The Experience - The Area Boys

A week today, I was planning on how to attend what is arguably the largest gathering of people on a spot for a Christian musical concert on earth tagged “The eXperience”. At the inception of this blog last year, I remember how eager I was to tell the story from the same event, as I was part of it for the first time last year. I am sure I didn’t capture the story well, but I told the story anyway [Here] & [Here].

The eXperience is not so strange to some of you. I am sure one or two of you were at the Tafawa Balewa Square (TBS) venue of the event on that blessed night, 4^th December 2015. There are some who followed it up on Cable, social media and other sites that streamed the event live.

The organisation of the event wowed me as much as it did at the last edition and other previous editions - ofcourse there has been a tremendous improvement of the year, as this year's eXperience is the 10th edition; the sound system was out of this world, the stage, the lighting, the seating arrangement, the security, the provision of toilet facilities, Emergency health care services, vendors selling food and other controlled items etc. I give thumbs up to the organisers, they must have put in a lot of effort to achieve the success they did. There are lots of lessons to learn from the organising of a big event like this, anyways you want to look at it. I'll just pick one to talk about.

The event is usually scheduled to start at 7pm and close by 5am. I arrived TBS at about 8:30pm (already late). I meet a very-very long queue of people who were yet to enter. The queue was so long so much so that I didn’t enter the arena until about 10:30pm. The security men were doing a great job ensuring order and ensuring people entered well searched and disarmed if they found anything that looked to them like weapon.

While waiting for my turn to get into the arena, I noticed that the set of security men keeping order on the outside streets of the arena were those who you may want to tag as “Area Boy’s” in the part of the Island. But really, you could hardly tell. They were dressed in a customised t-shirt for the event, with “security” inscribed on it too. The guys were looking so good and acted organised that you may confuse them to be a special team of ushers from, say… another parish or branch of the organising church – House of the Rock. I was impressed.

If only our government can positively engage the people the society have tagged as social miscreants and _______ (I forgot the word), they would use their energy in a more constructive way for the good of all. Sometimes I think all these people need is someone to give them the option or better ways to dissipate their energy and still survive. They must not be nuisance to themselves and the society to be fulfilled, because at the end, you will come to  realise that even their present lifestyle (as agbero's and touts or what have you), is in a quest of finding some form of fulfilment, especially when it is the only lifestyle they know of.

What do you think? Kindly drop your comments.

If you attend the eXperience and you come out the same then you need to check yourself...

TGIF…Cheers!