Laughable leadership / Wretched results

Today: Jídé Salawu, writer and editor at Olongo Africa; and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, founder of Olongo Africa, and writer and producer of the documentary, Ebrohimie Road.

Issue No. 195

A Jokeland Called Nigeria
Jídé Salawu

The Day Chaos Won Again
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún 

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 above the roof. She laughed and said she had no option than 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 things 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 rolled out weekly on the internet.

Laughter is therapeutic and good for the general health of the body, but I do not think being the subject of ridicule is the same. Nigeria once vaunted itself as the “Big Brother” of Africa: prosperous, educated, progressive. The current level of mockery is bitter. It suggests there is something awfully wrong. It implies that there is a stain, that one is perhaps weak and one’s nation is also weak. The joke is that yours is just a plain stupid country held hostage by a legendarily corrupt government.It shows that perhaps your country was once strong and great, but is now no more than the plaything of buffoons and tomfools. 

This, I think, is the most concerning of the stakes, that Nigeria is being led into the forest of despair by politicians who describe themselves as good wolves. But there are no good wolves in the land of prey. Nigerian leaders don’t care about being laughed at so long as their own reality remains rich and comfortable. They elicit sympathy when they pretend to share in everyday misfortune, but give no real thought to what ordinary Nigerians are going through. 

AI-generated memes of Tinubu have been proliferating on X/Twitter. Though the Nigeria House of Senate warns the general public against mocking the president on social media, the caveat has generated a backlash in response. In many of these memes, the President is frequently referred to by the name of the American artist, T-Pain. T-Pain has no connection whatsoever to Tinubu but the pun is a good one for describing the sufferings of the people under Tinubu’s policies.

The profligate lifestyles described in T-Pain’s music likewise makes the comparison to Tinubu appropriate (“I got money in the bank… Let’s talk money, I talk that.”)