I do not consider Nigerian highways safe enough for me to
travel on, apologies to those who hold a contrary view. Essentially the roads
are death traps in the real sense of the term. Beside incessant potholes and
sudden unprecedented diversions without warnings, there is the risk of armed
banditry, which the law enforcement agents have proved incapable of tackling.
There are no S.O.S rescue services and road maintenance is almost non-existent,
beside the fact that demented alcoholics and drug-addicted maniacs are allowed
to drive commercial vehicles, and these mentally unstable villains constantly
operate at such breakneck speed that would give Michael Schumacher goose pimples.
This is why throughout my artistic career in Nigeria I have always rejected engagements
that take me out of Lagos State, irrespective of its obvious adverse effect on
my professional mobility. When the movie industry virtually shifted to Aba,
Enugu and Jos, I practically quit acting. I recall rejecting a row of five
movies that came from producer Cardinal Onwutalu, because they involved shooting
in the East, and I didn’t have the slightest intention of putting my life on
the line on the death row, knowing full well that most Nigerian artistes of
yore departed this world via our horrible roads. In Europe however, I am
footloose hardly does a month pass by that the wanderlust does not find me
driving or jetting to performances in some distant resort. You could of course
question my patriotism and accuse me of cowardice, and I will not take offence
since my old man did so too, but how can you change my view where my own father
failed? My reason is simple; the first law of patriotism is self-preservation.
I have lost so many of my dearest friends in that incessant carnage you call
roads in Nigeria, and though I loved these friends greatly, I am not in any
hurry to join them, and I suspect that they might still have been alive today if,
like me, they had been so courageous, refusing to ply the ramshackle and
bedraggled Nigerian roads. I will never forget my best friend Nwachukwu Nwosu,
a tall handsome trailblazing medical student of University of Benin who lost
his life in the hands of a drunken luxury bus driver outside the campus on his
21stbirthday.
The vision of his father, an Anglican Bishop, placing his hand on his son’s
chest in the last sacrament during the funeral will never fail to haunt me. But
I have another friend who has functionally lived his life on the road, and the
road has brought him fame and fortune. Ever before I met Daniel Wilson, he was
already an established showbiz name in Rivers State. He was a regular raga act
on Radio Rivers 2 FM station, which was in the 1980s, one of Nigeria’s most
popular radio stations. His first album Uncle Style became a
household anthem in most of the South East, though majority
of the people hardly understood what the rapper was talking about, as
indigenous toasting was completely new in the Nigerian entertainment industry.
I was aware that Daniel Wilson was studying theatre arts in University of Port
Harcourt, and was some years junior to me in class, but I had never seen him
until that day in 1985 when both of us were billed to play at The University of
Science and Technology, Port Harcourt Dancing Competition. When I got to the
theatre, Daniel Wilson was practicing with the backing group Cloud 7. He was
tall, dark and muscular with weaves of jerry curls hanging over his handsome
and youthful oval face, his eyes were big and intense, his stare deeply
penetrating, his nose was round, his thick lips perpetually curved into a
smile, his charisma captivating. There was an abyss of enchanting innocence
about his personality that subdued and seduced every audience. After the
exchange of pleasantries, I politely demanded that Daniel stop his rehearsals
so that I could do my finishing touches in accordance with the arrangement as
he had been rehearsing with the band all afternoon. He immediately took
offence, so our first encounter was an argument. But the moment the show
commenced we became friends, and have remained very good friends till date. I
was drawn in by Daniel Wilson’s sonorous, almost feminine voice, his highly
developed singing techniques and his masterly stage control. But most of all,
his courage, which made him dare to be different at a time when commercial
success in Nigerian music meant imitating Kris Okotie, Jide Obi, Felix Leberty,
Gbugbemi Amas, and Chris Mba. (who all sang an adaptation of the African pop style developed by Ofege’s
lead singer, Melvin Ukachi Uche). 
Daniel Wilson took the suicide plunge by snubbing the
popular trend, thus breaking the traditional norm that was imposed by
frightened poorly financed record companies, who would never risk a dime by
embarking on any project outside the norm. Admittedly the musical genre that
Wilson was championing was alien, outlandish, complex, and to a large extent
incomprehensible, bearing in mind that the bulk of the Nigerian record buyers
were illiterate traders, who in most cases didn’t attend concerts. The stage
performances were left for emancipated youths, students and yuppies. Wilson’s
toast was too fast for the average Nigerian ears to understand what on earth he
was talking about, and at that time, the listener just impatiently waited for
him to finish rapping and hopefully sing, which he hardly did. That was at
least for that time his undoing.
