The contemporary art and photography exhibition “Wake Up!” is back again for a second edition.

Curated by Awele Onwordi, Wake Up! 2 exhibition pays homage to the Nigerian youth and burgeoning street culture which many of its contributing artists reference in their works.

Also read: FG to Review Foreign Scholarships and Focus on Nigerian Schools

Titled “Young, Wild, Free”, the exhibition celebrates the creativity, resilience, freedom and cultural influence found in Nigerian youth.

Taking aim at societal issues and economic concerns, the exhibit reflects the youth and their refusal to compromise or bow despite all the challenges stacked against them while charting youth culture through art, music, fashion, skateboarding, photography and community.

The exhibition will be held, once again, at the Angel and Muse Gallery at 25 Sumbo Jibowu street off Ribadu Road off Awolowo Road in Ikoyi.

It will open on Saturday 5 September 2026 and will run until 11 September 2026
This second edition which focuses on celebrating, nurturing and exploring artistic practices rooted in youth and street culture will feature works from DENCITY and SUPERGLIDER HOUSE.

Exhibiting artists include Ajilore Kehinde – their work is deeply influenced by Nigerian street culture and works of other artists like Slawn, Peters Ejiro, etc, Chuka Onwordi – graphic designer who embodies themes of death, melancholy and beauty in his works, ZIDYEP – Abuja based creative whose works move between digital and physical spaces through art, graphic design and air brushing , Franklyn Okoye – graphic designer and artist whose works explore themes of identity and hyper-reality, Awele Onwordi – founder & curator of WAKE UP and multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans character art, creative logo design, album covers and more , Oluchi Kogolo – digital illustrator whose work explores street culture, personality and storytelling through a raw and playful visual style and Kozetuo Apeji – multidisciplinary artists who work explores experimental approaches to problem solving through both digital and traditional art forms.

Commenting on the exhibition in her curatorial statement, Awele noted that “despite economic instability, limited opportunities and socio-political challenges, Nigerian youth continue to shape culture through music, fashion, art, skateboarding, raves, photography and community.”

Also read: FG to Review Foreign Scholarships and Focus on Nigerian Schools

Continuing and harping on the raison d’etre of the exhibition she said, “Young, Wild and Free exists to celebrate Nigerian youth while also creating a platform that supports and amplifies them.”

By Azuh Arinze,

Yes, I did!

Nobody roughened me up. Nobody also robbed me. But death “did me bad.” It suddenly snatched Dotun Oladipo, managing editor and founder of The Eagle Online, one of the best and leaders in online journalism in our country and a former president of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP).

Also read: Obasa Mourns Eagle Online Publisher Dotun Oladipo

To know Dotun is to know peace. To have Dotun in your team is also to have victory. Just share your feelings/thoughts/burdens with him and watch him carry them with smiles on his shoulder. And guess what: he won’t rest until victory is won.

I became fairly close to him after I joined GOCOP. And till death came calling on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, in a very, very shocking manner, “he carried my matter on his head.”

He did quite a lot, but I will share just one experience – and this happened at the Zenith Bank branch in Ogba, Lagos about a month ago. I had an issue to resolve inside the bank, and because his office wasn’t too far away, I called him to ask if he could be of assistance.

He explained that he was at home, fairly far away from where I was. I terminated the call. But he called back immediately, asking me to calm down and explain what happened to him. When I finished, he asked me to wait for him at the bank.

Meanwhile he had inadvertently allowed it to slip that he was getting ready for an appointment on the island when my unexpected call altered his program.

Long story short – he made it to the bank ultimately and in a jiffy helped to sort out the issue before heading to his appointment.

As minor as this may seem to some people, it taught me another lesson in selflessness, which Dotun epitomized all through his life.

I saw him last on Tuesday, August 11, 2026 at Radisson Blu Hotel in Ikeja GRA, Lagos. Both of us were there for the second edition of my friend, Olumide Iyanda’s Creative Powerhouse Summit.

As soon as I sighted the workaholic hitting hard on his laptop, tucked in a corner of the hall, to avoid any form of distraction, I went for the exchange of our always-warm pleasantries.

I have been reminiscing on that short memory ever since the unpleasant news of his death reached me.

And even as I cried in my bed last night; and after visiting his home very early today to condole with his wife and children. I will continue to hold on to that memory of him.

Fondly called Emeritus by many of us, especially in GOCOP, Dotun was loved by many. My prayer is that the Lord rests his gentle soul.

Also read: Obasa Mourns Eagle Online Publisher Dotun Oladipo

But above all, may God comfort his wife, children and loved ones, especially his mom who will definitely be devastated by his passing.

