Olatunji Ololade

The fire that gutted Kachi Hotel must be a careless historian. It destroyed human and material evidence, leaving no significant soot in its wake. However, it forgot to scorch a name: Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola. That name is where this reporting must begin. In its resonance subsists the Yoruba suspicion of tomorrow. Tani mo ola aka Tani mo eyìn ola translates to: Who knows tomorrow or Who knows what tomorrow would bring? Tanimola never lived long enough to answer this question inherent in his name.

Nigerian commerce thrives on predation. Thus, every transaction feels like a siege. Inside our cutthroat markets, only the stony-hearted may profit. Perhaps because profit stems from an incised edge, where corporate titans and small-scale entrepreneurs prey on helpless consumers. The carnage persists in extortionist forays and measures that render many a consumer feeling besieged and economically ruined. Thus, the incised edge is the line drawn between nature and culture.

The belief that sketching a bridge is somehow equivalent to crossing a river persists in the design and operations of the South West Development Commission (SWDC). Its morphology signals socioeconomic midwifery and platform fertility in one breadth. A virgin fertility would be contradictory, as the narrative survives only in religious vestal birth. Hera and Aphrodite renewed their virginity annually by bathing in a sacred spring.