Most experienced Nigerian music observers know that there is
a great difference between succeeding as a stage act and making a breakthrough
as a recording artiste. Making it on stage is relatively simple, while
recording success involves high risk financial investment on the record and video,
with very little guarantee, which are often carried out by the artiste and his
sponsors (not the
record company as frequently implied by the album sleeves),
and thereafter the artiste, (and in most cases, not the record company) embarks
on the costly ‘public relations’ tours to radio stations and television houses
that eventually get the music and video to the public, if generously done. When
all these rituals are performed right and the artiste becomes popular, he faces
the other harsh reality,
that in Africa fame and money are distinct and separate,
because poor economy means that a Nigerian music fan prefers a bowl of isiewu
and bottles of Big Stout to the video CD of his star idol, as long as he can
listen to the music and watch the video for gratis on radio and TV, and that the
media fame of a musical piece is not synonymous with good sales, therefore
being famous in the
mass media is not the same thing as being rich. This is the
reason why seasoned artistes like Tunde Kuboye, Dede and Geraldo Pino have
virtually kept out of the recording circuit, while maintaining buoyant stage
performances, and smarter recording artistes take a second job that guarantees
eba, since they can’t eat fame. But Daniel Wilson, more than anybody else,
understood his innate capabilities, pitched against all the odds, he knew that
he was the combination of all these artistic virtues, because of his witty
stage craft, developed by Ola Rotimi in the formidable Uniport theatre arts
department. Undaunted by the predictable commercial failure of his debut album,
Wilson plunged into a recording and performing career and pushed and pushed the
brick wall of conservatism until it gave way thereby changing the form of
Nigerian pop culture forever, evolving and sustaining a Nigerian version of the
Jamaican
raga music, which became more and more indigenized until it
grew into a distinctively Nigerian art form, becoming the foremost ideological
and musical framework with which Nigerian music found character and identity,
Nigerian youth finding instant relevance and easy and lasting expression till today.
But ironically few people remember that the originator was Daniel Wilson, long
before TLZ, Sweat, The Mandators, Isaac Black, Oritz Wiliki, Majek Fashek, Ras
Kimono, Felix Duke, Idris Abdulkarim, Plantashun Bois, Tony Tetuila, Daddy
Showkey, Daddie Fresh and the other Ajegunle boys who became the musical heirs
of Daniel Wilson. After my graduation, National Youth Service separated Daniel
and I, but I still remember my trip with him from Enugu to Port Harcourt,
shortly after the release of my debut album No Vacancy.
Throughout the travel my artistry was under endless tirades
of Daniel’s merciless criticism as he took the album apart song by song and
tore my efforts to shreds, but I realized that an artiste’s friend is not the
person that praises his works, but rather the person that points out loopholes
for correction in his opera. He had linked up with some Lebanese hoteliers with
whom he presented a totally new concept of entertainment, a moving caravan, on
which he performed live to the people in the street. Today many record
companies use this system for advertising their new releases. By the time I
left Nigeria for Europe Daniel Wilson’s 999 was topping the national charts.
Many changes came into being within the next 13 years of my absence, but one
major difference was that 
Raga music had come to stay, no longer as a musical import,
but as our own thing. Daniel Wilson was the first Nigerian artiste that visited
me when I returned. His musical triumph had also taken him to far and near,
enriching his experience and repertoire. He had registered himself in the
national psyche as a phenomenon, annually picking up several awards and making
amazing record
sales and performing in respectable shows. I visited his
band which was led by Felix Duke in Abule-Egba, and I still could not come to
terms with the fact that a celebrity who had made the kind of contribution
Wilson had made to youth culture, mass education, social mobilization and the happiness
of the average person would still be struggling with cosmopolitan survival. His
luck however came with his marriage to Juliet, a soft-spoken beautiful woman of
razor sharp intelligence and dazzling humility. I was a regular guest in their
regal Lekki mansion, and Daniel never spared me for a day. He lashed out at my
performance in virtually all my films, and refused to accept the excuse that
that was the way the producer wanted it, and he forbid me to enter the music
recording studio without him. He also forbid me to write any story about him,
bluntly refusing to grant me any interview on the grounds that we are friends
and he cannot imagine me as a journalist. When I was recording Does Your Mama
Know? Daniel used to come to the studio by 3am, driving across The Third
Mainland Bridge to Ikeja. ‘Aren’t you afraid of robbers?’ I would ask, and he
would reply rather immodestly.
‘Bob have you forgotten my name?’ But modesty is not Daniel
Wilson’s strong point, and this has earned him a lot of trashing from
colleagues and the media. Never have I seen an artiste more confident and less
diplomatic about the supremacy of his art. It took all my force of character to
resist Daniels insistence that I turn my music into Calypso, which he visualizes
as the genre of the future. The argument roared on between Daniel and my
producer Chris Okoro (who was also producing Daniel’s album at that time). I
knew that Wilson was about to embark on another gamble, which was unlikely to
succeed as nobody else in Nigeria was interested in Calypso, but he was so convinced
about his idea and there was no way to get him to listen to a different view.
In the only profession where vanity is a virtue, modesty becomes the vice of
indecision. His album came out, all Calypso, and predictably unsuccessful, but
I have never doubted that Daniel Wilson knows where he is going, my only doubt
was whether this was the right time to lead another musical exodus.
‘If you want to be a leader you cannot run with the pack’,
he reminded me during our last meeting, putting his flashy jeep and luxurious
compound at my disposition for the shooting of the video clip of Iyawo Mi and
Fiesta. Thereafter I have recorded a single in Daniel’s luxurious home in Lekki
Phase one and deliberately took my time to spend a holiday at my friend’s, that
was before he was appointed Technical Advisor to President Goodluck Jonathan
and he moved to Abuja and transmogrified into a politician as they come.
BOB EJIKE
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