Much Ado About Charly Boy’s Bus-Stop

Charly Boy Bus Stop, the iconic bus-stop named after the eccentric Charles Oputa, was recently renamed Badoo Bus Stop after another genius music Star, Olamide. The former Chairman of the Bariga Local Council Development Area – please Google his name – had gone on a street renaming spree the other day.  Iconic Nigerians like King Sunny Ade also got streets named after them, but it is this Charly Boy Bus stop “be the koko” as we say on the street.

This particular renaming has once again thrown up the spectre of ethnic divisions, markedly manifested during the last elections. The debate has been hot and stormy; a lot of abuses have gone under, and even tiny me has been described as unappreciative of the fact that “Yoruba people condone me.”

Mbok see me o, as I threw in my own penny’s worth of argument in the debate on a WhatsApp group. One mumu that I am sure hadn’t taken his bath that day just attacked me  – Duke, you are very, very ungrateful to Yoruba people who have condoned you and shown you love by sponsoring your play.  My people, I suddenly felt like Blacks in apartheid South Africa, stripped of my dignity and made to feel less. Na now I know how discrimination and ethnic profiling feel. I abused the living daylight out of the boy. I called him names and dragged his parents and ancestors into the fight. “Who is condoning me?” I asked him.

I even went Femi Fani-Kayode on him – you must be very stupid to have said that to me. Who the hell are you? Do you know me? Who is your father? Did your father go to Cambridge? You must be a fool. In fact, Chief Fani-Kayode would have been very proud of me by the time I finished with him.

Mbok, see me see wahala o, the Bariga Chairman, perhaps out of boredom, decided to rename streets and bus stops — including Charly Boy bus stop. And now, I’m the one they’re accusing of being condoned, simply because I made a harmless allusion suggesting the motives behind the move were less than stellar. Suddenly, it’s me the Yoruba people are condoning? Imagine. Did I ask for a refuse dump to be named after me, that they are now saying that I am being condoned?

This is exactly why the public outcry over the renaming has been so intense — the ethnic bias underpinning not just the act itself, but the broader socio-political interaction in the state since the last elections.  Today, more than ever before, we now see ourselves in ethnic colourations instead of as one people, all because someone did not want to lose an election in his vassal state. Na wa.

This is very, very sad.