Motherland- Pope Jay

I believe Olanrewaju Fasasi is one of the artistically creative men that Nigeria has produced so far. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of hip hop music in Nigeria but one of the most amazing things about this man is that despite the recent rise in the level of mediocrity in the music industry, Sound sultan, as he is popularly called, has managed to retain a high standard for himself. As a child, his track ‘motherland’ was one of the songs that spurred a sense of belonging and patriotism in me and very recently I heard a remix of the track. A particular modification to the song got me thinking, he started the remix with the words “I would rather be a Lion in the jungle than a dog in the city”.
 In my ruminations on these words, I considered quite a lot of things. Firstly, if there were bomb blasts every day in the jungle killing other lions, would he still rather be in the jungle? Or if the rate of corruption in the jungle was so high that the antelope had to pay bribe to eat grass, would he still rather be in the jungle? In fact considering the current state of our jungle (Nigeria), I was almost sure that the city held better prospects.

After a while, it dawned on me.  The semantics of the sultan’s words wasn’t quite as deep as I had thought. The jungle itself in the real sense was not a perfect place but there was a strong bond between it and the lion, it was the Lion’s home. The Sultan was simply reemphasizing the message he had been preaching all along; he would rather be at home.

 As young children, we were enthusiastic to be presidents, governors and leaders so we could buy our mother; ten cars and our father; five houses. This, of course, was due to the orientation that the society gave us. We saw these leadership positions as more of a paycheck rather than what it really was; a bigger opportunity to serve. This is one of the factors that corrupted the leader of tomorrow mentality, youths started to wait for a virtual tomorrow so they could get into office and eat their part of the “national cake”. They forgot to lead their lives well today.

 There are a few obvious and auspicious reasons to believe that the current leadership of Nigeria would make things better but there is still the need to establish the change we desire at the very fundamental level; the individual. In the words of Mahatma Ghandi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. The coincidental part is that; most Nigerians obviously wished to see “Change”.

Pope Jay