First thing Nigerians & Africans must bear in mind gleaning from lessons from COVID 19, apart from the very obvious health reasons, is that we need to stop putting 000s of £££ into the pockets of the unscrupulous events venue owners by paying £5000 and above to hire halls for our weddings or birthdays.

It is now very clear that our back gardens are enough for our events, and you do not have to invite everyone, with their cousins and neighbours to your event. Besides we held house parties in the 80s & 90s without dying and actually enjoyed them!

Enough of running up huge debts from credit cards and loans being incurred for just 1 day’s event, and the disgrace of being chased by your DJ, MC, Decorator or Caterer due to your inability to meet up with payments. I remember from my Decorator’s days when people will promise to pay on the day of the event from expected proceeds from the 1,1 dollar that will be sprayed. Unfortunately many of their friends and invitees don’t perform up to standard and many of them are left disappointed and in debt!!!

Then of course is the humiliating experience of queuing for food at the Nigerian owambe parties. You drive for hours to an event, never mind the additional hours it took you to get ready – make up, gele, and the actual dressing up. By the time they eventually decide it is time to feed you, it is usually gone 8pm even though you arrived at 6! And on top of all that, you will be very lucky if you got a piece of meat with your jollof rice. I’ve attended many “owambes” that you practically had to beg for food and “borrow” drinks from the next table

Nowadays There are many more Nigerians in London and the UK, and most of us have back gardens attached to our homes where we can have reasonably sized private events, and not public jamborees which we actually do not need, and can barely afford!!!! Most of the guests do not know you anyway, and many of them only come to CCTV you! But the new normal has shown we really do not need big crowd “Operation Feed the City” OFC events Smaller, classier private events are the new normal, and there will still be enough work for our events practitioners to go round. But let’s stop building and enriching the venue owners usually from the Asian community with the extortionate prices they charge for their halls!

Meanwhile

It really is time to revisit the strong and pressing issue of a Nigerian Events Hall in London.

Baroness J