How I Ended My Romance with Cigarette

Cigarette smoking is a huge concern for many who have found themselves deeply engrossed in it and wish to pull out. They say that it has substances, such as nicotine and tar deliberately added to keep users hooked but, for me, I pulled out with ease –I never felt any riveting influence it is said to have.

While in secondary school, there were boys who were deeply into cigarette smoking. They were so involved they often absconded from class to stay in the hills, where they smoked without someone bordering them. Suddenly, it seemed there was something in it that I was missing.

I left that school for another, driven by a strong desire for academic excellence –I was more predisposed to books than anything else. There again, I met a guy who often had thick dirty lips, bloodshot eyes and left a strong tobacco stench in his trails. He would leave school to stay in the city, nightclubbing, girls hunting, puffing all the time and sleeping wherever night caught up with him. Though he was born and raised in the city, he never went home, giving his parents the impression he was in school.

My friend got a little serious, as final examinations neared –he wasn’t crazy after all. That was how we got closer with me taking up that habit.

After graduation, I was waiting for admission to a university and stayed with my elder brother in the city (though my parents were also in the city). It was during that period that my smoking habit flourished. Inwardly, I got the feeling that my brother knew about it, but pretended he didn’t know, especially since he never saw me with a stick of cigarette –I smoked only when I was out, sometimes with that friend and, sometimes, alone. I recall one day when I tried to smoke in a taxi. The driver stopped and requested that I get out. While I was getting out, I was conscious that I was drifting away from society’s acceptable standards.

Eventually, I found my admission and moved to the university. While attending the pre-degree bridging programme, there were girls from influential family backgrounds with whom we had struck a much-valued camaraderie. On the day we completed that phase of schooling, it called for feasting. While walking towards the gate, I bought a stick of cigarette and was smoking it when some of these girls were driving past. I tried to hide my cigar but they still noticed it. It was how my esteem in the eyes of those girls vanished –they concluded I wasn’t a good boy, after all.

I moved into the mainstream of the university programme. In my class, I found a guy with whom our lives rhymed –we both loved music and followed the trends. He was already into smoking. So, we blended with ease. But in addition to cigarette, he also was into weed. I tried to get him to usher me in, but he kept playing games until I gave up. Now, with hindsight, I understand he felt weed-smoking wasn’t for my type.

In our second year, we stopped smoking. It wasn’t planned. It just happened naturally. One day, we just realized we had not been smoking for some time. I learned something from this: smoking for us and for many others was a stage in the staircase of adolescence.

But it didn’t really end abruptly. There were times, I found myself in a party or an adventurous mood. I consummated such moods with a stick of cigar. While at the orientation camp of the National Youth Service, I had money that I couldn’t spend since we were fed three times a day. So, I sometimes spent the evenings at the mami market, drinking. In the end, there was always a stick of cigarette to go with it.

After national youth service, I returned from Benin, Edo State, where I had served. I eventually got a job as a mine manager. The job took me to a remote village, somewhere around the limit between Plateau and Taraba States. In that village, there wasn’t decent food, no clean water, no electricity, the people were antisocial, the housing was practically a tent, and there weren’t people in my social circle... The funk in the village was so deep I often felt I was in prison. When, eventually, I had time to travel to the city, it felt like party time and called for celebration. At such moments, cigarette often came handy. That was probably the last time I recall smoking cigarette. It was in 1997.  

How Asake is Crippling the Nigerian Music Industry

Asake. Image Credt: https://radrafrica.com

You may have noticed that the Nigerian music industry has been slowing down for some time –we are having enough of the old artists, yet there are no new arrivals from behind the horizon. Somehow, the industry has been all about Asake in the last year. It isn’t that no one has been active at all, just that the attention has drifted to Asake such that the other artists have been forgotten. Davido, in an attempt to save his career, chose to collaborate with Asake. His reason for wanting the collaboration was because “Asake has scattered every place,” to use his exact words. Davido said he was waiting for Olamide’s consent –Asake won’t collaborate with you without Olamide’s approval.

Asake wasn’t the cynosure until the release of his single, Lonely at the Top. That single launched him to the top, making him the most sought-after Nigerian artist globally. But then he released his Lungu Boy album. Before its release, Asake talked about how the album would be in Yoruba and that he is more comfortable singing in Yoruba. I cowered when I heard him say this –I believe his success, following the release of Lonely at the Top, had to do with the language switch –he chose to perform that song in English against his tradition of singing in Yoruba.

