My Nigerian Wedding planning advice is based on my experiences from planning my wedding that took place June 12, 2021. Until you plan a wedding you can’t really give practical advice on wedding planning. Some years ago I wrote an article on Nigerian wedding planning so you would think planning a wedding would be easy for me but no. I can tell you now that nothing beats personal experience when it comes to knowing how best to do things for everything to run smoothly.
My wedding was a beautiful one. 🥰 My husband and I put in a lot of time into thinking about and planning for every aspect of the wedding. But if I could do it all over again I definitely will do a few things differently. Since I can’t, I’m hoping this article will help you avoid the mistakes I made and as well give you tips on how to successfully plan your dream Nigerian wedding.
Planning my Nigerian Wedding
My Nigerian wedding planning for me was exciting but very stressful, as I am sure it usually is for every bride.
On one hand you are happy that you’ve finally found the One for you and he’s soon to become your husband. This was especially true for me because it was a long wait. A wait I had already gotten tired of and given up on, now all of a sudden it was happening! 💃 Outwardly I was calm. But inwardly I couldn’t wait to start my Life with the man of my dreams. The date couldn’t come quickly enough. I remember I was so anxious, wanting the day to come already that I downloaded a countdown app on both of my phones which I checked almost everyday as if checking frequently will quicken time. I courted my husband for 8 months (we had been best friends for 7 years) and those 8 months felt like forever! 🤦
On the other hand, just thinking of all that needs to be done overwhelms you. Where do you start from? This was even worse for me because I had zero experience with wedding planning. As at then I don’t think I have attended more than 5 weddings in my whole life. Before me, I have had two of my sisters get married, but I wasn’t involved at all in the planning except ran errands and be present on the day of the wedding. In fact my family as a whole don’t have much experience with wedding planning as some Nigerian families do from participating in and attending a lot of weddings. So I had no one to turn to. Even my best friend didn’t have any experience, her own wedding was centuries ago. My parents are aged already and my mom couldn’t help anyone in her state of health. So I was completely alone in planning my wedding. Although my husband then fiance was eager to help and did help a lot, but what he could do was limited.
My First Wedding Planning Challenge – Creating a Budget
Every article you read on wedding planning will tell you that one of the first important things you must do when planning a wedding is to create a budget. You have to decide on how much you can afford to spend for the whole wedding before you start to spend money so you don’t run out of money during planning or you don’t spend more than you want to spend.
Creating a budget was a struggle for me and honestly I planned my wedding without having one. To create a budget ahead of planning your wedding, you have to know how much things cost in the market. I couldn’t just blindly allocate cost to wedding gown, our traditional wedding attires, food etc, without knowing what options were there and what those options cost. So that’s where my challenge came from. So when I spoke with a caterer for example and they ask what my budget was for food I couldn’t give a figure. I needed to speak to a number of caterers to know what the rate was from high to low based on the menu I wanted and then decide how much we were willing to spend on that. So that idea of just writing things down and then allocating price to them based on the money you have without any prior information, doesn’t work well.
But know that I could only do without a budget because we are to some extent established. I mean we had more than enough to spend based on the kind of wedding we hoped to have. We weren’t interested in having a flaboyant wedding. We just wanted a beautiful wedding that was affordable. I always said to my vendors, I wanted the best but it has to be affordable. Nothing extreme. So this way even though we didn’t create a budget, we did our best to keep cost as low as it could be for the kind of service we wanted. The secret to getting the best price is to speak with multiple vendors for the same service and compare prices. Then go for the one offering the lowest price for a ‘quality’ service.
To create a practical budget when you don’t have an open budget like we did, before drawing up your list and allocating price to each item on the list, speak to different vendors, get an idea of cost for the various items and then draw up your budget, this is before hiring vendors.
Wedding Planning Mistakes to Avoid
Think twice before hiring a Wedding planner
I hired a wedding planner for my wedding when I felt clueless about where to start and I wanted to take the stress off me. Well, guess what? I still ended up planning my wedding myself even after hiring a planner 🤦. In her defense it wasn’t her fault. We always wanted to negotiate things ourselves. So instead of us to leave the negotiations and bookings to the planner, we felt more comfortable doing it ourselves because the prices she was always coming to us with for different items we always considered too expensive. So if you think you can’t let go of control to someone else, and can’t trust the prices they give you, then don’t bother with a planner. Although ours eventually was helpful because we hired her both as a planner and a Day of Coordinator. And she helped a lot on the day of the wedding with coordinatiing, which made up for that expense. So you may not need a planner but you definitely need a day of coordinator if you don’t have close friends and siblings who can take charge of organization and following up with vendors on the day of the wedding.
