Temilade Oluwalayomi Alonge

Nigeria is a country that knows how to have the wrong argument with great Conviction. We are good at identifying symptoms and debating them with urgency, and considerably less interested in tracing the illness back to its source. We will argue about whether Peller is a bad influence for hours. We will not, if we can help it, open the education budget and ask why it says what it says. The Olodo Uprising is the latest version of this. A rapper makes a pointed observation. A content creator becomes the symbol of cultural decline. Social media takes sides. Think pieces proliferate. And the budget room in Abuja, where the real story lives, remains undisturbed. I have been circling this story for a while. I pay attention to where movements start, how they are told, and who benefits from the way they are framed. I sit at the intersection of culture, tech, media, education, and politics. That is not a brandhttps://urbanexpresslive.com/why-opc-remains-the-most-structured-non-state-security-architecture-deserves-recognition/

statement. It is a description of where the real stories tend to live. And this one has roots that go much deeper than a podcast. In June 2026, YCee, whose given name is Akinwa Akinyemi, was on the Afropolitan podcast when he said the quiet part at full volume. He called it an “Olodo Uprising.” “Nigerian society is no longer celebrating academic excellence,” he said. “Peoplehttps://urbanexpresslive.com/june-12-and-27-years-of-the-fourth-republic-mark-up-or-mark-down/

don’t even want to go to school anymore. It’s not even Yahoo culture anymore; now we have a Peller culture.”

Peller is Habeeb Hamzat. Twenty-three years old. Lagos. TikTok. Millions of followers, millions of naira, no university degree. He is genuinely entertaining. He has also become, fairly or not, the emblem of a generation that appears to have concluded that the certificate is not worth what it used to cost. YCee’s words hit a nerve because they named something real. The backlash hit a nerve because it named something equally real: that the people most likely to

lecture young Nigerians about the value of education are very often the people who have benefited most from a system that no longer works the same way for the generation coming behind them. Both sides were right about something. Both sides were also, I think, missing the

more important argument. Almost nobody is asking how we got here. Let us start with the word, because olodo matters. It comes from the Yoruba “odo,” meaning zero. It began in classrooms as the label for a child who scored nothing on an examination. Over decades it spread, first across Yorubaland, then into Nigerian pidgin, accumulating cultural weight as it

travelled until it became something larger than an academic result. By the time most of us were growing up, olodo did not just mean someone who failed a test. It meant someone who had looked at the effort that learning requires and turned away from it. A moral verdict, not an academic one. In the value system that produced the word, ọgbọn (wisdom) and ìmọ̀ (knowledge) were not optional social accessories. They were the currency of communal respect. To be called an olodo was to be told you had forfeited your standing.

What YCee is describing is the inversion of that. The moment when the word loses its sting. When the olodo stops being ashamed and starts being followed. When the

ring light outshines the certificate, and the certificate-holders can see it happening in real time and are not entirely sure what to say about it. That inversion is real. I have watched it. The question worth asking, the one that keeps getting skipped, is what produced it. Because cultural inversions of this scale do not happen in a vacuum. They happen when the value system being inverted has stopped delivering on its promises.

I work in tech. I know how these platforms are built. So let me say this plainly: the algorithm is not the villain of the Olodo Uprising. It is the mirror.

TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. They run on the same engine. Watch time, shares, comments, saves, replays. They do not assess educational value or national human capital development. They amplify what an audience is already watching and show them more of it.

When large numbers of young Nigerians are watching content that celebrates life built outside formal education, the algorithm is not corrupting them. It is reflecting a conclusion they have already reached from experience. The app found a vacuum. The Nigerian state created the vacuum. There is a difference. Consider what a young Nigerian in a federal university actually goes through. ASUU has gone on strike sixteen times since 1999. A three-year degree routinely

takes five or six years. Lecturers go unpaid for months. Buildings that should have been renovated in the nineties are still standing on cement and optimism. The student endures all of this, graduates, and walks into a formal job market that has

been contracting. Then she picks up her phone and sees Peller earning in one livestream what her father earns in three months. Tell me where, in that sequence of events, the algorithm did the damage. Because from where I am standing, the damage was done long before she opened the app.

I pay close attention to data. And the numbers on Nigerian education spending are, if you read them honestly, not a story about youth character. They are a story about government priorities.

UNESCO recommends that governments commit between 15 and 20 per cent of their national budgets to education. Nigeria allocated 6.1 per cent in its 2026 federal budget. Between 2015 and 2025, the education share of national spending declined from 10.75 per cent to 5.47 per cent. The 2025 allocation of 3.52 trillion naira represented approximately 3 per cent of GDP, half the globally recommended minimum, and was described by fiscal analysts as “big in number, not in value,” given the naira’s deterioration. As of late 2024, an estimated 18.3 million Nigerian children were out of school,according to UNICEF. The highest number of any country in the world. Nigeria alone accounts for approximately 15 per cent of all out-of-school children globally. In the seven-to-fourteen age group, 75 per cent of Nigerian children lack basic

foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Here is the part that I keep returning to. Between 2019 and 2025, the federal education budget expanded nearly sixfold in nominal terms. And over that same period, learning outcomes did not improve. Budget execution rates across states hovered between 66 and 67 per cent, meaning roughly one third of even the

Inadequate amounts allocated were never actually spent. A government that increases its education budget sixfold and produces measurable improvement in what children learn is not suffering from a funding Problem alone. It is suffering from a priority problem. The money exists, on paper, and does not arrive where it is needed because the people deciding where it goes have not genuinely decided that those places matter. There is a falsity running through this conversation that I want to name directly, because it is the engine of the impasse.

The political class presiding over this decade of educational decline is the same class whose children are not inside the system they have defunded. The senator who delivers speeches about Nigerian youth needing to value education more sends his daughter to school in Guildford. The minister overseeing a public school estate unrenovated since before most young Nigerians were born places his son in a British boarding school. They have conducted a private assessment of Nigerian public education, concluded it is inadequate, acted on that conclusion by removing their own children from it, and retained the authority to determine its funding while mourning its cultural consequences. That is not ordinary hypocrisy. It is something more deliberate. A managed abandonment, carried out by the people with the most power to reverse it, who have chosen instead to extract their personal stake and observe the decline from a

comfortable distance. YCee is not wrong to be alarmed. A society that stops valuing intellectual rigour makes decisions, in its politics, its medicine, its economics, its civic life, that reflect that devaluation. The stakes here are not merely cultural. They are civilisational.

But an alarm without accountability is noise. The Olodo Uprising did not begin on a server in California. It began in a budget room in Abuja. It was constructed, line item by line item, across a decade of deliberate underinvestment, by a governing class that had already quietly ensured the consequences would fall on someone else’s children. We are very good, in Nigeria, at commemorating the wrong things and ignoring the right ones. The bunting goes up. The hashtag trends for four hours. The generator cuts. The real story is in the numbers nobody wants to read out loud. I have been reading them. And I am not done yet.

To be Continued…..