Nigeria's biggest sculpture isn't made from bronze, stone, or steel. It's made from tires that were once headed for a landfill. Sculptor Toyeeb Ajayi, a graduate of Auchi Polytechnic, spent months turning more than 3,000 pieces of discarded rubber into a 24-foot Godzilla that now stands as one of the most striking pieces of environmental art to come out of the country.
The scale alone stops people in their tracks.
Standing two stories tall, the sculpture recreates every ridge, scale, and muscle of the monster using nothing but layered tire rubber, shaped and fitted piece by piece until the material stopped looking like waste and started looking like skin. It wasn't Ajayi's first time working at this scale either. In 2022, during an art residency in India, he built an 18-foot gorilla from the same recycled material, a project that helped sharpen the technique he would later bring home to build something even bigger.
The choice of subject wasn't random. Ajayi has spoken about wanting to draw attention to Nigeria's waste management problem, and there is something fitting about using an icon of destruction to make a point about what gets thrown away. Millions of tires end up discarded across Nigerian cities every year, most of them destined to sit for decades without breaking down. Ajayi took that same material and gave it a second life as something people travel to see.
The Godzilla and Kong sculpture now stands at the Scrap Art Museum, where it has become one of the most photographed pieces in the collection. It's a reminder that raw material has less to do with what something is worth and everything to do with the hands shaping it. Ajayi took what the city no longer wanted and turned it into a landmark. There's a Yoruba proverb that says the hand of a skilled craftsman never remains empty, and looking at that towering figure of rubber and imagination, it's hard to argue otherwise.
© 2026 Okon David Ekanem | TalkAfricang.com
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