Adieu, Emeritus!

Adieu, Ochiliozuo of GOCOP!

Till we meet to part no more.

By Osoba Otaigbe,

Why Nigeria’s next economic breakthrough must turn human energy into organisational productivity

The Conversations That Started My Thinking

Recently, I had the opportunity to facilitate two training programmes in Nigeria that caused me to think more deeply about productivity. The first was Maximising Personal Productivity and Positive Thinking, delivered with NNPC Academy. The second was Customer Relationship Management, delivered for the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria at its Kaduna Training Centre.

Also read: Free GCE Forms: Akindele, Falade Challenge Beneficiaries to Turn Opportunity into Success

The programmes were different in subject and purpose, but the conversations with participants kept bringing me back to the same question: Why do highly capable and hardworking people sometimes struggle to achieve their full potential within our organisations? I encountered some intelligent professionals, experienced managers and people genuinely committed to doing their jobs well. Yet our discussions also revealed something familiar about organisational life in Nigeria.

People often expend considerable energy navigating processes, overcoming institutional barriers and finding ways around systems before they can get the work done.

I left those engagements thinking beyond training. Nigeria does not lack capable people. We have ambitious leaders, intelligent professionals, innovative entrepreneurs and a remarkable capacity to improvise.

The deeper question is whether the organisations and systems within which our people work enable them to convert all that energy into its full productive value.

Understanding Nigeria’s Productive Chaos

This led me to a phrase that I believe describes an important part of the Nigerian economic experience: productive chaos. By productive chaos, I mean an environment in which enormous human energy, ingenuity and economic activity produce results despite, rather than because of, many of the systems surrounding them.

Nigeria is certainly productive. Travel through Lagos, Kano, Aba, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Kaduna or Onitsha and you encounter economic energy everywhere. People are trading, manufacturing, building, transporting, financing, designing and solving problems.

When electricity fails, businesses find alternative power. When conventional finance is difficult to access, entrepreneurs find other sources of capital. When distribution systems are inadequate, traders create their own networks.

When formal processes become slow, people develop workarounds. Nigerians have become remarkably good at making things happen.

There is much to admire in this resilience, but there is also a danger. We can become so accustomed to celebrating our ability to overcome difficult systems that we stop asking why the systems remain difficult in the first place.

The more important question is this: How much more could Nigeria achieve if our systems worked as hard as our people do?

Activity Is Not the Same as Productivity

Activity should not be confused with productivity. An organisation can have hundreds of hardworking employees and still be inefficient. A business can invest heavily in technology while maintaining poor processes. A government institution can employ highly qualified professionals while decisions continue to move slowly.

A company can send hundreds of employees on training programmes without knowing whether the learning subsequently improves performance. Everyone can be extremely busy while the organisation remains less productive than it should be.

Development economist Joe Studwell offers a useful perspective on this question. His work on economic development reminds us that economic activity by itself does not necessarily produce prosperity. Sustainable development requires economies to increase their productive capacity.

Agriculture, industry, finance, skills and institutions must increasingly work together to create greater value.

For Nigeria, this distinction is important. Our challenge is not simply to generate more economic activity.

We must become better at converting the enormous amount of activity already taking place into sustained productivity. That means moving from productive chaos to productive coordination.

From Productive Chaos to Productive Coordination

Consider an orchestra or afrobeat band containing fifteen outstanding musicians. Every musician may be exceptionally talented, but if each person plays a different composition at the same time without a common score, individual excellence produces noise. The problem is not talent. The problem is coordination. The musicians need a common score, clear direction, disciplined practice and the ability to listen to one another.

Organisations are not very different from that example. A company may have talented people, technology, financial resources and an ambitious strategy and still underperform because these elements are poorly connected. Strategy must connect with execution. Leadership must connect with accountability. Training must connect with performance.

Technology must connect with processes. Customer promises must connect with customer experience. Investment must connect with measurable outcomes.

This is why Nigeria does not simply need only more talented people. We need organisations capable of multiplying the talent we already have. Productive coordination is what turns individual effort into institutional capability.

From Coordination to Transformation

Productive coordination creates the conditions for productive transformation. Transformation is a word we use frequently in Nigeria, but perhaps we need to become more demanding about what it means.

Transformation is not simply introducing new technology, restructuring an organisation, engaging consultants or sending employees for training. The real test should be much simpler: What changed?

If an organisation introduces new technology, what improved? If 500 employees are trained, what changed six months later? If consultants redesign an organisation, what became more efficient? If a department is restructured, did decision making improve? If a customer service programme is introduced, did customers actually experience better service?

