MADE IN LAGOS

MADE IN LAGOS

1234. That was what my clock read. Thirty-four minutes past midnight.

Perfect math, I thought.

I got up to take a walk. I plugged my ears with my earphones and turned on Apple Music 1.

I stepped out into the darkness of the night.

The Apple Music Radio deejay started playing some tunes.

It was streaming all over the world from London.

It was a quiet night as usual and I lost myself in the amazing sounds of the young ones, speaking to me about their world, their lives, narrating their stories.

Some thirty minutes later, the deejay announced, “Made In Lagos,” by Whizz Kid.

And my eyes got wet.

God bless these babies, I said to myself, for without them, the only thing left in Nigeria is Bororo bloodshed and the carnage of the politicians and their friends raping Nigeria like she wasn’t their mother.

The first time I traveled out of Nigeria, in 1983, I went without a visa to Britain. I did not need to go to the British embassy to get a visa.

As a. Nigerian, I was a privileged world citizen. I could go anywhere in the world I wanted, and I would be welcomed like the oil sheiks we all were.

When I went to a textiles shop in London, the storekeepers abandoned all the other customers to attend to me. They knew from my swagger and accent that, “Here comes the Nigerian oil sheik.”

They bowed and looked wowed, and I maintained my cool, looking chill.

Now see what the APC and PDP have turned Nigerian into: A country of blood, where people gaze with hostility at you and shut the door against you, once they know you are a Nigerian.

If you haven’t listened to “Made in Lagos,” please do.

I was born in Mushin. I was made in Lagos too.

But the Nigeria in which I was born was murdered by these politicians and their bodyguards armed with uniforms of intimidation and oppression, paid to destroy the young.

Many of the Bororo killers that the northern politicians brought into Nigeria to intimidate southerners are not even Nigerians.

They were not made in Lagos, Benin, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Kano or Maiduguri.

They were made in hell.

And they have destroyed the Lagos in which you and I were made.

Bob Marley said, “We going to chase those crazy baldheads out of the town.”

It is a task that is worth the try.

I want to wear goods labeled “Made in Lagos.”

Bororo ti ba Eko je o.