by Bamidele Johnson

My friend, Sola Fasure’s Facebook essay, “Musings on Anthony Joshua’s Accident,” published on Tuesday, was not an interesting read. It was predictable and came from a joyless place. A profoundly joyless place. My friend has been in a funk since 2023. He is more sour than lemon. Big shame I cannot help. He will bristle at this intro because he is convinced he occupies Facebook’s moral watchtower, seeing all, judging all, dispensing clarity to the benighted masses. He thinks he is the Holy Spirit, actually.

I might have deferred to this assumed omniscience if the government of the man he served as governor in Osun State had not left civil servants unpaid to a stupor and the state financially skeletal. The man in question went on to serve as Minister of the Interior under the Buhari administration and effortlessly stank the place out. I do suspect that my friend considers the performance of the Buhari administration, under which his boss served, as the equivalent of Lee Kuan Yew’s. Moral absolutism is less persuasive when recent administrative memory is that bleak.

This will not be our first encounter. When Kemi Badenoch fibbed that her children could not acquire Nigerian citizenship because she is a woman, Sola insisted she was correct. Even after I pointed him in the direction of the relevant constitutional provision showing otherwise, he dug in. Later, he began to weave and twist, almost becoming contorted and having twisted blood. He remembers this.

Sola is always quick to cry ad hominem despite being the the one to insitigate. As I am not the one to turn the othet cheek, I retaliate when he instigates. That he does not find me a shrinking violet is what he does not like. I am a bit of a nasty piece of work. I am proud of it. I do not do an eye for an eye. I do an eye for an eye and your scrotal sac.

In our most recent exchange, he said I was ill-bred because I mocked him for suggesting that the EFCC was wrong to have been on Malami because there are people who have illegally acquired more assets than the former minister. I simply asked if those under prosecution should be given sunbeds in Ibiza until all other bad guys are arrested.

That was his reason for shouting ad hominem and calling me a product of ill-breeding, dragging my deceased parents into it. I did not respond in kind. I will not disparage people’s parents or families because they hold opions I do not agree with. That boundary remains intact. Everything else is negotiable. Of course, I gave it to him “in the eyes of carton”.

Anyone in doubt that he is convinced he is the Holy Spirit should check him out on Threads, where he freely calls people fools, idiots and morons for having the temerity to hold opinions, especially on the Middle East conflict. He was delighted as Israel killed. Not long ago, he announced that Facebook crawled with quarter-wits and that he, a one-man master race, might leave the platform altogether. You would think he had won the Nobel Prize more times than Messi won the Ballon d’Or. I replied that he should leave the world completely and go to be with himself in some other place since he is Einstein. Mr. Sanya Oni would remember this.

Does this intro come across as personal? I own it. There is nothing wrong with something being personal when it is not dishonest.

Now to the main menu.
In his essay, Sola writes:
“I was taken aback when Anthony Joshua displayed the Nigerian flag during his last fight, a country that has done nothing for him, while seemingly sidelining the nation that gave him everything: the global platform, the infrastructure, and the opportunities that enabled him to become a world heavyweight boxing champion.”
He concludes with unfettered flourish: “Anthony Joshua should learn not to trade his British gold for the Nigerian wood.”

This framing spectacularly mistakes grievance for clarity and cynicism for realism.
What Anthony Joshua is doing is exercising the most basic human right there is. That is the right to name oneself. Identity is not a loyalty card redeemable only where infrastructure works. It is not a transaction indexed to ambulances per square kilometre. Identity is memory, lineage, inheritance and story.

Britain, sure, gave Joshua opportunity. Nigeria gave him origin. One does not cancel the other. Adults can hold two truths without suffering cognitive collapse that Sola seems to suffer. He did not complain when Joshua took his belts to show Buhari in London. But since Buhari left, he has been wailing about Joshua’s affection for Nigeria. He is wild about Badenoch. I do not doubt that he would fellate Joshua if he was rubbishing the country like Badenoch. I own the use of fellate. No half measures here.

Second, the assumption that gratitude must be exclusive is a colonial hangover dressed up as pragmatism. Britain did not gift Joshua success out of charity. He trained, bled, marketed himself, absorbed ridicule, pressure, defeat and reinvention within a British sporting system that profits enormously from black talents. Britain provided a platform. Joshua supplied the labour, discipline and spectacle. There is no benevolence here. What exists is exchange.

Flying a Nigerian flag is neither an insult to Britain nor an act of ingratitude. It is a declaration that a black British man does not require permission to honour his ancestry. The discomfort this provokes says far more about unresolved anxieties around belonging in the West than it does about Joshua’s judgment.

When white athletes celebrate Irish, Scottish or Welsh roots within Britain, it is called heritage. When black athletes honour African roots, it suddenly becomes emotional excess or misplaced loyalty. The double standard is impossible to miss.

Sola’s horror deepens when Joshua is involved in a car accident on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. He writes of the absence of ambulances, the gawking crowd, the indignity of the dead left exposed and contrasts this with Britain, where an air ambulance would likely have arrived within minutes. All of this is true. And all of it indicts the Nigerian state, not Anthony Joshua’s presence in Nigeria.

Governance failure killing people indiscriminately is not proof that proximity to home is foolish. It is proof that home is in crisis. One does not abandon family because the house is collapsing. One mourns, demands accountability and sometimes still have to show up.

The comparison with Muhammad Ali is equally misused. Ali did not “outgrow” Africa because it disappointed him. He evolved across multiple identities, as humans do. He never renounced Africa. He simply refused to be trapped inside a single symbolic role. That complexity strengthens the case for Joshua rather than weakens it.

Sola also suggests that diaspora Nigerians cling to the country because they lack belonging abroad, imagining that emotional attachment to Nigeria will validate them. This is an overgeneralisation. Many Nigerians in the diaspora belong perfectly well where they live and still refuse to amputate their past to appease present comfort. Emotional attachment to home is not pathology. It is humanity. Only a deeply atomised worldview treats roots as liabilities.

Finally, there is the suggestion that wisdom consists in emotional detachment from Nigeria. It is a bleak prescription. It implies that the only sane response to failure is abandonment. That logic would empty nations, not fix them. Loving a country does not require illusions. It requires courage without amnesia.
Anthony Joshua does not need rescuing from sentiment. He understands exactly what he is doing. He is asserting that success abroad does not require cultural sterilisation and that dignity is not measured solely by emergency response times.

The real danger lies in mistaking comfort for virtue and efficiency for belonging. Some nations function well and still fail the soul. Others fail structurally and still tug at the heart.
Joshua chose to honour both.
That is is being sure of himself.

Bamidele Johnson’s Musings