It was a beautiful Saturday morning, yes very beautiful. Actually you rarely have a bad morning in the city of Jos. The weather was chill as usual but i would be embarking on a trip to Shendam, a town about 2 hours drive away from Jos. My friend Hyginus had proposed the trip to make up for an important function. We would have to watch a local football match that morning before commencing the trip. It would be my first visit to Shendam, so that accounted for my curiosity.

We arrived the match venue late, at the commencement of the second half, before I found out the match was between Lowcost and Rayfield.

No sooner had the match ended that a duel ensued. From what I sighted afar, the feud was ignited between a guy from the lowcost team (A Jos Guy) and a Chris Giwa FC Player (An Igbo chap). I had no clear idea of the cause of what resulted into an aggressive exchange of words. Apparently, both spectators were co-incidentally wearing a mo-hog hairstyle.

While still oblivious of what was happening, the Igbo guy made a statement that resonated like an earthquake amidst the crowd around me, stirring a cloud of aggression against him. The little feud suddenly became a mini crisis. “See this guy, you think say i be Jos boy?” was the statement that broke the carmel’s back. That Igbo boy was in a real trouble. The fight was bought at no penny by the crowd who were supposed to be onlookers, or mere spectators.

And so I was left at the mercies of so many pondering questions. What is this about? So who is a Jos boy? were the questions that scaled above my endurance threshold.

As if not to be objective about what ran through the veins of my thought that fateful Saturday morning. It wasn’t a fight for domination or assertion, it was an inferiority super complex’s exhibition from a conspicuous identity loss. What I saw was a crowd making out placards with inscriptions reading “Save Our Soul”.

If it was a fight for indigenization, then to what extent can we hold on to this fight? We are barely fighting a lost battle that we have a premonition of, so how stupid and irrational we were. How dare we stand to fight a guy who spoke boldly against a crowd he definitely knew such a statement of that magnitude would infuriate. It seemed he was calling for his own execution but he sure knows where he is coming from. He wasn’t oblivious of his status as an underdog at that point in time.

I would soon have an answer to one of my questions when someone from the crowed shouted on top of his voice saying “Ba so boda mun baku shaguna ne ya sa kana maganan banza ba?” translated to mean “Where it not for our shops leased to you. Would you have got such an audacity to make this comment?” then I soon realized what the fight was all about. When you control the economic power of any town you control every other thing. A little walk around Rwang Pam street, Ahmadu Bello, Dilimi, Farin Gada, then other Local Governments of the state should just be enough for one to turn back and say thank you to our dear friend who is not a “Jos boy”. Sure, he knows that control of the Economy translates to control of everything. Our opponent has taken our shops and houses and used it to better effect than we, its owners. But like ancients deserted by the gods we must return again and again to the fetish temple of sanity to seek succor.

So who is a “Jos boy”? A lunatic once prided himself as a Jos boy by the number of girls he had dated, the number of clubs he had attended not to talk of the number of alcohol he had consumed. He told me “Daser, you are not a Jos boy” for which I totally agreed, well by this standard. Here is a crowd in defence of an identity that is obviously non-existent. My Igbo friend is, ironically, my favourite. He is not a Jos boy, he is an enterprising young man, he works very hard to make a living, he is an investor, he doesn’t get high on alcohol in the morning and get women laid at night. Oh no, he controls a large portion of the economy.

While we were drunk in the morning, my igbo friend was at his business premise making it worthwhile, while we were clubbing at night, he was resting for the next day’s challenges, while we were hanging out with women during the weekends, he was in his traditional and business meetings discusing business monopoly.

The ordeal of the story is before we realize it, we are of age and who cares about if there is such thing as a “Jos Man” or “Jos Grandfather”? The record of how many girlfriends we had and how many parties we organized or attended in our “Jos Boyhood” would remain the missing piece in our memoir or citations if there will ever be.

I have never seen where a man was applauded or received a standing ovation for the number of women he had or the number of parties he had attended. They remain buried on our conscience, they form the major portion of our regrets.

The mantra of a “Jos Boy” only comes with a voltron’s identity but with a snail hit of a hammer.

Here is where our great State faces a deadly vulnerability. As we fight for identity, we are not merely weakening our own we are endangering the fate of our next generations’. We are loosing the battle.

When we lose our identity and sense of self, we are likely to seek our sense of self-worth from others. It suddenly becomes very important how others view us, as our sense of value and self-worth, our feelings of confidence, are dependent on external factors such as our physical appearance, success, status, money, and even fame. As a result, we seek reassurance and praise from others to feel OK about ourselves — but in reality, our emotional well-being depends on how we feel about ourselves.

Awareness that we have ‘lost’ our identity is one of the first steps towards finding it again. This can help us to lose the labels that we have hung around our neck. What are the labels? drunkeness, laziness, hopelessness, womanizing and all sorts of dark stains. What is the lost identity? Strenght, Courage and Creativity. Were we not the same people who showed strenght and courage against Jihad? Were we not the same people who have bred the likes of MI, Ice Prince, Ruby Gyang and many others?

Therefore The “Jos Boy Way of Success” should enshrine triumph through hard work and dedication. It was our divine token of our superiority shown in times past. Even better challenges from others are met by all-out Jos out-performance.

We must emulate the spirit of Sim Shagaya, the founder and CEO of Konga.com, Nigeria’s largest online shopping portal and DealDey spinoff site. Sim has been featured on forbes for every good reasons. An entrepreneur who has shown zealousness in disrupting the ecommerce industry. This is the “Jos Boy” spirit. Sim Shagaya is the real “Jos Boy”.

Dimbo Atiya (Choks) is another personality that i can stand with as a true “Jos Boy”. Someone who is currently sparking light in his profession of Movie directing and who is also the founder of the popular “Jostified” movement. There are many more guys doing us proud out there.

By regaining our “Jos Boy” identity is putting and end to dependency on external validation of who we are (no rush into a fight with someone by the way he looks at us). Until we arrive there, we still owe my Igbo friend an apology.

We must begin a sort of our own defined Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement in our mentality to restore our identity. We must conserve our strength and so preserve our way of life. We must retrace back to pick up our identity, “I am a Jos Boy” by Sim’s and Atiya’s Standards.

My much respects to all the Igbo boys and other tribes who see themselves as “Jos Boys” for the right reasons and to those who have defended the name for the right reasons most especially those boys who stood their ground that fateful day to bring my Igbo friend to order. We are all in Jos together.

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You think say I be Jos boy? Compelling piece by Daser David