I was raised in Nigeria, and my mother is white, but I never saw her as white, not until I came to America. She was just my mother. She didn’t really have a color.
I grew up in northern Nigeria.
What I can confirm is that I will always give a 100 per cent for Nigeria like I do at my club.
Well-trained medical doctors and engineers leave Nigeria to the developed countries. We want to reverse that.
I don’t regret turning out in the colours of Super Eagles. I love Nigeria, and I was prepared to come and play for the nation.
My target is to get as many call-ups as I can, get as many games as I can and win many trophies with Nigeria.
When your economy is subject to the whims of Libya and Nigeria and Venezuela, you have a problem.
You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
I’m not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There’s music, there’s art, there’s culture.
I lived in Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon when I was very young, until my mother divorced my father.
Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price.
I know now that what countries do at summits has the power to help girls in Pakistan, Nigeria or Afghanistan.
When Nigeria actually gave me the call-up I thought ‘oh, it’s going to be a challenge, I don’t go back there a lot, I don’t really speak the language.’ I wasn’t speaking the language as fluently as I am now, so it was always going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge I decided to take and change nationalities.
My grandfather was the king of a region in western Nigeria, where I had the privilege to live for seven years while growing up. But what we think of as royalty in the U.K. is very different to royalty in Nigeria: if you were to throw a stone there, you would hit about 30 princes.
