All souls come down to Earth

By Timothy Rotimi ONAYEMI

“You’ve come this far just to see Lagos? I don’t know where to start, of course, Lagos is here to be seen but hard to be felt without money or connections. As we say here, we never say ‘Welcome to Lagos’: we say ‘This is Lagos’ the only city in the World  going that way”.

The strange man quickly sped of on his bike before he could open his mouth. “Where am I?”

“You see”, in Fela Kuti’s voice: combined with my uncle Lekan Otusanya’s voice since they were born in the same year he also has a cliché: You don’t know anything.

It all makes me wonder how I’m gonna give Lagos to you in a book as the epitome of a Black Cosmopolitan City in history but less deserving of the honor since the Black Race scorn at the absolutely obviously filthy indignity the city has inflicted on herself and on our posterity for a long time to come since Nigerians are veesed in project completion but no maintenance culture. We need Cancel Culture here but it can be more dangerous than you think since our religion and society of cultures sometimes thrive more on superstition than facts lost before the Colonial Era, otherwise Lost in Translation Historical events which will be reconstructed here.

We thrive on a mix. We seem to always use the crazy part of the mix. We get carried away with the new instalment in our economy, oil, gas, phones, medicines and information engineering where our people who have never been to school are now working as full-time engineers and analytics (sic) but we are not any better for it because we have neither mastered our comparative advantages nor the means of mass production of sensible and tangible Impex.

We found the Man we are looking for carrying all the signs of a World that would have more problems of cohesion among the poor than the rich whereby a universal education scheme would cure all anti-social policies