When Lungu Boy finally got released, there was a rush for it and it trended, especially on YouTube and TikTok, albeit for an unusually short period. When an album is a hit, it continues to trend for months, but Lungu Boy trended for a couple of weeks only. Thus, all the plays were for the sake of reviews, people playing to rate it. Now, the abrupt silence is their opinion about the album –it is as if no new album has been released.

Most of what I have heard from Lungu Boy is Amapianowish. Plus, he added other elements that made the music so complex, leaving other artists wondering how he did it. He moved so swiftly that other artists couldn’t keep up. Following his success with Lonely at the Top, he became the avant-garde. With this, every music executive became fearful of putting money on any artist to avoid a financial loss.  

With the exception, of Ayra Star, who played around with Comma, Asake chose to single-handedly carry the Nigerian music industry on his shoulders in the last year. Now that he has tripped, the whole industry comes to a standstill.

When an African-American man was asked why the Nigerians are the most successful artists from Africa, he echoed my opinion: the Nigerians sing in English. The question is: what is responsible for the failure of the new album, Lungu Boy? For me, just the word “lungu” turned me off. I don’t know if it is a Yoruba word or a word from another tongue or Asake’s jargon. In Hausa though, the word, “lungu” means an alley or a hidden corner, a place where bad things happen without people noticing. You can, for instance, trap a woman and rape her successfully in a lungu. Furthermore, the whole album turned out to be in Yoruba, as Asake had promised. It is vital to note that while Asake sang in Yoruba, he failed to find that universal appeal until the release of Lonely at the Top, which is in English.

The decision to sing in Yoruba messed up Lungu Boy. People argue that music is a universal language. Yes, but not absolutely. English in our contemporary world is considered a superior language –everyone, including narcissists, wants to speak it. If the music is in a tongue that others consider inferior, it explains why its reception has been frosty. The success of any artist globally comes only if he is supported by the Western world, the storeroom of the English language. It isn’t by design but what Asake has done is to get the Nigerian music industry befuddled. 

A Plateau Author Who Lives in Obscurity

Changchit Wuyep, Plateau Author

Changchit Wuyep is an author with three published books to her credit. Her books include Offspring in Peril and Jiji volumes I and II. She said, she has finished Jiji volume III and is working on publishing it. The Jiji is a book set in Tarok folklore. The Tarok people are in Lantang North and South Local Government Areas of Plateau State.  

Because of funding challenges, Mama couldn’t finish formal education, dropping out midway in her secondary school. Thanks to eternal examination, she studied on her own and wrote the external General Certificate of Education (GCE) exams. With a brilliant result, she proceeded to nursing school and later worked as a midwife until her retirement.

Given her training as a midwife, one can’t help but ask how she became a writer. She says the secondary she partly attended ensured they understood the importance of reading, not just academic materials but anything else. That was how she built a strong romance with books. As a midwife, she often had ample time while off-duty and read works of Shakespeare with their typical Elizabethan English. She says her writing is inborn and explains why she was able to start writing by just critically looking at the works of other established authors. 

She feels she has an overcrowded mind and often wants to have a channel of release and relief. After reading so much, she wanted to be heard, too. Writing presented that channel to communicate the issues in her mind, issues triggered by people, places and events. One day, she sat down and simply started writing Jiji, her debut novel. But there was hesitancy at times. So the book may not have seen the light of day if not for her daughter who often returned from boarding school and went through the manuscript, discovering that the book has a strong potential as a result and insisting the book must see the light of day.

Offspring in Peril, which has a moral theme, was inspired by a place underneath a cashew tree, which was littered with waste suggesting the place was a rendezvous of drug users. Given her supplementary passion for bible class hosting, she felt deeply hurt in her mind. Thus, there was the need to reach a larger population of youths. Offspring in Peril was born.

Despite her talent, Mama Changchit lives in obscurity. She has come to believe that writing a book isn’t the difficult part of the job, but publicity is. She had liaised with the Association of Nigerian Authors and made attempts to be published by an international publishing firm. She also tried to be heard through television interviews. All efforts, however, failed short of giving her adequate publicity.

Mama Changchit, who holds an advanced diploma in Public Administration, is now aged yet her writing inferno continues to burn –she has completed Jiji volume III and is working on publishing it.