What the ‘Olodo Uprising’ Discourse Reveals About Nigerian Society

“The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us”. —Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You? 

Something has gone wrong with us. And we are only just beginning to see the extent of our ‘disfiguring social disease’. The Nigerian society suffers a purulent thing weeping quietly beneath skin that still appears whole.  

The June 2026 Afropolitan podcast with rapper Ycee (Oludemilade Martin Alejo) sparked an interesting discourse that set the tone for a cavalcade of commentary, condemnation and counter–condemnation.  

“Nigerian society is no longer celebrating academic excellence,“ he said. “It’s not even Yahoo culture anymore; now we have a ‘Peller culture’. This ‘Olodo’ uprising we are witnessing is terrible. It feels like we are trying so hard to accommodate ignorance so people won’t feel bad, and now they seem to be the majority.  

Peller—real name Habeeb Hamzat, the 21-year-old TikTok streamer whose name had now, against his will, been used to define Nigeria’s collapsing relationship with education—did not take the remark quietly. In a video posted to his page, he called Ycee “the illiterate,” accusing the older man of disrespect.  

“The same olodo uprising wey una dey use promote una noise, very anyhow OG,” he said. “If you’re an elderly person, respect yourself. Must you mention names? You yourself are an illiterate.”  

Well, nobody wants to be called an olodo. The word carries something of an almost physical sting—small, specific and reminiscent of childhood, of laughter directed at you rather than with you. Even in the most casual of settings, when friends exchange words, it bears that stigma. 

And yet, perhaps there is some comfort to be found for those it names. Intelligence, after all, may not be quite the achievement we have built entire school systems around convincing ourselves it is. Neil deGrasse Tyson once observed with all the calm of a man simply stating fact:  “I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life – this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So, intelligence can’t be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don’t have what we call intelligence, and they’re surviving just fine.” One might say—and I offer this gently—that some among us are simply thriving the way the rest of the animal kingdom always has. 

That is to say: they gambol, spared the trouble of intellectual exertion, but perhaps that should trouble us less than what we have allowed our institutions and our own conversations to become. 

And what precisely have our conversations become? It requires no great effort to observe this—a single minute in the public square, such as it now exists, will do. The mouth moves before the mind does, as though thinking were an inconvenience standing between a person and their right to speak. We have grown increasingly fluent in reaction and illiterate in reasoning.  

It would be convenient to blame this entirely on the algorithm, on the feed that seems to serve us exactly what will keep our thumbs moving. But the feed does not conjure appetite from nothing.  

Call it the olodo uprising if the phrase pleases you. It is older than Peller, and it will very probably outlive him. What it names is not one man’s rise but the rest of us gradually and unspectacularly learning to prefer the version of ourselves that requires the least of us.  

There is a temptation to imagine Yahoo culture and what Ycee calls ‘Peller culture’ as successive stages in Nigeria’s moral decline, as though one gave way neatly to the other. They are, I think, better understood as two symptoms of the same disease.  

What changes when a society continues to praise education in speech but rewards spectacle in practice? How does one secure dignity in a society where the promises once attached to honest labour and educational attainment no longer seem dependable?  

It is no longer remarkable to encounter graduates unable to find work commensurate with their qualifications, professionals whose earnings scarcely sustain a dignified standard of living, or highly educated Nigerians watching opportunities accrue to those who possess neither their credentials nor, in some cases, their discipline.  

Markets, however, are wonderfully indifferent to sentiments. They do not reward what societies insist ought to matter; they reward whatever attracts demand. This, I suspect, is where much of the present conversation loses its footing. Spectacle acquired a market value that credentials alone could no longer reliably command. It has produced a new class of digital nabobs – individuals whose wealth and influence are undeniable even when the traditional markers by which societies once conferred esteem are absent.  

This, I suspect, is where much of the present conversation loses its footing. We continue to preach education as the surest path to security and social advancement while living in a society that repeatedly demonstrates otherwise. Young people did not collectively awaken one morning having misplaced their regard for learning. 

A society cannot spend decades presenting education as the unquestionable route to dignity and then express bewilderment when its youth begin searching elsewhere for that same promise. We may dislike the alternatives they choose. We may even be right to criticise them. But criticism becomes intellectually unserious when it mistakes adaptation for origin. Structural failure may not excuse every cultural consequence that follows, but it almost certainly explains why those consequences found such fertile ground in the first place. 

