Upon his return from the USA, popular musician, Charlie Boy, also known as Area Father, returned to his village, Oguta in Imo State, where he spent seven years. The son of a retired Judge of the Supreme Court, Charlie Boy, stuck to his guns as he insisted that for him, it was music or nothing. But his meeting with Tyna Onwudiwe in the village changed his life.
Charlie Boy said, “I will never forget Tyna Onwudiwe. While in the village, after my return from overseas, I refused to work although jobs were provided for me. I told my parents that I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to become Charlie Boy. I became Charlie Boy to tell the timid and myopic Nigerians that you have the right to be what you want to be, and that one must not follow only a ‘zombie’ way of thinking and doing things. Everybody cannot be the same and everybody can’t follow the same way. You can’t say I am crazy because I wear this, except you too are crazy.
“When in the village for seven years after I returned from America, I insisted that I was going to play music. I told my parents and calmly accepted to go my way when they told me to do so. It was Tyna who came to rescue me from the village to Lagos. I liked her because she was like a perfect woman. She encouraged me that I was going to succeed in my venture. There were many people who saw her as a mad woman. This was the only woman that would spend her last kobo on somebody else. Tyna didn’t want me to waste away in the village, so, she tricked me to Lagos that a recording company was going to wax my music. I was shocked that she had prepared an accommodation for me, with one year rent already paid for. If not for her I would have languished in jail. Man is a God to another man,” he said.
Commenting on the state of the nation, the Area Father faulted government’s neglect of youths, likening some Nigerian leaders to armed robbers. He said, “I identify with the difficulties youths face in Nigeria, which bleed my heart. Youths are the most deprived. How would you expend resources on schooling or some vocation only to remain jobless and redundant in the society? I cry for this country.
Painfully, this is happening in the midst of abundant resources while our ‘yahoo-yahoo’ (fraudulent) leaders choose to steal from our common treasury. God will not stop punishing them until they stop looting. I blame myself, and our people for not confronting them before now. We are at fault over the untold injustice and oppression they heap on us.”