The stiff competition among leisure spot owners and hoteliers in Lagos has pushed many to devise devious and amo'rous means of attracting and keeping clients. The booming antic of some of the hotels include engaging ladies between 18 and 38 years of age to work as stri'ppers and dance provocatively nudé to lasci'vious music in their bars. And patrons, mostly men in their 30s and 40s root for more action. In most cases, the girls engage in "rough things" in the open.
The most notorious areas where this shameful practice is prevalent are Ikeja, Victoria Island, Apapa, Lekki-Ajah and Ajao Estate. In these places, high brow night clubs employ young girls as lap dancers to satisfy the lusc'ious appetites of men, including expatriates.
Along Allen Avenue in Ikeja, hundreds of girls besiege the hotels and pubs stretching from Allen junction on both sides of the road down to Opebi junction to ‘catch fun’ especially at weekends. Allen Avenue has become the Sodom and Gomorrah of Nigeria where séx, drugs and money are the business of the night as pros'titutes and strippers, yank off their mini skirts and underwears, and entice both men and women to have a taste of their wares.
Sunday Sun investigation reveals that no fewer than two of every 10 hotels in Lagos State contracts stri'ppers to dance before their customers full-time and sometimes on part-time basis.
In Ire-Akari area of Isolo, for instance, is a street near a Catholic church, which men and women of easy virtue have converted to their own, trading in séx without caution. On this street, exclusive hotels that harbour the strip clubs compete with churches for attention. On a Friday night, for instance, men, who ordinarily look responsible swarm the frontage of the hotels with exotic cars and spend quality time inside the bars with women of easy virtue. Inside one of the hotels on Alabe Street, nudé girls display their wares obtrusively to the admiration of the male customers who flood the pubs to catch fun.
Every Saturday night, between 9.00 pm and midnight along Allen Avenue opposite Sweet Sensation eatery bus-stop, it is another face of debau'chery as men and women line up in front of a prominent hotel that has neon light sign indicator to the entrance of the nude club.
The scenes at the night clubs are bizarre and reprehensible.
On a typical Friday night at one of the clubs in Ikeja a bouncer stood guard at the entrance of the building and a stream of men form a queue to pay the entrance fee of N1000 to gain access into the open room harbouring the dance floor. Once inside the building, séx hawkers in bikinis and provocative attires swarm like bees at the sight of any man, beaming with welcome smiles, all in an effort to get attention. The dance floor is an open space with chairs by the wall. Music is supplied from concealed loudspeakers. As the music begins to blare, one can see the girls giggling and swaying to the tunes.
The stri'ppers take turns to entertain the guests. The dance steps are mostly rough. Then unveils a weird style of twisting, flexing, rotating and spinning round the pole and throwing herself up before cascading upside down or sliding downwards in a slow motion with her legs and feet holding tight at the top pole while her head is towards the floor, like a python climbing down from an Iroko tree, and proudly revealing her "thing" by spreading her two legs wide before all men and women. Then she struts her "oranges" and yanks off her underwear.
“Wow, it takes a lot of skill to do just that,” says a customer who was a first timer to the show. “With these high heels they catwalk like models,” he adds with a tinge of satisfaction.
Then, the girls begin another form of rough play as they rub their bodies on men, perform a lap dance, which is cuddling the body to make a request while the men look in admiration as the dancers pull off their underwears, revealing their privates. Some of the men who get aroused move behind the centre stage and engage in the act with the girls for a fee usually between N1,000 and N5,000. People watch the acts as the stri'pper moans loudly to attract attention.
By the side is a bar where customers make their purchases with a bottle of whiskey going for as much as N10,000 and energy drinks for N1000. There is a large TV screen hung on the wall, showing rough films.
A regular customer reveals that it was the new law imposing 14 years jail sentence for gay séx that has restrained the girls and their patrons and patronesses who hitherto engage in homosexual acts in the open in the clubs. The séx hawkers easily go haywire when they sight expatriate men who usually come to unwind. Some of the girls usually release all in a bid to have séx with them. On this particular night, two of the men opted for "mouth". And they did this before all eyes with the girls moaning wildly.
There is no dull moment in the clubs as girls with different sizes of oranges, hips and curves kept moving in and out of their inner chamber to reinforce their strategies to "handle" men. According to a regular male customer, having séx at the VIP inner chamber is expensive as it goes for N15,000 just for a short time.
However, flirting with a customer is never a big deal for stri'ppers because two men can share a stri'pper. This is a confirmed case of Sodom and Gomorrah underway!
Tunde's mum Zarina, in an interview with ABC some weeks back, said Tunde didn't even tell her about his scores immediately.
Tunde's story is a one of courage and determination to win against all odds. Despite living in a tough neighborhood, where he saw violence everyday, Tunde was able to steer clear of the distractions that often befell African-American teenagers.