Pick any day for your wedding date except June 12 (Democracy day)
June 12 in Nigeria is a public holiday tagged Democracy day. After my husband decided June was the month for our wedding, I picked that 12th because it fell into my fertile period, and my husband went along with it. You know, I was hoping to hurry things up with conception due to getting married late. I wanted the first few intimate acts after the wedding to lead to a baby. So I opened up my Cycle tracking app and did the math. God I wish I didn’t! 🤦
Usually democracy day in Nigeria is peaceful. No protest and no riot. And being a work free day, less traffic; which would have worked to our advantage as guests wouldn’t have to spend hours on the road coming to the venue. But what we didn’t see coming was that because of the EndSars protest where allegedly some people were shot and killed, some Nigerians were going to take advantage of the day to do another protest. People tried to warn us but we didn’t think it would be a problem. When we realized it was going to be a problem it was too late to move the date. All vendors were booked. It was scary, the speculations and the panic created was like nothing I had seen before. People were afraid of what the day would bring. Twice my husband suggested we moved the date a day to the wedding. But we would have had too many vendors to call and I’m sure not all would have been able to reschedule. So we decided to book hotels close to the wedding venue for people who had part in the wedding to come lodge June 11. And close friends and family members came over a day to too to stay with us as we both lived closed to the wedding venue. We decided that if the protest happens June 12 as it was being speculated and other guests couldn’t attend the wedding, the people we had on ground were enough to have the wedding, after all what I wanted initially was an intimate wedding, so we didn’t reschedule.
The day came and everything went on smoothly even though it did cause some delay here and there. The government did its best to put security personnel in different places in Lagos to scare people from starting a riot which was the real fear. Very few areas of the country reported rioting. Although many chose to play safe by remaining indoor, we still had decent attendance. I believe we had up to a 100 people present that celebrated our wedding with us (we had planned for 200).
If I could do it all over again I would never pick June 12. It almost ruined the day for me. It caused too much stress on us. And caused us to spend more money for hotel bookings, if we didn’t have an open budget that would have been a big problem for us. And all that could have been avoided if we had just picked the week before or the week after that week.
Think twice before hiring a Caterer especially one that’s your friend
After picking the wrong date, the next big mistake I made in my wedding planning was the people I chose to do the catering and serving of food. It was a big error.
One of my priorities when I was planning my wedding was to make enough food available. If you know anything about Nigerian weddings you will know that food going round everyone is what makes your wedding special in most peoples minds. Moreover why have guests you can’t feed?
I didn’t only want food to go round, I also wanted to give my guests food options at my wedding. We spent above what we ever expected to spend on food. But still, it was a mess. 😔
A friend had convinced me to hire her team for the job. My groom didn’t like the idea at all. But I thought that being my friend she would look out for my best interest. We had had a meeting where we discussed the food items and serving plan. I thought from everything they said they knew how to do things right. But the report I got after the wedding was terrible. They claimed they killed a Cow for the meat served at the wedding, yet food didn’t go round, and some of those they served only got small piece of meat in their foods. We had planned food for two hundred people and ended up with just like a hundred guests, still food didn’t go round. My eldest sister who represented my mom and cousin didn’t eat on my wedding day! 😔 They had zero coordination serving the food. And because no one from me or my groom supervised them where they made the food we couldn’t even confirm that they really bought a cow and if they did, what they did with it. We couldn’t also confirm that they even brought all the food options we planned and paid for, and in the numbers we discussed.
I was so sad about the general poor service. So much regret. This mistake is a big eye opener for me. If you must hire a caterer on no ground leave them unsupervised. Any vendor who has a problem with supervision should be crossed off the list! Preferably let them cook the food at a location of your chosen. But if your location isn’t convenient and they want to use their location, insist on someone from your side and your husband’s side supervise them. So you can get the worth of what you paid for. I felt my trust was abused and I was played. And my relationship with that friend is damaged as a result. Now I want nothing to do with her. The annoying part is that they claimed they went above and beyond for me. Really? 🙄 You did and N550,000 (Naira) could not successfully feed a 100 guests? 😡 It’s upsetting talking about it. And evidently stealing meat meant for guests is a common practice among Nigerian caterers. Coincidentally today (as at writing this) I saw a story on Instablog of caterers who stole meat meant for a party and they were caught. It’s a shame. 🤦
If you’re planning a wedding, you must be worried now about your own wedding after reading some of my mistakes, so here’s what I am going to tell you about that, not everything will go as planned on your wedding day and that’s okay. Continue reading from Part 2, My Nigerian Wedding Planning Advice, Everything won’t go as Planned.