A Jokeland Called Nigeria

by Jídé Salawu

I was on the phone with my mother a few months ago and asked her how she was adapting to the austerity in Nigeria, where recent reforms instituted by the government of Bola Tinubu, including a steep devaluation of the Naira, have caused inflation to soar. She lives in my hometown, Kwara, where the cost of living is not as high as it is in Lagos, but e reach to ask because prices have gone through the roof. She laughed and said she had no option but to keep hoping. She is an incurable optimist of course apart from her ardent Adventism. 

The World Bank speculates that Tinubonomics is working and will benefit Nigerians in future. When that future will arrive is uncertain. 

But perhaps no other country laughs misfortune away like Nigerians. While things fall apart, Nigerians find humor in their situation, producing skits, memes, and GIFs on the challenges that besiege everyone in the country except its leaders—or rather, Nigerians in the real sense are not happy, but we are also happy insofar as we can find humor and sarcasm in the absolute tragedy that characterizes us as a people. 

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is the most recent fiction from the African Nobelist, Wole Soyinka. Nigeria may be a jokeland where people are prone to putting on happy faces, but it is also the most explicit sadland in Africa, and remains a bad emblem of a Black-led country on a rudderless trip to the future. Soyinka’s work is satirical, naturally, a critical commentary on our absurd condition as a nation. Nigerian writer Ebenezer Obadare has said that in humor we can witness the everyday sadness of Nigerians’ resistance and struggles for agency. It is unsurprising then that humor is perhaps the most popular media industry in Nigeria, with hundreds of skits and memes rolled out weekly on the internet.