Afro beat singer, Seun Kuti, has said that the Nigerian government was ill advised to ban the use of marijuana, believing that the decision is a carryover of colonial law.
According to the artiste, “There are doctors and scientists who believe that marijuana should be legalised. There are also lawyers, judges, and politicians who believe that the war on drugs is a false war. That is actually a war on the poor people all over the world, because poor people and rich people use drugs to be sane. But you will find that here, people are in jail more for drug use.”
Going further, he said, “We as Africans had no reason to ban marijuana. It was done out of the U.S. lobby, forcing our governments to ban the drug. I don’t think that the Nigerian government has ever carried out any independent research on marijuana. One of the biggest markets in the world for marijuana in the world is Israel (which is a more religious country than Nigeria). But they understand the benefits… especially the economic benefits. So much wealth can be generated from it, but that is another issue entirely.”
Seun, a father of one, says that he does not believe in marriage for the simple reason that it is a power game. “It is a thing of ego, of domination and submission. I think humanity is gradually moving away from it from the number of marriages that don’t even work. In the ones that work, someone has to submit, someone has to give up who they are for the other person for it to work; especially the women, if no one agrees to do that, the marriage won’t work. Women are more independent,” he said.
The singer, who studied Popular Music and Sound Technology at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, going further with his thoughts of marriage, and women’s liberation said that his grandmother Mrs. Funmilayo Kuti, a foremost nationalist and feminist did not have a great relationship with her husband after she became independent. “My father told me that when his father died, his mother told him she and her husband had not been speaking for 10 years, even though they lived in the same house… staying together because of the children. My grandfather was a reverend, so divorce was not an option. Not like Chris Oyakhilome, or Chris Okotie that divorced, they swore an oath to God, and still broke the oath.”