Transformation should ultimately be measurable. Decisions should become faster. Processes should become simpler.

Managers should lead better. Employees should understand priorities. Customers should receive better service.

Resources should generate greater value. Innovation should move from conversation to implementation. Accountability should become part of organisational culture.

Diagnose Before You Prescribe

My recent training experiences reinforced another lesson. Training matters, but not every organisational problem is a training problem.

Sometimes what appears to be an employee performance problem is actually a management problem. What appears to be a technology problem may be a process problem.

What looks like a customer service problem may originate much deeper within organisational culture.

What appears to be poor execution may result from employees not understanding the organisation’s strategy.

When we diagnose the problem incorrectly, we can spend considerable resources treating symptoms while leaving the underlying problem untouched.

Before asking, “What training do our people need?”, perhaps Nigerian organisations should first ask a more fundamental question: “What is preventing this organisation from performing at its full potential?”

That question changes the conversation. It moves us from programmes to problems, from assumptions to evidence and from interventions to measurable outcomes.

It also encourages leadership to look at the organisation as an interconnected system rather than treating every challenge in isolation.

Productivity Is a National Question

There is a wider national reason why this matters. We usually discuss Nigeria’s economic future through the language of government policy.

We talk about GDP, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, infrastructure, taxation, foreign investment and government expenditure.

These issues are important, but national productivity does not happen somewhere abstractly called “the economy”. It happens every day inside organisations.

A farmer becomes more productive. A factory becomes more productive. A bank becomes more productive. A government department becomes more productive. A hospital becomes more productive. A university becomes more productive.

A logistics company becomes more productive. A small business becomes more productive. Multiply these improvements across thousands of organisations and eventually we are no longer talking simply about organisational productivity. We are talking about national productivity.

Nigeria’s next productivity revolution may therefore be quieter than we imagine. It may not begin with one spectacular national project.

It could emerge through thousands of improvements taking place simultaneously across our institutions and businesses.

Imagine a government agency reducing a process that once took three weeks to three days. Imagine a bank removing unnecessary stages from a customer’s journey.

Imagine a manufacturer discovering the real reason production is below capacity and addressing it. Imagine a family business developing governance structures that allow it to flourish beyond its founder.

Imagine an organisation returning six months after a major training programme to measure what actually changed.

Each improvement may appear small when viewed independently. Across thousands of organisations, however, these improvements begin to change the productive capacity of a nation.

Introducing OARE360

It is from this conviction that I have been developing OARE360, Organisational Advancement, Readiness and Excellence 360. OARE360 begins with a simple principle: diagnose before you prescribe. Its purpose is to help organisations understand their organisational health and readiness, identify the factors constraining performance, determine the interventions genuinely required and measure whether improvement actually takes place.

The starting point should not always be the assumption that technology will solve the problem, that another restructuring exercise is required or that another training programme will automatically improve performance.

The starting point should be understanding the organisation itself. What is working? What is not working? Why? What needs to change? What should leadership prioritise? Most importantly, how will we know whether the intervention has worked?

OARE360 is therefore part of a wider proposition. If we want a more productive Nigeria, we must deliberately build more productive Nigerian organisations.

Stronger organisations create better jobs, use resources more efficiently, develop people more effectively, serve customers better and create greater economic value.

From Organisational Productivity to National Prosperity

Nigeria does not lack ambition. We do not lack entrepreneurs. We do not lack intelligence. We certainly do not lack hardworking people.

Our deeper challenge is to create organisations and institutions capable of converting these strengths into sustained productivity.

For too long, one measure of Nigerian ingenuity has been our ability to succeed despite difficult systems.

There is something admirable about that resilience, but resilience should not become an excuse for inefficient systems.

We should aspire to a Nigeria where systems release human potential rather than consume so much of it.

Imagine organisations where talented people do not spend much of their energy navigating avoidable obstacles.

Imagine decisions informed by evidence, investment in people producing measurable improvement, technology simplifying processes, institutions learning from experience and businesses scaling because their systems can scale with them.

This is the journey I believe Nigeria now needs to pursue:

Productive Chaos → Productive Coordination → Productive Transformation → National Prosperity.

Nigeria has already demonstrated that its people can produce extraordinary results in difficult circumstances. The next chapter of our development should be even more ambitious.

Also read: Free GCE Forms: Akindele, Falade Challenge Beneficiaries to Turn Opportunity into Success

We must build organisations and institutions capable of releasing the extraordinary potential already present in our people. That is the productivity conversation Nigeria now needs.