by Adeleke Babatunde

I never met Brymo. I want to say that upfront, because this is not about a personal slight or a wound to the ego. There is no wedding story here, no moment where he looked through me like I was furniture. My relationship with Olawale Brymo Ashimi is the purest kind a fan can have: just me, and the music, and what the music said.

In 2022, just a few hours after the release of Ethos, his joint Album with A-Q, I wrote a crash review of the album. I listened twice before I wrote:https://x.com/lakezWrites/status/1557990098020585472?s=20 

What Brymo music said was everything. 

He grew up in Okokomaiko, one of the rougher edges of Lagos, the kind of place that does not produce men who romanticise power. He was recording music at fourteen. By nineteen he had independently produced his first album, with no label, no machine, no infrastructure behind him. Just will and a voice that sounded like it had already seen things. When Ice Prince put him on “Oleku” in 2010 and the country suddenly knew his name, it felt less like a discovery than a confirmation. Those of us who love music sensed immediately: this one is different. This one is thinking.

Then came Merchants, Dealers and Slaves in 2013, and different became undeniable.

The title alone was a thesis. Brymo was not being subtle. He was telling you exactly how he saw Nigeria, exactly how he had organised the country in his mind after years of watching it from Okokomaiko and Lagos Island and every striving, surviving space in between. Three tiers. Three roles. The Merchants at the top, the elite ruling class who control the wealth and set the terms. The Dealers in the middle, the enablers, the fixers, the people who trade favours for survival and tell themselves they are pragmatic rather than complicit. And at the bottom, doing all the real work and receiving the least of the reward: the Slaves.

He was not talking about history. He was talking about the street outside your window.

“Down” opened the album like a confession on behalf of the whole country. The song is a slow, sorrowful reckoning with a society that has accepted its own collapse, that has normalised the rot so completely it no longer registers as rot. It does not shout. It mourns. And mourning, done right, is more devastating than anger.

“Grand Pa” went further. On the surface it is a song about an old man who parties while his household falls apart, who misplaces his priorities and neglects the people depending on him. But you would have to be deliberately obtuse not to hear what Brymo was actually describing: Nigeria’s political class, the elderly statesmen squandering national resources on personal comfort while citizens scratch for survival. He dressed the critique in narrative, in character, in the specific details of a foolish old man at a party, and it landed harder for being indirect. That is craft. That is a writer who trusts his audience.

And then the title track itself: “If you ain’t got freedom, you can’t give.” Six words. The whole colonial inheritance of Nigeria compressed into a single line. How do you build a nation of free people when the people who founded it were themselves never free of the hunger for domination? How do you give what was never given to you? Brymo was not just writing songs. He was writing history, writing sociology, writing the kind of sentences that make you put down whatever you are doing and sit with the weight of what you just heard.

He released that album independently, days after Chocolate City filed an injunction to stop him. His former label, the machine that had amplified his voice and then tried to cage it, came after him with lawyers. And he released the album anyway. The themes of Merchants, Dealers and Slaves, the breaking of chains, the refusal to be owned, the cost of freedom, were not just artistic positions. They were autobiography. He was living the album while making it.

That is the Brymo I loved. That is the artist whose music felt like it was made for people who refused to be lied to.

Then came 2022, and Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced he was running for president.

And Brymo said: let a city boy be president for once.

I want to stay with that phrase for a moment, because it deserves scrutiny. “City boy.” The man who wrote about Lagos as a machine that turns human beings into survivalist dealers, the man who documented in “Eko” how elite partygoers and exploited hustlers share the same streets without ever truly sharing the same city, the man who spent an entire album explaining how the urban system traps ordinary people in bondage, was now asking Nigeria to hand the presidency to the person who ran that city.

The contradiction is not subtle. It is operatic.

