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What’s going on?

On Friday, June 26, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu that Nigerians struggling with the cost of living should consider frying akara or roasting corn, as the Federal Government would offer grants to help them get started. Within hours, the tone-deaf comment had become the internet’s newest meme.

On July 2, President Tinubu at a press dinner, playfully introducing his wife as “Iya Alakara,” meaning Akara seller. Following the joke, the Presidency’s media team leaned into the new nickname and posted an AI-generated of the First Lady as a roadside akara seller.

And just like that, Akara became the main character. The conversation shifted from “How is selling akara the solution?” to “Who’s posting the funniest skit?” This happens every single time our leaders fumble; we laugh instead of demanding answers.

We’ve been here before

Nigeria has no shortage of serious political moments that somehow end up as memes.  

In 2018, a Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) clerk in Makurdi claimed a snake swallowed ₦36 million belonging to the board, money later to staff misappropriation. 

The story quickly became one of Nigeria’s most enduring political jokes, with content creators making skits and using “the snake swallowed it” as a response when asked about something they don’t have an answer to. 

In 2020, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) then-acting managing director, Kemebradikumo Pondei, mid-hearing while being questioned about ₦40 billion in missing commission funds, attributing it to an “unexplained health challenge.”

Content creators made skits and jokes about the situation, prompting multiple people to reenact the incident and causing it to go viral. 

Here If snakes swallowing cash was the height of it, you’re in for a shocker. In 2022, officials at the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) a Senate panel that termites had chewed through the receipts showing how the ₦17 billion was spent.

It’s the same routine. A crazy political moment occurs, the internet gets to work, and everyone’s in on the joke; before long, the memes have outlived the conversation that started it. 

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Standup comedians

We no longer live in a country where the government merely fumbles; we live in one where the government manufactures memes to cover up its fumbling. 

When the Presidency’s media team posted an AI-generated image mocking its own First Lady’s tone-deaf remarks, it wasn’t a harmless attempt to match the public’s humour. It was a calculated political deflection.

That’s where things get tricky. Once government failure becomes content, it’s much easier for the people behind it to join the joke than answer for it. By adopting the “Iya Alakara” nickname, the government effectively hijacked the narrative, shifting a legitimate crisis of empathy into a marketing campaign.

This means the next time a minister says something tone-deaf about your salary or your electricity bill, the expected response isn’t outrage, it’s a skit, and skits don’t get anyone fired.

What’s funny?

While Nigerians are busy making skits and memes out of failure and corruption, the country keeps dying. Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions has rated Nigeria 26 out of 100 for the second year running, while the country slipped from 140th to 142nd globally.

This rating will only worsen if we allow politicians to get away with corruption. Our poverty rate will continue to skyrocket if we laugh away ridiculous solutions rather than demand accountability,  and politicians will generate memes to mock our poverty because we’ve made them think it’s ok.

Because of our tendency to joke about everything, politicians know now they can get away with looting billions when they come to court in stretchers, when they pretend to faint, or make up ridiculous excuses to evade scrutiny.

They do it because they know we’d only be outraged for two days before we turn it into memes.

And so, it’s up to us to decide: do we want a political class so afraid of the populace they’d think twice about their actions and utterances, or one that fears nothing because they know they’ll be laughed at rather than challenged.

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