Nigerian rapper, singer and producer eLDee the Don has released a song that turns a familiar dating script into a punchline.
In I Wish You Well, he narrates an encounter with a woman he has barely met who first asks for a loan, saying her car has been towed and her rent is due, before the requests widen to travel, designer goods and other markers of luxury consumption.
Assisted by comedian Lasisi Elenu, he recognises the pattern and declines the role assigned to him: “I ain’t the one.
I wish you well.”
According to that report, the song has further popularised the discussion, with its use online extending to a wider conversation about financially supporting others, including relatives.
For better, for OPay
eLDee occupies an important place in the history of popular music in democratic Nigeria.
Through the Trybesmen and the broader Da Trybe movement, he helped shape Nigerian hip-hop in the late 1990s and 2000s, and songs such as Plenty Nonsense, I Go Yarn, Bosi Gbangba, Big Boy and One Day combined entertainment with sharp observations about social aspiration, politics and everyday life.
His 2011 youth mobilisation campaign, The Politics of Our Time, was central to one scholar’s analysis of electoral consciousness in the music of democratic Nigeria.
He has not released much music in the past decade, and this time his subject is not electoral politics or poor governance but billing.
Afrobeats has long celebrated male wealth, generosity and conspicuous spending.
The ideal successful man is often imagined as someone who can spend freely – at clubs, in restaurants, on fashion, travel, cars and romantic partners – while women are frequently positioned as validators or beneficiaries of that prosperity.
Against that backdrop, the report describes eLDee’s track as a bold and unusual outlier: a crisp and witty takedown of a world where men are measured in money and women in beauty, where romance is a marketplace, intimacy is measured through transactions, and consumption becomes evidence of affection.
These shifting expectations around romance are made visible through music videos and on social media, where public debates about what a woman may reasonably expect from a man play out.
“For better, for OPay” is one playful catchphrase and internet meme that revises the marriage vows “for better, for worse” to describe Nigeria’s digital-payment culture.
The country’s difficult economy has also shaped the stakes of the dating game, with intimate relationships potentially becoming part of the informal systems through which people manage everyday life.
Rent, transport, food, education, healthcare and family obligations all enter the emotional economy of dating.
The phone, restaurant meal, holiday, designer bag or apartment is no longer merely a possession or experience.
In Nigeria’s social media economy, it may also function as evidence of social value: to be seen receiving such things can generate cultural capital, while to provide them can become a performance of masculine success.
Both men and women can be constrained by this script, which the report describes as a gender bargain that both sexes have inherited, performed and reinforced.
By centering a loan request as the catalyst for the story and ending with a noncommittal, even sarcastic blessing, the song critiques a system that monetises intimacy but refuses to share surplus, the report argues, asking whether romance must begin with an invoice.
Afrobeats, in this reading, does more than reflect social life – it gives listeners a language through which to engage with it.
The question the song raises is not whether billing is right or wrong, but what kinds of relationships become possible when people refuse the script that makes money the main measure of women’s compliance.
Source: The Conversation
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