The National Theatre

It sits at Iganmu, and you have seen it a thousand times without stopping: a low white drum with a ribbed crown, rising out of the green between the lagoon and the expressway. People say it looks like a military cap. It was finished in 1976, and from this year there is a rail station at its feet.

Inside is five thousand seats and eight languages. Not a theatre in the sense of a stage and some seats — a machine for holding an international event, with booths built so a speech could be heard in eight languages at once.

That detail is the whole building. It was not made for Lagos audiences. It was made for the world, arriving all at once, in January 1977.

Put a photograph of the National Theatre beside a photograph of a concert hall in Varna, on the Black Sea and the argument is over before it starts. Same drum. Same ribbed crown. Same splayed concrete fins. One opened in 1968 in a Bulgarian seaside city of three hundred thousand people. The other opened in Lagos eight years later, several times the size.

The Lagos building was built by a Bulgarian state construction company — Technoexportstroy, the export arm of a Soviet-bloc state that spent the 1960s and 1970s selling finished public buildings to newly independent countries with money to spend.

Nigeria had money to spend. The oil price had quadrupled in 1973, the year the contract was signed.

FESTAC '77 was a festival that ran for four weeks — 59 countries and liberation movements. It remains the largest gathering of the Black world ever staged, and Nigeria paid for it out of the oil boom, at a moment when the country believed it was going to lead a continent.

The theatre was the room that event needed. So was Festac Town, thousands of homes built to house the delegations, which is why a suburb an hour away is named after a month in 1977.

A building put up for four weeks is still standing fifty years later. That is the fact worth sitting with, in both directions.

Between the festival and the restoration there is a stretch of decades in which the most ambitious cultural building in West Africa leaked, dimmed and emptied. Halls closed. Equipment went. The grounds around it were repeatedly proposed for sale.

Nothing in this story explains that gap, and the gap is longer than the building's useful life so far. The same pattern is on the Third Mainland Bridge and on Carter Bridge: build spectacularly, maintain nothing, then pay to rescue it.

We would like the maintenance budgets. That request is open.

On 1 October 2025 the building reopened. ₦68bn, and a new name — restored on the banks' money rather than the culture ministry's, and renamed for the living writer who is the most internationally legible Nigerian of the last century.

Lagos State put in land and built the rail station, which is why the Blue Line now runs past the front of it, and why this is the first generation that can reach the National Theatre without a car.

So the answer to who decided is: the central bank and the commercial banks. A cultural monument was recovered by the financial sector, because the part of government whose job it was did not do it.

The theatre is named after Wole Soyinka, who was held without trial from August 1967 until his release in 1969 under the military government of General Yakubu Gowon. That is the government that commissioned this building — it was finished in 1976.

It is fifty years old next year. It has been usable for perhaps fifteen of them.