It was 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic break. I was at home, humbly accepting the tumble life has thrown at me, at us, and despite how caved-in I felt, it was creatively one of the best periods for me. I read more than I could ever imagine, and I wrote the wildest stories and pieces. While I did not publish most of the stories during that break, they carried me through periods when my creative juice felt dried up. It was a catastrophic period that claimed many lives, but because education and intellectualism are really appreciated in my home, it felt like the perfect period to exist in: read books, have home lessons with the kids and do house chores.
However, my experience was a stark, ironic reflection of my environment. It was the period when a popular internet fraudster was arrested for internet scam, and instead of the news curbing the practice of such criminality, it seemed to inspire and birth a new generation of fraudsters. Not long after, the term “Yahoo Yahoo” became popular, and someone I attended the same secondary school with also tapped into the frequency. He bought a car not long after that. I knew parents who purchased phones for their wards to also be involved. It could be considered the beginning of what would become of Nigeria today.
Fraud and internet scams had existed in Nigeria before the pandemic break, but the break popularised it for the generation that was idle and had enough time on its hands. Instead of Nigerians collectively speaking against it, the economic reality of many households convinced them otherwise. Due to the pandemic, inflation was rising, fuel prices were rising, and commodities became more expensive. Buying and selling were stopped, so many households were spending and eating what they had before the pandemic. “Yahoo Yahoo” came to alleviate many households out of that lack of bondage and blurred their reasoning to evaluate the situation.
By the time safety measures were implemented and movements were allowed again in the country, many young Nigerians were deep in the hustle of “Yahoo Yahoo”, hustling for clients, making money. The result is a collective lack of interest in education and intellectualism, and a collective focus on and appeal of making money. Everyone wanted to make money without knowing how or whatever. “School na scam” became more popular because it met an established, institutional ridicule of education in the country. The unemployment rate among young people between the ages of 15 and 34 had risen to 34.9%; lecturers, teachers and school workers were earning meagre salaries; many graduates in the country were in jobs completely unrelated to what they studied in school; and the education infrastructure was poorly funded.
It could also be considered the beginning of the tech boom in the country because a lot of people were hunting for soft skills to earn money, adopting tech apps like Zoom for remote work and other fintech apps to earn abroad and save money. As an effort to curb internet fraud amongst young people, some concerned individuals suggested that learning tech should be made a substitute for fraud. It couldn’t work because fraudsters always hunt for quick money, a quick scam, which is not guaranteed in tech, combined with months of learning involved in acquiring a tech skill. Young Nigerians had become lazy, and learning or education became a difficult ladder to climb.
Its effects reflect in what Nigeria has become today. In a recent interview, Nigerian singer, Ycee, echoed the effects by mentioning the lack of appreciation for academic excellence in the country. He said in the interview, “We are trying so much to accommodate unintelligent and ignorant people because we don’t want them to feel bad; they are now like the majority… There is a massive attack on the education system in Nigeria. Aside from the kidnapping and Boko Haram, other factors such as leadership not prioritising important things, society not celebrating academic excellence; people don’t even want to go to school anymore… We keep rewarding guys [who think they just] have to go online and do something obscene to get clicks and numbers; that’s what moves the needle in Nigeria. Now, what are you telling the rest of the impressionable young people out there?”
Ycee’s observation is an accumulation of what has been left unaddressed in Nigeria, which is the rise of anti-intellectualism. Instead of valuing education, the system prioritises making money. So, many young Nigerians would rather pursue money than obtain a certificate or education, which reflects a troubling decline in our cultural values and systems.
My friend and colleague, Nnebuifé Kwubeï, tells me, “You can’t talk about anti-intellectualism without talking about the erosion of values and morals in our society. I don’t know when it happened or if our value systems were as good as I imagine them to be, but at some point, they completely vanished. We began to see an increase in materialism and, most concerning, the normalisation of this brand of craftiness that is “gaming the system.”
A few things went downhill, and everything followed: the shabby way education is treated, the quality of our leaders, the quality of our role models. We used to have educated people and thought leaders as role models. That’s hardly the case now. We used to quote lines from books; we used to admire the “put togetherness” of professors, but that drastically changed. Professors were mocked. Schools incessantly closed. Lecturers went on strike every semester; students were left to their own devices, and in that mockery of our education system and the shabby manner in which our teachers were treated, a vacuum began to expand.”
The Nigerian government has realised that the majority of the country’s citizens have unprioritised education, and instead of raising the bar and fighting against it, it introduced policies that would make young Nigerians lazier: reducing UTME’s cut-off mark to 150, increasing school fees, underfunding public schools, paying school teachers and lecturers and many other latest policies that continue to make education less and less appealing. According to a UNICEF report, 1 in 3 Nigerians is out of school, which accounts for roughly 33% of the school-age population. Where are they? They are hustling for money when they should be hustling for education.
Some years ago, one of Nigeria’s finest contemporary journalists, ‘Kunle Adebajo, launched a Facebook page called the Intellectualise Nigeria Movement when he became concerned about the decline of intellectualism in Nigeria, which shows that the brain rot and lack of appreciation of education did not begin today. It has just become more pronounced. When I ask him what he thinks about the Olodo Uprising conversations, he tells me, “Olodo uprising is more about what is absent than what is present. We’re intellectually malnourished because we’re not consuming a balanced diet. It’s all lopsided. I’d argue it begins with the top, too. There’s much to say about how the Babangida administration ignited the decay of the educational system. But we’ve done everything but reverse that trend since, through how we’ve not prioritised the welfare of teachers and the establishment of public libraries, for example.
What we need is a society where the average child will see their teachers in public secondary schools as models to aspire to because of how smart and comfortable they are. But when you have yahoo boys driving fancy cars while university professors are trekking or using old junk with wheels, then it’s inevitable that everything will turn on its head. We must reward competence and intelligence in every sphere of life – from the schools to our politics. It’s only then that we have any chance against this collective brain rot.”
I fear that we have gotten to a point where we are comfortable with ignorance. It’s dangerous to a country like Nigeria. It is dangerous to a country that is already poor. If class is the appeal for intellectualism, better to have that than to sit comfortably with ignorance and celebrate it. Every country has skit makers, content creators, streamers and others, but they do not define the absoluteness of the country. Nigeria has slowly become a playful country, which is why international bodies would rather fund a skit-making contest rather than groundbreaking research or a program.
What frightens me is that anti-intellectualism has become fashionable. Ignorance is no longer merely tolerated; it is performed, monetised and defended. To know too much is to be accused of doing too much. To ask difficult questions is to be labelled arrogant. That is how countries collapse. It doesn’t always have to be through war (Nigeria is in war with a lot of things, though) or famine, but through the slow erosion of what they choose to admire. Every generation inherits a value system, and this generation has inherited a country where education had already been weakened by decades of poor leadership, underfunding and neglect. Instead of repairing that inheritance, we have, in many ways, normalised its decay. We have built a culture where the quickest route to money commands more admiration than years spent mastering a craft, conducting research or contributing to knowledge. We have mistaken visibility for value and virality for excellence.
None of this is to romanticise suffering or pretend that young Nigerians are irrational. They are responding to incentives. But when a hungry graduate watches a fraudster buy a mansion in his twenties, wetin you think say dey sup for him?
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