Surulere, Silence and Me

Plus: The Cat on "Flee As The Elites Flee"

Jun 07, 2026

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“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”
- Delmore Schwartz (1913 - 1966)

Welcome back, friends! 🤗

CHELS’ WORLD 🌍

Surulere, Silence and Me

Opened brown wooden window by Katerina on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/@kat_katerina)

I was taking a stroll. Well, that is what I am calling it. I was really just heading to the recycling bin to drop off empty water bottles. But somewhere along the way, I realized how quiet everything was.

Quiet quiet.

No generator somewhere humming. No neighbours shouting across. No random drama starting outside that everyone will gather to watch. Just quiet. And that quiet made me think about where I was coming from. How we are so much a product of our environment, our upbringing, the undiagnosed trauma we might have experienced, and the influences of our parents. How all of those things have influenced our choices, our decisions, and the kind of persons we are becoming.

I grew up in Surulere, Lagos. There are quiet areas of Surulere, and I went to primary school in one of them, very serene. But I lived on the opposite end, noise, chaos, fighting, drama. Sometimes you would be coming back from work, and someone would call and say, “ Oh, they are fighting, the police have been called and are on the street”. And you would just be so scared to go home. It was a lot of drama. And to be honest, we lived for it. I legit lived for the drama. You could come out to your balcony and see people fighting, hear someone shouting, hear somebody insulting somebody’s entire family history. It was just part of everyday life. It was normal.

Like normal normal.

So even though internally I am a very quiet person, I am very introverted. I know it does not always look like it, especially at work, but I like to observe, to be in my own space. But what I had internalized without knowing it was that my environment could be loud and I could still be quiet inside. I had adjusted to that kind of environment without even realizing it.

And that followed me into uni. I never once went to the library. I got my library card as part of registration and then never used it. People would say let us go and read there, and I just could not. Because in my head, it was just too quiet. It was not that I needed noise exactly. I just needed the background echo that signified that there was life. The library had nothing. Dead silent. And I did not know what to do with it.

Until I moved to my own space. And it is quiet quiet. The kind of quiet where you can hear yourself think, hear your own thoughts. A quiet that is almost too peaceful sometimes, where filling it with noise feels disconcerting. Because when you grow up around noise, silence does not immediately feel like peace. It feels like something you have to adjust to. But over time, I started liking it. No. I absolutely love it. Every time I go home now, it is jarring to come back to all that noise. And I want to be clear, I am not playing the elites here. This is not me acting like I am above where I am from. It is just that I now know what peace feels like. And the contrast is real.

I think what being in noise has done is that I do not know how to quieten myself. I first noticed it at Opus Dei. I had gone for a talk, and I think I had also gone for confession that day. After the first talk, all you needed to do was go into the chapel, sit down, and just be. And it was so quiet. And I remember writing in my notepad: I do not know how to be quiet, I do not know how to be silent. Because even though everywhere around me was still, my mind was just racing. Noise noise. There was this need to fill it with words, with something. I had spent so long learning to be quiet inside external chaos that I had never learned the other thing, how to quieten myself when everything around me already was.

We are products of our environment. The choices we make, the aspirations we have, the things we find comfort in, are shaped by the situations and environments we found ourselves in before we even knew to question them. This is not to say people cannot rise above those circumstances. They can. But it takes work. It takes a level of self-awareness that not a lot of people develop as they go through life. Because for a long time, I just thought I preferred noise. Now I am not even sure it was a preference. I think it was familiarity.

Now I live in a quiet place. I am still learning to sit still, still learning how to not fill every quiet space in my head, still learning what it means to actually be at peace. I am grateful for the quiet. And I am still learning to live inside it.

I found this interesting:

Read Your Color

THE CAT’S LAIR ☠️

Flee As The Elites Flee

Note: I am using a simple framework here to explore this topic. Not every single member of a country’s ruling class is immoral.

An airplane is flying high in the sky on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/@oschill)

If there is one thing the political elites of a country are good at, it is preaching one thing while doing the opposite. The things they advocate for are usually framed as some moral good that decent people should strive towards. Meanwhile, in the background, they seldom believe in the very actions they extol. The same people who punished average Joes for not wearing masks during COVID were seen dining out and getting their hair done with no masks on. This was in the US, by the way, so having hypocrites in power is not a Nigerian thing. In a previous article titled “Do As The Elites Do”, I talked about the importance of mirroring the actions of the ruling class in our financial lives. This time, I will focus on mirroring the elites in periods of insecurity.

