A few months ago, we were having a discussion in a Whatsapp group about Nigerian football being in the doldrums, with many Nigerian fans being more concerned about English Premier League clubs, etc. One guy said the football authorities in Nigeria need to learn from the music scene in terms of developing a product that Nigerians could embrace.
It was an interesting observation. Back in the day, if you went to a Nigerian party, either in Nigeria or in the Diaspora, the music used to be mainly American R&B, hip hop, etc. Any DJ that played Nigerian music was expecting to clear the dance floor. Bright Chimezie sang about this in “Respect Africa”: “I went to a disco party, I requested for African sound the whole people started laughing”.
But now the script has been flipped. “Afrobeats” has become a phenomenon and taken over dancefloors all over the world. You will now struggle to hear R&B/hip hop at a Nigerian party. What changed and when? The Netflix documentary released in June last year – “Afrobeats: The backstory” looked at how “Afrobeats” went, in hip hop parlance, from nothing into something. From around the mid 1990s, the music took over Nigeria, Africa and the world. They did it despite the challenges of operating in Nigeria.
I remember attending a seminar at the London Museum in 2010 entitled “Nigeria: Africa’s Superpower?”. The author Chika Unigwe said that culturally, Nigeria was becoming a superpower, with Nollywood and the music scene blowing up. John Snow, the newscaster who chaired the event, said Nigeria, as a country, may not be doing great things, but its people were.
Nollywood, for example, is the second largest employer behind the public sector. The music industry can’t be far behind. The artistes have won Grammys and other international awards, worked with superstars worldwide and have put Nigeria on the map. They are doing for Nigeria what reggae did for Jamaica, in which a tiny Caribbean island ended up punching above its weight culturally.
What’s instructive from the Netflix documentary is how collaborative the “Afrobeats” scene is, with very little evidence of the ethnocentrism that seems to dominate politics. The Nigerian music scene has shown that Nigeria can be world-beating in any field, despite the challenges. The same interpersonal skills that transformed the music industry – collaborative working, borrowing best practice, taking advantage of technology, championing diversity, recognising talent, etc could be replicated to deliver success in any field of human endeavour from governance to development to the economy.
It just needs harnessing and for the politicians, whose only agenda is looting, to step out of the way.
