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One of the most heartwarming aspects of life in Nigeria today is
the surge in artistic creativity in all its forms, a sign that the people are
appreciative of their own beauty and find fascination and self confirmation in
their Nigerianess despite the dysfunctionality or perhaps even maybe, because
of the dysfuntionality of the part of their lives that has to do with
governance and politics.

The vibrancy of Nigerian art can be explained by the immediacy
of the language and symbols we use to describe ourselves. So much of what we
are is still virgin, fresh and authentic and the energy of that Naija factor
infuses everything that makes it to these shores.

But change is stealing up on us in subtle ways as we struggle to
clear the tenacious undergrowth of urban squalor and mass unemployment seeking
the light of smooth highways and streamlined overpasses.

There is a sculptor whose name I confess I do not remember, who
has a fascination with feet. He makes huge depictions of feet, the kinds that
tell stories. Gnarled toes that have smoothed many untarred paths, sinewy
muscles that have forced their way through mud and silt, leathered soles that
are unrecognizable as skin. You see these works of art and you know they are
the tail end of another Nigerian story of cattle herders, of itinerant
pedicurists, of people who work by the sweat of their bodies.

Take Lagos, the mega city to be. One of its most enduring icons
is the teeming splash of yellow taxis and colour clad bodies, a surging mass
that has inspired many a painter and seen on a wall anywhere from Sidney
Australia to Sag Harbor New York spells Eko even to people who have never been
here.

The Item of my teenage years has gone. The streams we used to
bathe in curtained by a rich rainforest canopy of trees have melted away. We no
longer wash al fresco in open air showers built with walls of strung branches
latticed with palm fronds, rubbing the soles of our feet against stones to
clean off the dirt of the day. Bush paths have given way to motor able roads,
theoretically at least, but that is not the only kind of change I am talking
about.

There is a kind of change that still retains with it the romance
and humanity of the world it is moving away from. It is a feat that requires creative
thinking to achieve, the kind that replaces ugly dumps with plant stalls, that
removes and eyesore and provides employment at the same time.

Neatly stacked rows of baby palm trees and many other kinds of
plants are turning parts of Lagos into mini market gardens.

Orange uniformed women are sweeping highways, just the way we
used to sweep compounds. The first thing you would hear every morning apart
from cocks crowing or the drumming of Pa Agu Ogali’s Unity Church rousing
morning prayers (‘use me, my father use me’) was the swish swish of a broom on
the earthen ground.

We do not always recognize the true worth of our pioneers when they are with
us but one day when Lagos has come into its own and has melded its
irrepressible spirit with the dreams of the people who give it its heartbeat we
will remember its current governor. But the needs of those who form the bedrock
of this megapolis, its okada drivers, its civil servants, its omolankes, its
domestic workers its undocumented, its area boys and girls big and small, have
also to be considered in the great march towards urban splendour.