The Federal Republic of Olodos

Olodo is the boy who came 10th in a class of 40. Everyone who followed his class ranking would be subjected to a small public humiliation. The word meant school was the road, and being slow on it was the small disaster of a child. The future belonged to whoever sat in the front of the class and ranked higher in class tests.

That world has come apart. The boys who once feared the label are taking a rather curious pathway.

The artiste YCee recently appeared on the Afropolitan Podcast and named the moment. He said Nigeria had moved past Yahoo culture into something else. He called it the Olodo Uprising, a clever coinage that describes a society that abandoned intelligence and started rewarding shallow behaviour. He went on to name the streamer, Peller, as emblematic of the uprising. Within a week, the phrase became more popular than it ever was.

Peller’s partner Jarvis replied to YCee with the most cutting response. She reminded everyone that she's a graduate but, with job scarcity, she turned to content creation. She asked what exactly her critic expected her to do. To clean toilets?

Hers is one of the strongest arguments in the viral debate. If the system promised that education would translate into livelihood and did not keep that promise, it leaves people to adjust their evaluation of education. They are being economically literate about a contract the state defaulted on. Calling them olodos is morally satisfying but analytically lazy.

The contract was clear. Study, get qualifications, find work, and build a life. The state broke the contract through a series of failures and each year the value of certificates fell. The economy centred on oil, not labour, so the ruling class learned to extract wealth without broad productivity. The young person who notices all of this and chooses instead to film herself eating pounded yam for two million viewers is intentionally making a rational choice inside an irrational economy.

The educated people noticed that their prestige has collapsed and so they gave the collapse the dignified name of national decline. Peller earns more money than most first-class graduates. The complaint that this is bad for Nigeria is partly true. It is also, obviously, the complaint of a class who is reacting to a loss of social standing.

Their complaint is also right. It contains a real concern, and Jarvis answered to a part of it. Most countries produce their share of the unserious and the trivial. Nobel laureates and reality TV shows. But the reasonable country refuses to let one of these sides to be the most prominent definition of the country. It keeps the fringe at the fringe.

South Korea focused on engineering and steel; China pursued steady, long-term planning; India, perhaps the closest to Nigeria in economic and social contradictions, built lasting software and medical expertise. These were national contracts, in which they agreed to fund education and reward disciplined careers, and built institutions to keep the agreement.

Nigeria has not negotiated that level of agreement. We celebrate education in speeches while underfunding schools. Our teachers are overworked and underpaid, and exams reward cramming over critical thinking.

And our religion sits inside the problem. Religion consoles, disciplines, deepens, and moralises, but where it devotes more than normal attention to giving and managing hopes, it takes parts of people's attention away from the business of nation-building. An observer familiar with Nigeria's brand of religiosity would wonder how an imagination trained to interpret structural failure sometimes as spiritual attack can build the muscle for engineering. A Nigerian student diverted from physics into deliverance from supposed ancestral enemies has been robbed in a way the church will not acknowledge. Where do we even start to reverse that?

When a country's clergy are more famous than its surgeons and engineers, it says everything about its priorities.

Colonialism too. It damaged institutions, borders, languages, confidence, and imagination. It left unhealed wounds. But, eventually, a country has to look at what it has done since the colonial masters left.

The complication with our beloved country is quite fascinating. It has produced literature, music, science, fashion, business, technology that the world has noticed. And somehow it has also elected the same political class across generations and pretended to be surprised.

About the educated class.

The discomfort of the Olodo Uprising debate is that the class that talks about it has been part of building it. They staffed the universities and sat on boards that hire through personal connections over merit. And then wonder why the country sounds different from them.

Nigerians love certificates. We collect them and say “engineer” and “architect” and “Dr” before we say a name. The meaning behind certificates gets lost when everyone focuses on acquiring them. There is a brilliant line in 2Face’s song, “Higher (Spiritual Healing),” that deserves to become part of folk wisdom. “To be civilised, you don’t have to be educated.” It suggests that seeing the light does not require schooling. It dismisses the kind of schooling that does not produce inwardness or wise judgement because they are the foundational floor under everything else. A country without them can buy technology, announce reforms, invent Afrobeats, organise the loudest Detty December, sometimes win at football. It will still wobble when character is required.

Let's go home. The country needs more than programmes or policies. A culture is repaired in what parents praise and condemn. When the home front yields to the dynamics of bad government, children are likely to get trained for survival without character. Smartness replaces truth, credentials lose value because they cannot quickly become money. It becomes commonplace to not question the source of sudden wealth.

Back to churches and mosques which have difficult choice to make. Faith that reduces fear is one thing. The one that monetises fear is another. The pastor or imam who chooses to reduce fear will lose some of his audience to the one that chose to monetise it. The marketing competition among Nigerian Pentecostal churches would embarrass many corporate brands. Almost no Nigerian religious institution would be willing to lose members in the interest of national reckoning.

Media faces the same incentives. A newsroom that publishes a sensational headline gets more clicks than the one that chooses a careful headline. This is the mode that shaped the influencer economy where YCee and Peller now meet, with different aesthetics but the same underlying logic.

All of these presuppose trust, which is in short supply. A country whose people no longer trust teachers, the economy, government, media, or the law won't turn to those institutions when it needs something; it turns to whatever offers immediate, visible proof. Attention. Fame. The Olodo Uprising is, in some way, a market correction by people who lost faith in the longer auctions.

The cultivated class has its own homework. There is, inside Nigerian intellectual life, a habit of preferring Nigeria as material rather than as nation. The diasporic essay about the country. Another podcast about the country. The work of building the institutions is less rewarding and undertaken by fewer of the people who should be doing it. Jarvis may have read the contract correctly or incorrectly, depending on who is judging, but many of the people who could read it have read it and decided to opt out.

A schoolboy in Yaba is filming himself for an audience of two million. He went to school, but school did nothing for him. He is now rich and spends his afternoons filming in a room running on a generator. He doesn't see himself as a symbol of national decline.

In another scene, a professor is preparing a paper for a conference she is unlikely to attend because her salary has not been paid. She does not consider herself a sign of national decline either. She has no time for the metaphor.

The Olodo Uprising did not come from nowhere. Na we make am.

Renewal begins with a small and dedicated group of people. Teachers who stay late to grade essays, civil servants who process files without taking bribes, parents who read after dinner. These small acts add up. The country we have not agreed to build will be built by them.

Some of them have already started.