The onus, therefore, cannot rest entirely upon the young to preserve values that the institutions around them have repeatedly failed to honour. 

However, explanation is not exoneration. If structural failure helps explain the emergence of this culture, it explains rather less the peculiar confidence with which so many have appointed themselves its judges. 

For all the moral certainty the phrase Olodo Uprising now carries, remarkably little attention has been paid to the question of who, exactly, is entitled to pronounce the verdict. By what measure is an olodo recognised? Academic attainment? Reading habits? Intellectual curiosity? The quality of one’s contributions to public discourse? The criteria shift with suspicious convenience, expanding or contracting according to whom one wishes to condemn. The accusation has become wonderfully elastic. 

One need not look very far to see it. The same timelines upon which olodo is deployed with prosecutorial enthusiasm are rarely distinguished by exceptional rigour. They thrive on engagement farming, tribal loyalties, and headlines consumed in place of articles. Intelligence, increasingly, is not something to be demonstrated but something to be performed. 

There is a peculiar satisfaction in identifying the intellectual deficiencies of others. It flatters the critic with an unearned elevation, allowing one to mistake the act of recognition for the possession of superior judgment. The insult, in other words, says as much about the speaker’s desired position within the hierarchy as it does about its intended target. To call another person an olodo is not merely to describe them. It is to announce something about oneself. 

And yet, the arithmetic refuses to cooperate. 

No creator acquires millions of followers in isolation. Every viral personality is also evidence of a viral appetite. Consumption, no less than creation, is an act of cultural authorship. 

The average Nigerian’s digital life is not obviously more intellectually demanding than the content so confidently dismissed as evidence of decline. The same people lamenting the collapse of public discourse often participate in ecosystems sustained by outrage, gossip, performative cleverness and algorithmic spectacle.  

Words have a habit of outgrowing the meanings assigned to them. Before long, they cease merely to describe and begin to classify. One wonders how long it will be before ‘olodo’ functions less as a measure of intelligence than as a shorthand for an entire social type. This possibility is not far-fetched. Nigerian public life has rarely been immune to class performance. We have long used accents to infer competence, grammar to infer intelligence and schools to infer worth. The temptation to recruit olodo into that same hierarchy is entirely plausible.  

The difficulty, of course, is that intelligence has never been particularly visible. One cannot glance across a room and perceive another’s capacity for thought. What one sees instead are its approximations. It is therefore unsurprising that we repeatedly mistake the performance of intelligence for intelligence itself.  

Marya Mannes once said that “those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not”. Whether or not one accepts her conclusion in its entirety, it gestures towards the simple fact that we often reward the performance of intelligence more readily.  

By now, the entire discourse resembles a Gordian knot. Education, economics, class, language, algorithms, and institutional failure have become so tightly wound together that every attempt to isolate a single culprit only tightens the knot further. We ask whether schools have failed, whether creators have displaced scholars, whether social media has eroded our standards, whether the youth have become less interested in learning. Each answer contains a measure of truth. None by itself is sufficient.  

Perhaps that is because we have spent too much time searching for villains and too little time examining incentives. Societies rarely produce values in isolation. They cultivate them, reward them and eventually normalize them.  

Sally Rooney writes that “when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.” I think she is exactly right.  

A society cannot repeatedly reward spectacle, watch increasingly more of its young orient themselves towards it and imagine itself unchanged. Every generation learns, consciously or otherwise, what its society is prepared to reward. The more consistently we elevate this raree show over substance, the more those become the aspirations inherited by the next.  

That, I think, is what Ycee was trying to articulate, however inelegantly. And yet, I am no longer convinced there is simply ‘something wrong’ with the people who have come to embody these values. They did not invent the incentives to which they responded. 

They did not wake up one morning and collectively decide that spectacle would be more profitable than substance. Institutions collapse long before cultures do.  

By the time we begin lamenting the people a nation has produced, we have often forgotten to examine the conditions that produced them in the first place, or we have simply become so accustomed to these conditions that we no longer recognise them as the problem anymore.  

That does not absolve them. But it should humble us.

Jolamade Adetoro