From WAEC to Wi-Fi; Olodo Uprising — by Bamidele Ademola-Olateju
When Peller got married, I watched and watched. I became one of people keeping his numbers up and my living room became the ground zero of the Olodo Uprising. For those of you who, like me a month ago, have been peacefully minding your business; reading, praying, adjusting your gele, Nigeria has apparently had a revolution, and nobody sent an invitation. It was declared by a rapper on a podcast, not a general on television, which already tells you everything about how governance has changed in this country.
Ycee looked around at a Nigeria where a young man can build an empire out of pranking desperate job-seeking graduates, and he gave it a name: the Olodo Uprising. Olodo, for the uninitiated uncles and aunties among us, is what we called the boy who copied your homework and still failed. Now that boy has a verified badge, three cars, and a fan base bigger than most political parties.
I laughed first. Then I stopped laughing, the way you stop laughing when the child in the room finally says the thing everyone was thinking. Because underneath the memes, the skits, and the young man who advertised a fake job just to film graduates begging for it, is a joke Nigeria has been telling on itself for forty years. We are not new to olodo. We simply used to give it a suit and a title instead of a ring light.
If we know where the rain started beating us, we will know where it stopped. So where did the rain start beating us? Not on TikTok, my dear. It started in classrooms with sixty children and one leaking roof. It started when a first-class graduate submitted four hundred applications and received four hundred silences.
It started when the honest civil servant who spent thirty years of honest labor retired on a pension that cannot buy him fuel to attend his own retirement party, while the man who bypassed every exam through connection now owns the filling station. We built a country where certificates are ceremonial and connections are constitutional, and then we act shocked, shocked! that the next generation looked at our example and decided to skip the middleman. This is where I must be honest with my fellow elders, because the market woman does not lie to her customer and expect goodwill: we cannot mourn a harvest we planted with our own hands.
Every WhatsApp uncle sharing “see what this generation has turned into” was, not so long ago, the same uncle telling his son that “who you know” matters more than what you know. Every one of us who once whispered “forget JAMB, go meet the Vice Chancellor” helped write this script. The Olodo Uprising did not fall from the sky like manna; it fermented, slowly, in the barrel of our own contradictions, and now it has come of age, wearing designer clothes and asking us pointedly, “how many cars do you have?”
And yet, and here is where I refuse to join the mob on either side. Mockery alone will not fix a foundation that was cracked before these children were born. It is easy, from the comfort of a certificate, to sneer at a boy from a home with no library, no light, and no listening ear, who found in a phone camera the only stage that ever applauded him. Ọgbọ́n kì í dàgbà nínú ikùn tí kò tíì jẹun rí – wisdom struggles to grow in a stomach that has never eaten.
We cannot ask a generation raised on hunger and hustle to have the polish of a generation raised on library cards and landline telephones. That would be its own kind of olodo, mistaking privilege for virtue. Bí ọmọdé bá subú, á wo iwájú; bí àgbà bá subú, á wo ẹ̀yìn – When a child falls, he looks ahead; when an elder falls, he looks back to see what tripped him. So let the elders look back honestly, instead of looking down performatively.
The real uprising Nigeria needs is not against Peller, Carter Efe, or whichever bright young man makes headlines by Friday. It is an uprising against a system that trained brilliant minds and then had nowhere to put them; against a curriculum still teaching typewriting in the age of TikTok; against those who cut education budgets and then clutch their pearls when the streets stop respecting the professor.
You cannot starve a child of good schooling for eighteen years and then be scandalised that he prefers content creation, where at least the algorithm pays him on time.
None of this means we should applaud ignorance dressed up as ambition, or let ridicule of hardworking, desperate graduates pass for entertainment. A society that rewards cruelty with clout is not evolving; it is simply finding new packaging for an old rot.
There is a difference between a young hustler building something honest out of nothing, and a young man profiting from other people’s desperation for likes. Ycee was not wrong to name the discomfort. He was only pointing at a mirror we have been avoiding since the oil boom taught us that money, however it arrives, silences every question about how it arrived.
If I may offer my generation one instruction and the younger one another: to the elders, stop performing shock at a harvest you fertilized with nepotism and neglect, and go build the schools, the jobs, and the systems that would make certificates worth chasing again. To the young ones storming the gates of relevance with humour and hustle, never let a viral moment convince you that depth is optional.
Fame without foundation is a house built on sand during the rainy season; the applause will not hold the roof up when the storm returns. Ọgbọ́n ju agbára lọ – wisdom outlives strength, and it will certainly outlive a trend.
As for me, I have made my peace. Every generation gets the uprising it was raised to produce. Ours was the uprising of grammar without opportunity. Theirs is the uprising of opportunity without grammar. Somewhere between the two lies the Nigeria our children deserve, and building it, unlike a skit, cannot be done in sixty seconds.
