Fodelos

  Prelude: The Notion That Lingers There’s a strange notion that regularly surfaces in everyday Nigerian life. You’ll hear it whispered on street corners in the morning, tossed around at food canteens at noon, and murmured over pepper soup and beer at night. It pops up during primetime news, from NTA’s 9PM slot to Channels and Arise TV at 10PM. It lives in questions like: Where is Nigeria really headed? And often, the answers—passionate, loud, and confident—are not backed by substance. Like yellow pants or Lamborghinis in traffic, they catch your attention but don’t move us forward. The Gap Between What Is and What Could Be In group discussions, like the one I recently joined—one of those “future leaders” roundtables—the conversation returned to a familiar problem:   Why can’t Nigeria refine its own crude oil? The founder of Stanbic IBTC offered a refreshing perspective. Instead of mourning the "blondie that got away," he encouraged us to notice the "girl next door....

Introduction: A Mirror to Ourselves In 2009, the late Pat Nebo—an acclaimed set designer in Nigeria’s entertainment industry—offered a quiet but incisive observation in an interview: “We have not actually matured to look inwards at the glamour in our culture.” Fifteen years later, his words feel more like a challenge than a critique. Nebo wasn’t just talking about art direction—he was indicting a national posture toward beauty, identity, and memory. His statement frames a broader cultural malaise: one in which aesthetic depth, historical reverence, and thoughtful design have been swapped out for generic utility and noise. A Culture of Substitution We’ve seen this trend unfold across every layer of public life. From cars designed with no character, to buildings erected without architectural soul, to civil projects that lack foresight or finesse, the signs are everywhere. Even Abuja—our so-called planned capital—reflects a missed opportunity for inspired, contextual design. The issue goe...

'It's a pity that life can only be lived looking forward, but understood looking back.'  Fifteen years ago, Pat Nebo, a veteran set designer in the entertainment industry, made a few comments i n an interview about practicing his craft in Nigeria.  Two lines stood out in his career-long reflections ... "...what I found out is our educational system is not tailored to basic perception of art.  We have not actually matured to look inwards at the glamour in our culture." Here's the full newspaper  archived page  from March 27th, 2009.  In the first phrase, Nebo accurately identified the common denominator for such a mediocre approach to life.  We have gone back and forth about this mediocrity cutting across  all things in our living space,  not just art. C ars   as spicy as a platter of table salt, hermetically sealed buildings pasted as concept architecture without context, civil engineering works with a distinct lack of planning, functio...

Knowledge is Power. There is a weird notion that pops up around these parts; You hear it at street corners most mornings when less-occupied adults gather at newspaper stands to exchange chunks of hearsay.  You hear it during the day, on queue at food canteens, and bus stops. You hear it at sundown too, between orders of beer and pepper soup at joints and lounges.  Old folk tune in to NTA Network News at 9PM to find it. A similar young-at-heart  audience wait an hour after, tuning to News at 10 on Channels and Arise TV.  Where is Nigeria headed ? Nigerians, like yellow pants and Lamborghinis, can be loud and proud. Nothing unnecessarily sinister to see here - with a burgeoning population, it takes a bit more to stand out. That tends to be a bit too much anywhere else in Africa.  As with things of this sort, there is a crucial misnomer that is overcompensated beneath the bluster. Doing the most.  The naked emperor beneath his shiny new clothes. We know a gro...

We spoke of simplifying transfers between users, because the ‘middleman’ could be eliminated. bitcoin was created to be opposite of centralised currrencies . Decentralised  -adj-  Remember the middleman in this case of international money transfer, involves all parties other than sender and receiver; banks, credit card company, and payment processor. Banks ask for KYC data; those pesky details and ID's to have a file on you, and allegedly keep things on the straight and narrow.  In the end, the bank charges you fees for services like everybody else. Remember that ledger we spoke of last time ? Yes - for recording transactions. Of course we are in the digital age, so just like your bank, transactions are stored in a computer network. In this case, the blockchain is a  network across multiple computers, all over the world. These computers all confirm the validity of entries, such that  records can not be altered or deleted, as it is  confirmed by all, and vi...

Ten thousand corollas litter Lagos streets, with just two horn notes and  barely  seven colours between them. Ascend to more luxurious altitude, and there’s hardly any variety either.  In a city of well over two thousand Range Rovers and G-wagens, not even  one   ricer has been spotted. Why so  boring  ? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Look around your favourite neighborhood; there's a reason everything fits in the mediocre concrete monoliths spliced across the country.  Modern developments seem to have forgot the whole colonial episode, losing all the recipes of tropical function informing form and space design. Gardens, Courtyards and balconies, swiped away. Gable roofs trimmed to get with the modernist trend.  What do you mean colour pallette - we don't do that here. Bleach it white. But boring buildings are not really a problem anyway - you spend all day split between school run traffic, office hours, and closing time  go sl...