THIS IS NIGERIA – A COUNTRY SCARED OF THE TRUTH?

Just weeks back we wrote an article tagged “Looking Deeper into Falzs’ This is Nigeria” preceded by “What we Learnt from Falzs’ Awesome Surfing Skills” and today we will yet be doing another post on “This is Nigeria”.

Today the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission ‘Banned’ the playing of Falzs’ “This is Nigeria” on radio and TV stations as music with ‘vulgar and indecent lyrics’.

This move by NBC is controversial and has many angles. You may wonder what part of the lyrics was vulgar and indecent. The part the NBC villainized is “This is Nigeria, look how we are living now, everybody be criminal”. You might want to give NBC some accolades though for intentionally preserving the nation’s image but it still sparks controversy.

Nigeria is in a democratic era with freedom of expression and freedom of the press two freedoms that are currently being suppressed by NBC. A school of thought would say that America the nation which had the original “This Is America” by Daniel Glover AKA Childish Gambino didn’t even ban the video so why should Nigeria do it?

Another school of thought is the Nigerian government is scared of the truth. This has played overtime after time and Falz’s video only highlighted it. Falz has been praised this year for being one of the first Nigerian artists to do real art and stand for truth with his art and this is a deliberate act to suppress him. Similar patterns were suspected when other celebrities tried to stage protests/marches last year and suddenly went mute. The same video was reported by MURIC a Muslim group just days after its release but the lawsuit was dropped.

This is Nigeria is a song to remember and thank God at least it hasn’t been removed from YouTube. It is one of those videos we’ll show the younger generation as proof that people stood for the truth.

And we hope that other music artists would respond to this by releasing truthful songs about Nigeria because the role the arts especially music can potentially play in Nigeria’s rejuvenation cannot be overemphasised – they’ve been sleeping for too long.

Perhaps Falz should have added a line

This is Nigeria. Look how we fearing now. Everybody be saying the truth we be rejecting it.