Proud to be Nigerian!!

Even here in chilly London I cannot get it, or him, out of my head. It just keeps popping up like that leftover in the toilet bowl that lacks the substance to get sucked down the drain. I mean how dare he? At the time I was apoplectic. I could have bust a blood vessel. Since then I have calmed down but not enough to forget.

So here's the deal. You grow up in Nigeria before the oil hit big time and the train went off the tracks. You have a great family and social life. You go down to the beach on the weekends. You go for drives with your dad in his convertible. Lagos is light. Life is great. It stays in your mind.

Fast forward several decades and you now have kids of your own and you say to yourself - I must give them a sense, a taste of what it is like to be a Nigerian. Regardless of where they eventually settle in the world they must have a sense of their Nigerian identity. And so you all end up in Lagos. And every day you are trying to show them this , tell them that and the other so that they get it. So that they understand. So that they are Proud to be Nigerian.

In the meantime, everyday you turn on your radio and local TV to be greeted by a barrage of false American and British and God knows what other accent. However, there is one that truly stands out. This chap on Grilla FM. Is he for real? Iyawo reckons he might just be doing it to take the mick. I don't think so. I think he sees himself as the bees knees. I think he wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and taps himself on the chin.

This guy has the most strangulated, over reaching "upper class" British accent I have ever had the misfortune to come across. Morning after morning on the drive to school we tune in hoping against hope that at some point he will come out and say - just kidding oh my people. How ya body? But no. He continues to murder the English language at every turn.

And then the final straw. He is interviewing some chap and he has the audacity, the alacrity, the bloody nerve to ask the chap if he is proud to be Nigerian???? He then claims that he himself is very proud to be Nigerian!! All the while continuing to speak in his awful !£%£$^$&% accent. Whaaat?? How can you be proud to be a Nigerian when it is quite obvious that you detest being a Nigerian if you cannot even be bothered to speak naturally? To communicate in your own tongue?

His is not the only example of the dissing of our culture, our values, our heritage. It seems more and more is disappearing every day. We are dying a slow death. How sad. For me, for my children, for their children. Will there be anything left?