The internet recently caught fire when rapper YCEE weighed in on the meteoric rise of non-educative, hyper-casual content in Nigeria, a phenomenon some are cheekily calling the “Olodo Uprising.” The critique is familiar, weary, and loud: we are making people famous for absolutely nothing of intellectual substance. But pointing fingers at creators like Peller misses the mark entirely.
While the observation about a lack of educational value in mainstream media isn’t wrong, blaming the content creator is like blaming a mirror for showing you a messy room. Peller is not our problem. The real culprit is a multi-layered systemic crisis involving a broken educational ecosystem, a media architecture obsessed with cheap clicks, and our own collective appetite as consumers.
At its core, content creation is a market governed by the unyielding laws of supply and demand. Without a buyer, a product simply declines in distribution. Creators like Peller are merely supplying a massive, pre-existing demand.
Look at our larger media landscape for perspective. Every single year, intellectuals and critics scream from the rooftops that Big Brother Naija is destroying societal morals and offering zero educational value. Yet, MultiChoice does not force a single citizen to watch. During past seasons, the public has willingly cast nearly a billion votes across a single run, pouring staggering sums of money into the show’s ecosystem.
The show’s producers did not invent the human craving for voyeurism, gossip, and escapism; they merely stepped into a massive market gap. We cannot blame a media corporation or an entertainer for printing money off an appetite that the public explicitly displays every single evening. If the public genuinely craved deep, intellectual discourse on a Friday night, the algorithms and TV schedules would pivot instantly. Instead, millions choose to switch off their brains and laugh. You cannot blame an entertainer for entertaining a crowd that explicitly asked for a show.
To understand why substance dies in darkness, we must consider the gatekeepers: the bloggers and mainstream media houses. How many platforms actively promote educational or thought-provoking content today? If you ask them, their answer is always the same: it does not drive traffic. Media houses have gamified attention. By prioritizing sensationalism and low-effort drama over substance, they have conditioned the public to consume digital junk food. When the promoters refuse to showcase the healthy options, the consumer forgets they even exist. The truth is simple: if there are no promoters, the buyers do not see the product, and when the buyer doesn’t see the product, distribution declines.
The irony of the argument that social media is inherently ruining a generation is that the platforms themselves are often agnostic. TikTok, for instance, explicitly features a curated STEM feed designed to surface educational content. The infrastructure is there, and the creators are there. But a quick look at the metrics reveals a harsh reality: while a comedy live stream pulls in tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, a brilliant breakdown of macroeconomics or tech innovation struggles to clear a few hundred engagements. The problem isn’t a lack of educational content; it is a profound lack of public appetite.
Ultimately, this is not a social media crisis; it is a national, systemic education crisis driven by a glaring lack of government interest and chronic underfunding. We love to demand intellectual excellence from our youth on the timeline, but we refuse to look at the ledger. Year after year, our national budgetary allocations to the education sector hover around a meager six percent. This leaves a massive funding gap when measured against the UNESCO-recommended benchmark of fifteen to twenty percent. We cannot starve our classrooms, underpay our teachers, leave basic literacy infrastructure to decay, and then express shock when the minds emerging from that system gravitate toward low-barrier, mindless escapism.
This decay has effectively hollowed out the foundational elements of primary learning. I recently watched a viral street interview on X where a twenty-year-old could not identify Taraba as a state in Nigeria. This is basic, elementary knowledge that previous generations sang, rhymed, and mastered by the age of four through the classic “36 states and capitals” nursery song. When full-grown young adults lack the fundamental geography of their own country, it points to a total collapse of the educational foundation. It proves that the system is no longer teaching the basics, let alone fostering curiosity.
Beyond the school walls, the wider society carries a severe share of the blame through a hypocritical reward system that completely destroys the value proposition of education. We live in a society that screams about the “Olodo Uprising” by day, but by night, it turns around to idolize internet scammers, corrupt figures, and characters with obvious social vices simply because they have deep pockets.
Wealth has been completely decoupled from character and intellect. Today, the economic reality is so warped that a first-class or PhD holder is often treated with financial irrelevance, while those who bypass intellectual rigor are showered with societal validation, titles, and front-row seats.
Consider the psychological toll this takes on the younger generation. They watch millions of university graduates stay unemployed for years, or they see Master’s degree holders doing menial, low-paying jobs just to survive. In many cases, these highly educated youth end up serving or running errands for the very “Olodo” content creators society looks down upon, simply because that is where the capital is concentrated.
When the classroom yields poverty and the timeline yields prosperity, how can we honestly expect the young ones to look at a textbook and believe that education is the future?
Society has explicitly shown them that attention, by any means necessary, is the actual currency of survival. When a state effectively treats public education as a secondary afterthought, and its economy suffocates legitimate professional paths, it gives up the moral right to police how its youth capture attention to live.
If the current system is broken, we do not fix it by shouting at TikTokers; we do it by systematically rebuilding the talent pipeline from the ground up and changing how we define economic value.
This structural shift is what drove us to establish Earlybrite. Instead of simply lamenting the lack of substance online, our focus is on preparing the next generation with reasonable, high-value talents that can actualize real-world impact. By teaching future-proof skills like technological literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving, the goal is to shift young minds away from mindless consumption and empower them to become creators of actual value. We recognize that if you want the buyers of tomorrow to choose better economic and digital products, you have to educate them today.
My final take: stop asking the likes of Peller to be a school teacher. He is an entertainer, and he is doing his job remarkably well. If we are genuinely worried about the “Olodo Uprising,” we need to look in the mirror. We need to examine the media platforms that refuse to fund substance, the institutional gaps that have hollowed out the education system, and ourselves for hitting the like button on the absurd while ignoring the educational. The only way to defeat a culture of low-effort entertainment is to build a culture of high-value competence. Change the demand, equip the next generation with reasonable talent, and the supply will naturally follow.
About the Author
Victor Tubotamuno is an entrepreneur, venture builder, and the CEO of Earlybrite, an innovative EdTech organization operating as a subsidiary of Retta Holdings. Passionate about systemic educational reform and human capital development, Victor is dedicated to bridging the widening gap between traditional schooling and the demands of the future digital economy. Under his leadership, Earlybrite is systematically rebuilding the talent pipeline through high-impact initiatives like The Elite Mentorship Program (TEMP), GIT, and the Brite Foundry, a global, hybrid EdTech accelerator designed to equip public school leaders and transform schools into student incubators and innovation hubs.
Beyond education, Victor’s work operates within the broader Retta Holdings ecosystem, a dynamic venture capitalist and venture building firm with diverse portfolios spanning agriculture (Retta Farmhouse), global mobility (TEW Capital), energy, real estate, and technology. Across all his ventures, Victor is driven by a singular mission: to build structural solutions that empower the next generation to shift from being passive consumers to creators of actual, real-world value.
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.