The people in power love it when you are extremely fond of your identity. When you are so attached to your social group that you would go so far as to engage in aggressive conflict to defend the group’s honour, they are thrilled. Someone insults your religion, and you are ready to fight. Someone belittles your tribe, you are ready to break bones. If you are the type to treat outsiders with dignity and respect - including those who hate you - those in power might not like you very much. Contrary to what some people think, ruling elites who foster division may not even be as prejudiced as the useful idiots under their spell. The Nigerian political class consists of men and women from all corners of the country. Some have wives and husbands from the same tribes they fearmonger about. Once it’s time to amass power and share loot, tribal affiliation clears from their eyes.

We have seen this scenario play out multiple times in the past: Ruling elites spend a great deal of time and money brewing division and sowing fear among their followers. Consequently, over time, the atmosphere becomes ripe for conflict. On a random day, some radical members of their social group get so worked up that they act out violently. Soon, a small fight turns into a full-scale war. The first thing the elites do in these situations is secure safe passage for their wives and kids to some foreign land to seek refuge there. The masterminds stay in the country but endeavour to steer clear of the frontlines. The farther away they are from the battlefronts, the better. Shortly after the war begins, they start a mass conscription campaign. Young men in their territory are forced to “fight and die” for the group. Taking part in a war of the elites’ own making is framed as “Patriotism” or “Cultural Pride”. While the plebs put their lives on the line, the elites do not. Yet, it is the latter who will take all the spoils if their side emerges victorious.

War in the 21st Century is the biggest scam known to man. Those in power who start wars lose nothing but gain everything. Even when their side loses, they won’t lose. They will probably flee to another country and start a new life with all the millions they have stashed away. It is those who were brainwashed into doing their bidding that stand to lose. The poor stand to lose their lives, their families, their homes and their livelihoods even when their side emerges victorious.

I think very poorly of politicians everywhere in general because their ranks are filled with some of the most spineless people in existence. In the old days, if you were a power-hungry tyrant, there was nowhere to hide. You would follow your men to battle, and you would be there live on the battlefield. If you made a mistake, there was a good chance you would lose your life. Gustavus Adolfus (1594 - 1632), the “father of modern warfare”, lost his life in battle. He was the king of Sweden. Alexander the Great (352 BC - 323 BC), king of Macedon, almost died at the Battle of the Granicus River (334 BC). He was saved by a last-ditch intervention by Cleitus the Black, his bodyguard. When a king was successful in battle, he usually allowed his men to grab some loot for themselves. Basically, soldiers of old usually shared in both the failures and successes of their elites. Today, the opposite is true. When a soldier fights and is victorious, he gets no loot; he gets a measly salary. Meanwhile, all the treasures he seizes go to the “state”. What really is the point of fighting in a battle you had no hand in creating, again?

In the old days, if you waged war, you or your sons would be on the battlefield, duking it out. A leader who stayed far from the field of battle was at risk of being usurped by a formidable general. In modern times, this is no longer the case. A leader’s greatness is now tied to how many men he can send to die while hiding in an impenetrable bunker - or while tweeting on social media. It is very easy to start wars when your life is not on the line. War is sweet when it is not your own sons who will do the fighting. If the instigator of a war is not on the battlefield with you, it is wise to rethink what exactly you are fighting for.

Bringing it back home, if you observe Nigerian elites closely, you will notice an overwhelming number of them have dual residencies. They can live in Nigeria and at least one foreign country. This gives them the confidence to create an unstable environment here. If the situation gets too hot, they will simply get on the next available flight to their foreign residence. Maybe it’s time we commoners started to think the same way. Live and do our best for the country, but have the option to fly to safety when those who caused the problems are fleeing. If the elites stay on to fight, we can always choose to stay on as well. Even if they chose to flee and we don’t, we can always feel better about ourselves knowing that we could have fled - but stayed on to help those with no options.

Interesting stuff: