I know when I publish this piece, people will ask me, How did you manage to write such a long piece on an issue that just went viral this morning? I’d say because I am an awesome, badass writer, with a supercomputer brain like that. But the actual unflattering truth is that the piece had been in my drafts for months, from the time popular American media personality IShowSpeed came to Nigeria. I didn’t publish then because I knew that the issue between the “olodo” (Yoruba for someone who scores zero) and the “intellectuals” never dies; it just merely falls asleep, waiting for another person to rouse it from its slumber in order for it to become a hot topic. In addition, I have gained some more insights than when I first wrote it.
The “someone” this time was Nigerian rapper, singer, and songwriter Oludemilade “YCee” Alejo, who, while talking on the Afropolitan Podcast with Eche Emole andChika Uwazie, talked about the “Olodo uprising” or what he snarkily referred to as the “Peller culture,” a not-so-subtle dig at Habeeb “Peller” Hamzat the popular online influencer that goes by that name.
Every few weeks, a version of the same argument breaks out on Nigerian Twitter. The discourse usually follows a familiar arc. Someone posts a photo of the prize money given to the winner of Big Brother Naija, or Peller or Carterefe’s latest brand endorsement (those two, whether you accept it or not, are the current commanders of the Nigerian Olodo uprising), celebrity purchase. Someone else from the degree-holding professional class responds with contempt, pointing out that the celebrity “never even finished secondary school,” that they’re a clown, that Nigeria is a failed country if this is what wealth looks like. The replies pile up. Some agree. Some push back. Someone invokes a chart comparing the cheque the best graduating student in a university got compared to what Ilebaye Odiniya (No shade to her btw)got for her BBN win. The thread becomes a courtroom, and the question on trial is always the same one: what, exactly, is school actually a scam?
It is not quite envy. It is not quite admiration. It is something closer to outrage. Something that sounds, if you listen carefully, like grief. But the real issue is a lot more nuanced than the outrage that trails the issue on social media suggests
The Bargain That Was Made
One of my Dad’s favorite sayings is the Yoruba proverb “Atelewo Eni kii Tani je” (Roughly translated as You can never go wrong if you rely on working with your hands). There is a story that my dad usually shares whenever he is asked to talk to young people about work, employment, and the labour force. His bricklayer, at the time, brought his child, who was looking for admission into the university, for help. When he asked the boy what he wanted to study, the boy said without hesitation,” Management and Accounting”. My dad was surprised by this because he knows the boy well. The boy had been following his dad to work regularly long before he was old enough to finish secondary school, and could probably mould a straight wall with his eyes closed by that point. Dad said he told the father to excuse them and told the boy, “I know your father nurtured this Accounting dream in you, but your father is a bricklayer; he doesn’t own a bank. Is this how he is going to be taking you around when you graduate? As you are now, even if you choose not to go to school, in a few years, you can start getting your own building commissions. But I am happy you want to go to University. So why not go for a course in the Environmental Design and Management faculty, such that the certification just backs your skills instead of going into an industry where you are handicapped by virtue of your background?”
My Dad, of course, did not say whether the boy or his father listened to his advice, but that is not the point here. What made me remember this story was something, as Dr Ola Brown (Orekunrin) argues in her recent essay Why African Money Does Not Become Capital About how Nigerian parents, particularly those who came of age during the post-independence decades, made a specific bet on behalf of their children. It was not simply a bet on education as enlightenment. It was a bet on education as security architecture. The goal was not to produce a risk-taker. The goal was to produce a child who cannot easily fall. Perhaps the bricklayer listened to us talking about how we wanted to be “Lawyer”, Nurse, Engineer, and decided that if “Prof’s” children can have such big dreams, why should his own son not be an accountant?”
