Abuja: Reflections on Friendship, Migration and Building What Lasts

I recently travelled to Abuja to attend the wedding of a friend I first met more than twenty-one years ago at university.

Like most weddings, it was a celebration of a new beginning. But walking through the city, reconnecting with old friends and sitting with the quiet weight of how far we have all come, I found myself thinking about something much larger than the occasion itself.

I found myself thinking about what it actually means to build something that lasts.

A City That Did Not Happen By Accident

Most great cities grew organically shaped by trade routes, rivers, colonial boundaries or the slow accumulation of generations. Abuja is different, it was designed.

In 1976, Nigeria's military government made the decision to move the capital from Lagos to a new city at the geographical centre of the country. The intention was deliberate: create a capital that belonged to every Nigerian equally, regardless of ethnicity, religion or region. Lagos had outgrown its role. What was needed was not an expansion, but a reimagined neutral ground built from scratch with unity as its founding principle.

What struck me walking through Abuja was not the infrastructure or the wide roads or the government buildings. It was the patience the city represents. Decades of decisions, corrections, investments and belief that something worth building is worth building properly.

The most meaningful things rarely arrive fully formed. They are constructed. Slowly. Intentionally. Often without any certainty that the effort will be worth it.

Twenty-One Years

Twenty-one years ago, a group of students met at university with no particular awareness that they were forming something that would outlast the degree.

Life took us in different directions. Some of us left Nigeria. Some stayed. Careers diverged. Families were built. There were years when communication thinned and distance felt like it might win. But it never quite did.

I sat at that wedding watching a man I have known since we were both trying to figure out who we were, and I thought about how quietly remarkable that is. Not dramatic. Not the stuff of speeches. Just the ordinary miracle of a friendship that survived everything life threw at it because both sides kept deciding, without fanfare, to keep showing up.

Meaningful friendships are not maintained by proximity. They are maintained by intention. The decision to call. The decision to travel. The decision to remain genuinely invested in someone's life when adulthood makes it easy not to be.

Abuja was not built in a season. Neither was that friendship.

The Generation That Belongs Everywhere and Nowhere

One of the defining realities of our generation is that we are in motion.

Nigerians and Africans more broadly now live and build lives across every continent. Many of us occupy a particular kind of existence: deeply connected to where we are from, while fully committed to where we have chosen to be. We do not belong entirely to one place. We belong to several, simultaneously.

That tension and the beauty within it is part of what the Travellers Club collection at 234Collectives was built to reflect. Not movement for its own sake, but the specific experience of people who carry their histories, their languages, their friendships and their identities across borders and time zones. People who are never quite simply from one place, and have learned to find strength in that rather than conflict.

Distance used to mean drift. For our generation, it increasingly does not have to.

What the City Reminded Me

Standing in Abuja surrounded by people I have known for two decades, watching one of them begin a new chapter, I kept returning to the same thought.

The things worth having almost always require a clear foundation, consistent effort and the willingness to keep building long after the initial energy has faded.

A city. A marriage. A friendship. A brand.

The founding vision matters. But what actually determines whether something lasts is what happens in the years after, the quiet, unglamorous work of maintenance, investment and renewal.

Abuja was not built to impress. It was built to endure.

That feels like the right ambition for most things worth caring about.