Dr. Reuben Abati a foremost Nigerian writer and chairman of the editorial board of the Guardian Newspaper recently published an article titled “A Nation’s Identity Crisis” READ HERE. In my opinion, while this article might have been heading to a positive destination i.e. a positive criticism of the current state of the Nigerian music industry, reading the article from top to bottom, the direction of this article rather shows Dr. Abati as being resistant to change and very intolerant to the Nigerian youth and our various or even general state of mind.
I’m not one of the best writers ever (at least not of articles…I’ll kill a beat anyday…lol), so I’m glad that our generation has been able to produce an articulate enough voice to respond to the largely ill-informed and misguided article written by Dr. Abati. This voice is in the person of Banky W., who was personally criticized in the former’s article. READ HERE
Giving my own 2 cents, (though I really don’t need to say much, Banky said it all) my first observation was Dr. Abati’s preference of the fact that a country as great as ours was named by a slave master’s mistress (he even joked about the romantic moments in which this might have happened). In this vain, naming our country Nigeria, I might say was given as much thought as naming Lord Luggard’s pet dog. Don’t get me wrong I’m a very proud NIGERIAN, but if I was asked to choose, I’ll rather choose a name that was given to us by us, and in the words of Sauce Kid,”Its Naija”.
I think Dr. Abati and his generation should claim responsibility for some these his criticism of our generation. Where are the museums, the exhibitions, the festivals, the schools, the programs to teach us about our culture? Is it really our fault that all we’ve got is school curriculum’s that teach us more about Lord Luggard, George Washington, classical music etc than they do about Oduduwa, Eyo, Bata dance etc. Growing up we watched DSTV, our television stations were filled with foreign programming. We are a generation willing to learn, so if people like Dr. Abati have decided not to teach us but rather criticize, we’ll learn from Jay Z, he’s on MTV almost everyday!!!
My final words are taken from my twitter conversation with eLDee the don, he states and I quote him “We finally make somethin of the nothin we r given and then they start chattin sh*t”. I say let the keep chatting sh*t, we don’t plan to stop what we are doing, we gon build something so great that they’ll only be able to watch from the sidelines. But, to our fathers and mothers that are showing us great support, we promise to make you all proud.

Tags: Banky W., Dr. Reuben Abati, eldee, The Guardian
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