In an unstable country, his thinking makes sense. Even today, my sister, for example, works with her nursing degree in the UK. My other sister is an associate professor of law in a prominent University. A banking job brought structure. Professional credentials were portable in ways that land, naira savings, or a family business were not. So Nigerian families, across class lines, across geopolitical zones, across different levels of income, organised themselves around the production of professionals. Money that could have seeded a business went to school fees. Savings that could have compounded in a market went to a JAMB form, a university application, and a master’s degree abroad. In other words, the bricklayer was within his rights to herd the son to a professional path to ensure that he didn’t end up like him.
But hedges have costs, and this one was paid forward, into the bodies and expectations of the children who were supposed to benefit from it.
When the Ladder Runs Out
The educated Nigerian professional did what was asked of them. They passed the exams under harsh conditions. They got the degree. They survived the NYSC posting. They joined the bank, the law firm, the hospital, and the government ministry. They climbed. And then they looked up and realised the ladder had a ceiling they had not been told about.
The salary does not compound the way a business does. The title does not translate into equity. The credentials that were supposed to be insurance against falling have become, in many cases, a very expensive way of standing still. Meanwhile, inflation is ballooning. The naira is moving. School fees for their own children are moving. And the Peller, the one who hasn’t even entered university, is moving too. Into a new house. Into a new tax bracket. Into a new conversation about wealth that somehow excludes everything the educated professional was told would matter.
Again, I don’t follow Peller; most I know about him is from Twitter intellectuals holding him as the scapegoat for everything that is wrong with Nigerian youths nowadays. That gap, between the promise and the reality, is where the disdain lives. But disdain is the symptom, not the diagnosis.
I must acknowledge that Peller himself is not an innocent lamb led to slaughter in this matter. Some time ago, he announced an open position for a photographer to work for him. He then said that anyone who wants to apply must have a minimum of a Master’s Degree. The stunt was ostensibly to “stunt on” (pardon the pun) on people who went to school, that it is money that matters, not the education. He has become public enemy number one and the General of the “Olodo uprising” since then.
Ironically, because, to use the words of his haters, he is an olodo, he does not realize that that stunt reveals his feelings of inadequacy about his lack of education; like the fox in the sour grapes story, he is trying, and failing, to convince both himself and the people he is performing for that he doesn’t need to go to school. The lesson here is stark: even those who didn’t go to school wished they did.
What educated Nigerians are experiencing, in many cases, is a crisis of the “Bata re a dun ko ko ka, Ti o ba ka’we re.” (roughly translated, “You will get a job and acquire the level of social status that allows you get to wear high-heeled shoes, if you study hard”) model they were handed. The professional prestige trap, as Ola Brown frames it, is not just about professional status. It is about the entire orientation of ambition that Nigerian society has historically rewarded. We have mastered the professional ladder; we have not mastered the ownership ladder.
Wizkid for example, who is also a “ university dropout” (but who rarely gets the same hack jabs at his lack of education, probably because he is rich, and he has an army of fanatics who will rip you to shreds if you come at him) did not read that memo. Or rather, he never received it, because the memo was not written for him. The likes of Wizkid, Peller, entered the economy through a different door: one that was not gated by credentials, and therefore not protected by them either. They built audience. They built IP. They built brand. They took the risk that the professional class was specifically trained to avoid. And in a moment when the returns on risk-taking happened to be unusually visible, they won in ways that are hard to unsee.
Of course there is the argument that ironically the record label issues that YCee himself faced (and which his music career is yet to recover from) is one of the side effects of celebrity without education, or “the olodo uprising.” But that is an argument for another piece.
But what many people don’t pay attention to, because educated Nigerians rarely say it out loud, perhaps because it is too uncomfortable to say out is the anger is not really about the celebrity.
There is a reason every arc of the argument usually ends at how Nigeria has failed her people and vitrolitic abuse for the president in power. It is because Carterefe is a mirror. What is reflected in that mirror is a system that failed to complete the promise it made. A child was told: sacrifice now, and security will follow. Go to school and you will wear high heeled shoes. Climb the professional ladder, and it will hold your weight.
