before you need them, not during.
Cash matters more than people from card economies expect. Some amount, in a currency that travels, somewhere sensible at home.
Medical evacuation cover, read properly rather than assumed. Most people find out what their policy actually covers at the moment they need it, which is the worst possible time to discover an exclusion or a pre-authorisation requirement. Know the number to call, and make sure your partner knows it too.
A current list of medications, dosages and conditions for everyone in the household, in that same encrypted folder.
School records, transcripts and assessment reports collected each term rather than requested in a crisis. A school that is helpful under normal conditions may be slow when its administrator is unavailable and you are trying to enrol somewhere else on Monday.
If they hold citizenship elsewhere, keep it live. Passports current, registrations complete.
Read your lease for the break clause before you sign it, not when you need it. Understand what you forfeit if you leave with nine months paid in advance, because on Nigerian terms that is common and expensive.
Somebody local you trust who can access the property, secure it, pay a caretaker and speak for you. Preferably with something in writing. A house left sealed and unattended for three months is a different house when you return.
Your partner should know all of this independently of you. Where the documents are, how to reach the money, which number to call, who has the keys.
Emergencies have a habit of separating people. A plan only one person can execute is half a plan.
Put it in the calendar next to something you already do. Passports expire, cards get replaced, policies renew, the trusted friend moves to Abuja.
Everybody we know who has done this well says a version of the same thing. Having a way out is what let them commit properly to staying.
Without it, some part of you never fully unpacks. You hedge. You keep the flat abroad you do not need, you decline the longer lease, you stay slightly braced. With a Plan B written down and funded, you can put both feet on the ground, which is the only way any of this works.
Plan B is not pessimism. It is the thing that makes confidence reasonable.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your exit position, tell us your situation. It is part of what we set up in the first ninety days.