The Olodo Uprising through the lens of economics
School na scam. It is a phrase we’ve all heard at some point, maybe even said it with a laugh as a joke but it’s really not. Somewhere along the line, a generation of young Nigerians looked at the deal their parents were sold “Read your books, pass your exams, get a good job and life will reward you”. We examined the evidence, and returned with a verdict, a judgment of fraud.
We like to call this an epidemic of unseriousness. The olodo, once used as an insult in context of academics, has become somewhat of a mascot. The skit maker out-earns the professor. The betting shop is fuller than the library. And millions of young adults will spend endless hours doomscrolling but cannot be moved to open a book that is not tied to an exam. And the easy explanation, the one that flatters those of us who write essays, is that the people have simply chosen entertainment over education.
I want to argue something less comfortable though, that this choice… if it is a choice at all, is being made exactly the way psychology predicts it would be, a symptom.
The pyramid we live at the bottom of
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs stack like a pyramid. At the base sit the physiological needs — food, water, shelter, sleep. Above them, safety. Only after those floors are secured does a person climb toward belonging, esteem, and finally what he called self-actualization: the pursuit of knowledge, mastery, meaning, becoming everything one is capable of becoming.
The insight buried in that pyramid is brutal in its simplicity that a hungry man does not philosophize. The mind attends to the fire nearest the house.
Now hold that pyramid up against Nigeria. By the most recent multidimensional poverty figures, well over half the population are struggling at that bottom floor, preoccupied daily with the raw permutations of survival: fuel, food, rent, transport fare that doubles without warning. When sixty percent of a society is pinned to the base of the pyramid, you should not be surprised that the activities of the summit of the pyramid feel like luxuries imported from another country.
Scarcity is a tax on the mind
But Maslow only tells us one part of the story. Behavioral economics tells us the other, that poverty shrinks the mind.
In their book Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir describe studies of Indian sugarcane farmers who take the same intelligence tests twice a year; once before harvest, when they are broke, and once after, when they are flush. Same men, just a few months apart. Before harvest, their scores dropped by the equivalent of roughly thirteen IQ points, about the cognitive cost of losing an entire night’s sleep. Scarcity, the researchers concluded, imposes a bandwidth tax. Worrying about money is itself a full-time mental job, and it is paid for out of the same account that funds patience, self-control, and long-term reasoning.
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This is the part we might refuse to acknowledge when we mock the olodo. The young man who cannot concentrate on a lecture is often far gone in his mind, focusing on how to stretch two thousand naira across four days, or whether the landlord’s deadline is negotiable, whether the strike will add another year to a four-year course. Long-term thinking is not a moral virtue evenly distributed among mankind. It is a cognitive luxury, and it is rationed.
The economics of the skit
Social media did not create this hunger though. A thirty-second skit asks nothing of a taxed mind and pays instantly, be it through a laugh, a jolt of outrage, or a moment of escape. A chapter of a book asks for forty minutes of the very bandwidth scarcity has already confiscated, and pays in a currency that may not mature for a decade. Under conditions of survival, this is not even a contest. Anything offering immediate emotional relief will outcompete anything offering deferred intellectual reward, every. single. time. And these social media platforms have refined that relief into a science.
Meanwhile, the institutions that were supposed to make the long game credible have been quietly folding their own tables. The universities strike for months at a stretch. The lecturers who might have modeled the life of the mind are boarding planes. The japa wave has hollowed out hospitals, banks, and core institutions and the ones who remain are visibly poorer than the twenty-three-year-old streaming his “mental episodes” in his bedroom. A society teaches with its salaries far more persuasively than with its syllabuses. When a nation pays its entertainers like kings and its teachers like an afterthought, the message to the youths is passed perfectly.
So here’s my hypothesis…
So here is my hypothesis, stated plainly. The olodo uprising is not a celebration of stupidity. It is a referendum on a broken promise, conducted by minds too taxed to hold out for a payoff they have never once seen delivered. Call it foolishness if you like, but notice that it is foolishness with impeccable internal logic: if education no longer buys safety, and safety is the thing you lack, then abandoning education for whatever pays today is not irrational but strategy.
That is also why the sermons do not work. You cannot shame a man up Maslow’s pyramid. You cannot motivational-speak someone out of a bandwidth tax. The preacher, the LinkedIn optimist, and the disappointed uncle are all shouting instructions to the top floor at people whose staircase has collapsed.
None of this is a counsel of despair. It is a redirection of blame, and of effort. If scarcity is the disease and anti-intellectualism the fever, then the cure is not more lectures about the fever. It is whatever restores the base of the pyramid be it livelihoods, functioning schools, some believable link between effort and reward, because curiosity is astonishingly resilient once survival stops screaming over it.
The same young people dismissed as olodo will teach themselves video editing, crypto trading, and whatever else whenever the payoff is visible. The hunger to learn never left.
Until then, the uprising continues, and it is telling us the truth about ourselves, if we can bear to listen: a society gets exactly as much thinking as it can afford to make safe.
Until next time, cheers!