In “Heya,” from his album Oṣó, Brymo strips down the psychology of a post-colonial people who have been taught to celebrate surface-level development, to applaud political theatre, to mistake the performance of progress for progress itself. He mocks the “big men” who perform wealth while the country rots beneath the spectacle. He is warning, explicitly, against being dazzled by appearances. Against confusing a gleaming skyline with genuine development. Against letting aesthetics do the work that scrutiny should do.

And his central argument for Tinubu was: look at modern Lagos.

He met with Tinubu in person. He met with Kashim Shettima. Photos circulated. The man who once stood alone against a corporate machine that tried to silence him was now sitting in rooms with the most powerful political machine in the country, and he looked comfortable there.

His fans quoted “Heya” back at him. They said: is this not exactly what you warned us about? Is this gleaming “city boy” argument not precisely the surface-level seduction you told us to resist? The criticism was not unfair. It was his own lyrics, held up like a mirror.

Here is what makes the Brymo situation different from K1, and in some ways harder to sit with.

K1 is a Fuji musician working within a tradition that has always included praise singing. The griot who elevates the powerful is a figure with deep roots in Yoruba culture. K1’s transformation, from accountability to patronage, follows a comprehensible trajectory even if it is a disappointing one. The system he moved into had a logic, even a cultural precedent.

Brymo had no such cover. His entire artistic identity was built on the explicit rejection of exactly the kind of power he ended up endorsing. He did not merely stop criticising. He became an evangelist. He did not look away from the system he had named and anatomised. He looked at it and said: this one is different. This one has a plan.

The Merchants, Dealers and Slaves framework he gave us makes the betrayal almost too neat. He spent an album explaining that the Dealers are the ones who trade favours for survival, who enable the system by finding their comfortable place within it, who tell themselves they are being pragmatic while the Slaves continue to pay the price. And then, when the moment came, he stepped into the role he had drawn with his own hand.

He became a Dealer.

I do not know what was offered. I do not know what conversations happened in those rooms. Maybe nothing was offered and he genuinely believed what he was saying, that Tinubu had a plan, that a city boy would fix what career politicians had broken. People believe stranger things. Artists are not immune to political naivety, to being charmed by proximity to power, to mistaking access for alignment.

But I keep returning to Merchants, Dealers and Slaves, because that album is not the work of a naive man. That album is the work of someone who understood the system from the inside, who had mapped it carefully, who knew exactly what the tiers were and who occupied them and at what cost. You do not write “if you ain’t got freedom, you can’t give” by accident. You write that line because you have thought seriously about freedom and what its absence produces.

He knew. That is what makes it hard.

Ozymandias is the Shelley poem about a ruined statue in the desert, a monument to a king who commanded the world to look upon his works and despair at their magnificence. The statue is broken. The desert is empty. Nothing beside remains. The point of the poem is not just that power fades, but that power always believes it will not. That the powerful are always the last to understand their own impermanence.

Brymo named one of his songs after that poem. He understood what it was saying.

I wonder if he thinks about it now. About what it means to have once stood in the desert, looking at the broken statue, writing clearly about what you see, and then later finding yourself in the retinue of the king.

The music is still there. Merchants, Dealers and Slaves still exists. “Down” still mourns. “Grand Pa” still indicts. “If you ain’t got freedom, you can’t give” is still true, more true now perhaps than when he wrote it.

But the man who made those songs made a different choice when it mattered most. When the election came and the country needed its conscious artists to be exactly what they had always claimed to be, he stepped sideways.

I never met Brymo. My grief is not personal in the way that grief over a friend would be. It is the grief of someone who trusted a voice, who let that voice shape how he understood the world, who believed that the clarity in the music reflected a clarity in the man.

Maybe that was always too much to ask of any artist. Maybe the music and the man were never as unified as I needed them to be.

But Merchants, Dealers and Slaves told me otherwise. That album felt like a promise. It felt like a man saying: I see the system, I refuse it, and here is my refusal in twelve tracks.

He broke the promise. He joined the system he named.

And somewhere in the desert, the statue stands a little while longer.