Nigeria’s politicians love to wrap their mouths around big words like democracy, and Efi Cruise has had enough of hearing them. On “Ojoro”, released on 1 October through Bayside Records for the sixty-sixth anniversary of the country’s independence, he gives their way of governing a more accurate name, “oyocracy”, and says what it means: “government for yourself, government by yourself”. Tucked inside the word is OYO, Nigerian shorthand for “on your own”, which is where a government busy serving itself leaves everybody else.

Those same politicians are all over the telly, talking plenty, each with a “bigi belle like who want born twins”, a belly big enough to be carrying twins. He accuses them of giving posts to the wrong people, so that a farmer ends up inspecting oil and a lawyer building roads, and of spending public money they cannot account for. He asks in Pidgin what such people should be called, “Wetin we go call them oh”, and answers with the song’s title: “ojoro” means cheating, and it is the word shouted on a Nigerian street football pitch when a decision looks fixed. His complaint reaches beyond politicians to ordinary Nigerians, who he says have stopped looking out for one another: “Even in congregations people are lonely”, he sings, picturing people who feel alone even when gathered for worship. He ends by speaking to the politician directly, calling him “oga”, the Pidgin word for a boss, and telling him to “show love to your brother-man”.

Efi Cruise was born Efiom Ita in Lagos, with family roots in the southern city of Calabar. He sang in his school choir, then studied business in Plymouth,  in the UK, and returned to Nigeria in 2018, against the wishes of family and friends, to make music his career. Two albums followed, Mirrors in 2023 and If You Were Me You Would Be Dead last year, in a style he has named Southern Afro-Jazz: he scat-sings, improvising with wordless syllables as bebop vocalists do, over highlife and funk grooves. On “Ojoro”, produced with Onil, David Knauf and Bayside, he leans on afrobeat, the music Fela Kuti used in the 1970s to ridicule Nigeria’s military rulers, and laughs at their civilian successors.

Listen to “Ojoro” HERE