There are nights

I want to be Nigerian so badly

I could wear the flag beneath my skin.

Not the Nigeria they put in newspapers.

Not the one they reduce to elections,

corruption,

blackouts,

and another road collapsing somewhere.

I mean the one that taught me

how to make a celebration

out of almost nothing.

The one that could lose electricity

and somehow find light in a story.

The one where children once chased each other

through moonlit compounds,

where neighbours knew your name

before they knew your surname,

where somebody's mother

could shout your full name from three streets away

and somehow,

you heard her.

I miss a Nigeria

I am not even sure I am old enough

to remember properly.

Maybe that is what we do.

We inherit memories

we never lived.

We inherit songs,

languages,

recipes,

clothes,

names,

and the stubborn belief

that somewhere beneath all this noise

there is a country worth loving.

And God,

how we love loudly.

We carry our music across oceans.

A boy from Lagos

can make an arena in London

sing words born from a street

that London has never seen.

A Nigerian doctor

can walk into a foreign hospital

and save a life.

A tailor can sit beneath a weak bulb

and make something beautiful enough

to cross an ocean.

Our mothers sell beneath the sun.

Our fathers build with tired hands.

Our students study through darkness

and still submit assignments

before the deadline.

We are strange like that.

We complain about the country

in the morning

and defend her before foreigners by evening.

We say,

“Nigeria is finished.”

Then somebody succeeds abroad

and suddenly

“That is my person.”

My country.

My blood.

My own.

Perhaps patriotism is not always

the clean thing they teach you in school.

Perhaps sometimes

it is loving something

with your eyes open.

Because I have seen the potholes.

I have watched generators become

the soundtrack of childhood.

I have watched people leave

with their lives compressed

into two suitcases.

I have watched talented people

become experts at surviving

when they should have been

building.

I know.

I know why they leave.

I know why some of us

dream of passports

before we dream of houses.

I know why “Japa”

became more than slang.

It became a prayer.

And still

put me in a room

where the Nigerian anthem begins.

Watch me.

Something in me changes.

The room disappears.

The arguments disappear.

The politicians disappear.

For a moment,

there is only that green,

that white,

that green

and a strange little boy

who once believed

the world was bigger than his street

but somehow

his street was still worth loving.

Maybe that is the urge.

To walk into foreign rooms

without shrinking my name.

To wear the fabric

they once called ordinary

until somebody calls it beautiful.

To speak my language

without translating my pride.

To carry the rhythm of home

into places that never knew

we had one.

Because before the world

learned to pronounce our names,

we were already here.

Before they discovered our music,

we were dancing.

Before they discovered our food,

we were feeding ourselves.

Before they discovered our cocoa,

we were growing it.

Before they discovered our oil,

we were living above it.

Before they called our creativity

a global phenomenon,

we were creating

because creating was how we survived.

And maybe that is what I want.

Not a perfect Nigeria.

I don't want to lie about the darkness

just to prove there is light.

I want the darkness gone.

I want the roads fixed.

The lights on.

The classrooms full.

The hospitals breathing.

The young to stop treating departure

as their greatest achievement.

I want a country

that doesn't force its children

to become successful elsewhere

before it believes in them.

But until then

I will still carry her.

Not because she has earned

every ounce of my love.

But because somehow,

through all the disappointment,

she put something in me

that refuses to die.

A rhythm.

A stubbornness.

A certain audacity

that makes me look at the world

and say,

you have no idea

who you are dealing with.

So call us third world.

Call us corrupt.

Call us whatever makes

your statistics comfortable.

I know what I come from.

I come from people

who have learned to build

with broken things.

People who can turn hardship

into humour,

scarcity into invention,

and a borrowed microphone

into a stage.

I come from a place

that has broken my heart

more times than I can count—

and somehow,

I still hear its anthem

and want to stand.

That is the part

I cannot explain.

That is the part

I cannot cure.

That ridiculous,

beautiful,

unreasonable thing

the urge

to be Nigerian.