Is Afrobeats failing?
The real question now is something much bigger.
What happens when Nigeria finally decides to build the system that this industry deserves?
Religion is belief. Ancestry is lineage. Conflating the two is political conditioning. Faith alone is not an objective basis for territorial claims. Land rights are determined through history, continuous presence, and legal frameworks. Using shared belief as justification for modern territorial takeover is a political argument about power, not heritage.
@OsaGz I think itโs gotten worse. It peaked around the late 90s and was largely limited to college campuses. Now itโs everywhere. Many of todayโs public feuds are really just proxy wars between cultist factions.
Itโs not as much the begging culture as it is the entitlement to other peopleโs money. Reflects itself in the DMs too. So itโs not just one for what happens on the streets. Itโs deeper than the streets, the streets are just one outcome of many.
As someone who lived in Lagos before exiting, I believe that to genuinely enjoy Lagos, you must fall into one of four categories:
(1) Youโre an occasional IJGB visitor, returning intermittently and selectively, buoyed mostly by nostalgia and the romance of distance.
(2) You have never lived in a properly functioning city outside Nigeria for more than 3 consecutive months; a strenuous visit to Zanzibar or Kenya every other year does not qualify.
(3) Your income, social or other advantages are so tightly coupled to Lagos that leaving would require an intolerable loss of status, access, or opportunity making you a rational actor under enormous constraints.
(4) You are temperamentally suited to chaos and tolerant of disorder in a manner that is so unusual, it would be best explained by a rare combination of low intelligence, a comfortingly low threshold for environmental expectations, and the possession of just the right physical resilience required to absorb the daily friction.
Outside these categories, Lagos is utterly a hell hole. I will always stand by this. More than half the worldโs population would struggle to believe it is even possible to live under conditions this hostile especially because those conditions are obscured by a remarkable asymmetry between everyday lived experience and the cityโs relentless PR.
My Nigerian friend just completed a new house in Atlanta, thats on the market for $2.3M.
It's only 15 minutes from Downtown and has plenty of grass and greenery for kids to play on, not just cement floors.