Lagos Through Young Eyes: How Public School Children Rewrote the City at LRF’s February Book Reading

Inside Eko Poems, the anthology where Lagos speaks through its youngest poets.

A new generation of Nigerian voices took centre stage at the February edition of the Literary Renaissance Foundation (LRF) Monthly Book Reading, as children from Lagos public primary schools read the city back to itself through poetry.

Lagos Through the Eyes of its Youngest Poets

Hosted via Zoom and livestreamed to a wider audience, the February session of LRF’s Monthly Book Reading featured Eko Poems, an anthology of nursery‑rhyme‑style verses written by pupils in Lagos State public primary schools. The collection, developed in collaboration with the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (LASUBEB), captures what Lagos means to children aged roughly 10 to 15: a place of beauty and economic opportunity, but also a city of stress, inequality, and “dancing challenges.”

Director General of the Nigerian Tourism Development Authority (NTDA), Olayiwola “Journathespian” Awakan, who curated the project, explained that he deliberately chose to work with public school pupils as a way of giving voice to children who rarely appear in official narratives. Himself a product of public schools in the Ajegunle part of Lagos, he said he wanted pupils who “live in Lagos, sleep in Lagos” to speak in their own words about the city’s promise and its struggles.

A Multiple Award‑winning Storyteller at LRF

Reading from his extensive profile, Stephen Happiness introduced Awakan as a multiple award‑winning broadcast journalist, dramatist, poet and storyteller whose work straddles media, tourism and theatre. Before his appointment as NTDA Director General in September, he worked as a senior reporter with TVC News, winning the Nigerian Media Merit Award for TV Production of the Year and recognition at the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence, among several other honours.

His plays, including “Echoes of the Drums,” “Tafawa Balewa,” “Behind the Map,” and “The Madness That Kills My Land,” have been staged by prominent companies, with “Echoes of the Drums” performed by the National Troupe of Nigeria to mark the country’s 62nd independence anniversary. “Eko Poems,” the focus of the LRF reading, is endorsed by veteran poet Professor Niyi Osundare and features a foreword by celebrated spoken-word artist Akeem Lasisi. The anthology has been recommended for use by Junior Secondary School 2 students in Lagos State.

Inside “Eko Poems”: Lagos, Love and Hard Truths

During the session, Awakan read poems by pupils from schools such as St. Mary’s Girls School and Holy Rosary Nursery and Primary School, allowing participants to see and hear Lagos from the children’s vantage point. The verses moved between praise and critique: Lagos as a beautiful, bustling economic hub, and Lagos as a place of traffic, noise, insecurity, and poverty.

According to the anthology blurb read aloud by Awakan, Professor Osundare describes the collection as presenting Lagos “in the words of some of its youngest inhabitants… the city of countless opportunities and daunting challenges,” offering readers “images of my Lagos today” and “visionary dreams of my Lagos tomorrow.” For many participants, the children’s language and imagery captured a raw honesty adults might avoid, making the poems both literary artefacts and social documents.

LRF Community Reacts: “I wish I were a child again.”

Members of the LRF community joined from Lagos, Ibadan, Jos, and other locations, introducing themselves as students, teachers, editors, legal practitioners, volunteers, and farmers before the reading began. LRF Executive Director Babs Oladele moderated the conversation, noting that the Monthly Book Reading alternates between male and female authors and occasionally features child authors, with plans to host at least one young writer later this year.

After the readings, participants, including Linus, Tejumade Oke, and Olasupo Olabisi, praised the project for its blend of creativity and social conscience. They highlighted how the poems reveal children’s sensitivity to their environment and argued that giving young people such a platform forces adults to confront their responsibilities to the next generation. One participant reflected that they “wished they were a child again” to be part of such a groundbreaking initiative, underscoring how rare this level of support for public school pupils has been in the past.

From Lagos Pilot to National Project

A key thread in the discussion was how to move the initiative beyond Lagos. Oladele and other participants proposed a national poetry project in which children from every state write about their home communities in their own languages as well as in English. The goal would be to create a mosaic of children’s perspectives on Nigeria—its beauty, contradictions, and possibilities—while preserving linguistic and cultural diversity.

Awakan, speaking from Katsina, where he was on an official tourism tour, welcomed the idea and linked it to his broader vision of using storytelling to deepen tourism development and national branding. He described plans to replicate successful tourism storytelling models from other countries while grounding them in Nigerian realities and youth voices, suggesting that projects like “Eko Poems” could become templates for similar collaborations between creative practitioners, schools and government agencies nationwide.

Building a Reading Culture, One Session at a Time

The February edition also reaffirmed LRF’s wider mission: to use literature as a tool for civic engagement and national development. Oladele reminded attendees that the Monthly Book Reading is part of a broader effort to revive reading culture in Nigeria, alongside school outreach programmes, civic issue dialogues, and an online forum where authors share their work.

Participants were invited to join LRF’s WhatsApp Reading Community, follow the organisation on social media, and watch the full replay of the session on YouTube, where past readings often reach audiences far beyond those present on Zoom. As the session closed, Oladele thanked the NTDA Director General and all attendees, stressing that nurturing young readers and writers is central to building the informed citizenry and imaginative leadership Nigeria needs.