For many Nigerians in the educated middle class, the ladder has not held. Not because of personal failure, the grades were excellent, the degree is real, the job was obtained, but because the wider system that was supposed to reward that path has been corroding for years. Wages have not kept pace with inflation. The naira has lost enormous purchasing power. Savings erode. The cost of living accelerates. The state that was supposed to validate professional achievement has instead been a source of instability, volatility, and disappointment.
So when a celebrity buys something outrageous and posts it online, what the educated professional feels is not merely envy of a single person. It is the accumulated weight of a bargain that feels like it was made in bad faith. The disdain for the uneducated celebrity is a displacement of anger at a system, and, if the professional is honest enough to go there, at the model of ambition they inherited.
The Prestige Trap and Its Discontents
This is where the conversation needs to go further than the Twitter thread ever does.
Back to the Ola Brown piece. There is something she calls: “the professional prestige trap: the way Nigerian society organises status around credentials and titles rather than ownership and production.” A doctor earns respect. A lawyer commands deference. A banker is taken seriously at a family gathering. An entrepreneur, especially one in the long, unglamorous middle of building something before the exit, is treated with polite skepticism at best.
The comedian who goes viral has bypassed this system entirely. They did not build prestige through the channels the system recognises. And yet they have achieved something the system was supposed to deliver: financial security, visible wealth, social influence.
But unlike what YCee and his defenders are trying to say in this latest round of outrage, what this reveals is not that education is worthless. It reveals that the Nigerian conception of education’s value has been too narrowly defined. Education was positioned as a route to professional income. Not as a route to ownership. Not as preparation for building. Not as the foundation of the enterprise. The degree was supposed to be the destination, not the departure point.
This was perhaps what my dad was trying to say to the man and his son who came to him for help. A country does not become rich simply because it produces brilliant professionals. It becomes rich when those professionals move from income to ownership, from credentials to production, from employment to institution-building. Nigeria has produced exceptional professionals. It has produced far fewer owner-builders.
The celebrity, ironically, even with the conditions of the creative in Nigeria, has often done something closer to the ownership model, building an audience as an asset, licensing that asset, monetising attention at scale than the credentialed professional who has spent fifteen years selling hours for a salary that does not beat inflation. We can argue ourselves hoarse about how sustainable it is, but facts are still facts.
What the Disdain Is Costing Us
The problem with the educated professional’s disdain is not that it is emotionally unjust. Given the weight of disappointment behind it, it is understandable. The problem is that it is strategically useless.
It re-centres the argument on credentials as the measure of value, which is exactly the framework that produced the professional prestige trap in the first place. It reinforces the idea that the goal was always the title, and that the celebrity’s lack of title is the source of their illegitimacy. But if the title did not deliver the security it promised, then defending the title-based system is not resistance to a broken structure; it is loyalty to it.
The more honest reckoning is harder. It requires the educated Nigerian professional to ask not “why is that comedian richer than me?” but rather “was the model I was given the right one?” It requires looking at the ownership gap, not just the income gap, and asking what it would take to cross it. It requires recognising that the path was built for safety, not for scale. And that safety, in the conditions Nigeria has actually delivered, has not been as safe as advertised. It is not an easy issue to admit, but we must start from somewhere.
The anger is real. The grief is real. The system failed a lot of people who did everything they were told. But piling on Peller and Egungun of Lagos every time Dangote Refinery jacks up the price of fuel will not recover the years or rebuild the model ( Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Desmond Elliot are fair game, sha, I will be on top of that pile like mad). Only a clearer-eyed understanding of what went wrong, and what a different relationship to risk, ownership, and wealth might look like, can begin to do that.
The point is not that school is a scam, or Peller is suddenly worthy of glory and adoration because he became rich without going to university. The point is that the ladder was incomplete to start with. And someone has to be honest enough to say so.
Leave a comment