Lagos Rising

Celebrates the Yaba tech corridor — Lagos coders building world-class software between power outages. The lyrics capture the absurd resilience: generator fuel as a line item, inverters as essential as laptops, code commits timed between NEPA blackouts. References real startups — Flutterwave, Paystack, Andela — and the programmers who ship products used by millions while their own infrastructure crumbles. Lagos Rising is an Afrobeats anthem for a generation building the future on unreliable foundations, and winning anyway.

[verse 1] Yaba morning, generator dey hum Coder in the corner making magic with crumbs No steady light but the laptop full charge Building applications that gon' take us far They said we couldn't do it from the Third World side But the Wi-Fi hotspot is our rocket ride From Lekki to the Island, innovation dey flow Nigerian passport but the vision is global Two billion dollars, venture capital raised Silicon Valley looking at us amazed Fintech revolution, mobile money boom What you build in a garage, we build in a room With NEPA taking light every other hour We still writing code with unlimited power Because the hunger in the belly is the fuel we need Lagos never sleeping, watch us take the lead [chorus] We dey rise, no stopping now From the gutter to the top, see us shining now We dey rise, no stopping now Lagos rising, Nairobi rising, Africa rising now We dey rise, no stopping now Play our music worldwide, hear the Afrobeats loud We dey rise, no stopping now Tell the whole world, we dey rise, no stopping now [verse 2] Tems on the Grammy stage, the whole world froze Burna Boy in the stadium, hundred thousand shows Wizkid numbers breaking every streaming record Afrobeats the language that the planet selected From Fela's shrine in Ikeja to the global charts We been carrying rhythm deep inside our hearts Amapiano log drums from Johannesburg Mixed with Lagos melodies, the sweetest on earth Every corner of the continent, a different sound But the beat connect us, common ground we found Nairobi Silicon Savannah building apps That solve the problems that the West can't map M-Pesa changed the game before they understood African solutions for the African good So when they ask how we survive the struggle here We point to the music, point to the engineers [chorus] We dey rise, no stopping now From the gutter to the top, see us shining now We dey rise, no stopping now Lagos rising, Nairobi rising, Africa rising now We dey rise, no stopping now Play our music worldwide, hear the Afrobeats loud We dey rise, no stopping now Tell the whole world, we dey rise, no stopping now [verse 3] Small boy from Mushin with a big dream Downloading tutorials on a cracked screen Now he running servers, got a team of ten Building payment systems, watch him rise again Small girl from Kibera writing her first code Python on a secondhand phone she was loaned Now she at a conference in Kigali town Telling her story and the crowd amazed now This is not a fairy tale, this is what we do We take the nothing and we make it new Infrastructure broken but the spirit's whole Every setback feeding fire in the soul So let the generators keep on running loud Let the traffic jam remind us of the crowd That's hustling, grinding, building every day Africa is coming and we here to stay [chorus] We dey rise, no stopping now From the gutter to the top, see us shining now We dey rise, no stopping now Lagos rising, Nairobi rising, Africa rising now We dey rise, no stopping now Play our music worldwide, hear the Afrobeats loud We dey rise, no stopping now Tell the whole world, we dey rise, no stopping now [bridge] Omo, see where we dey go oh From the bottom to the very tippy-top oh Naija, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa The future looking bright, brighter than a star E no easy, but we no go tire Every generation building something higher Grandmother sold pepper in the market square Now her grandchild selling software everywhere [chorus] We dey rise, no stopping now From the gutter to the top, see us shining now We dey rise, no stopping now Lagos rising, Nairobi rising, Africa rising now We dey rise, no stopping now Play our music worldwide, hear the Afrobeats loud We dey rise, no stopping now Tell the whole world, we dey rise, no stopping now [outro] We dey rise, no stopping now We dey rise, no stopping now Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Joburg We dey rise, no stopping now Tell them say we dey come oh We dey rise, no stopping now No be small thing we dey build We dey rise, no stopping now