ARE YOU AN OLODO?? - by Nonso Obi

The mother asks how they are both doing. It is a simple question, the kind mothers ask at the start of every visit home. She turns first to the one who did not go to school. He tells her about the money coming in, the new car, the house he is renovating for her. She smiles, nods, tells him well done, tells him she is proud, tells the room, without quite meaning to, that this is what doing well looks like. Then she turns to the one who did go to school. He starts slowly. He talks about the plan, the field he's building a name in, the people ahead of him who started exactly where he is now and made it. He is mid sentence, mid hope, when his brother cuts in. "School na scam," he says. "Look at you. Still explaining. Still promising." The room tightens. Words that have been circling both of them for years finally land. The rich brother says it plainly: his brother is educated but has nothing to show for it. Meanwhile he, who barely finished school, is the one feeding the family. "You are an olodo," the educated brother spits back, the insult meant to wound. His brother doesn't flinch. "I'm an olodo," he says, "but at least I feed my family." Nobody answers that. The educated brother tries to say more, to explain, to finish the sentence he started before the interruption. Nobody is listening anymore. The mother says nothing at all. She already gave her verdict, before the argument even began, in the way she smiled at one son and let the other keep talking into a room that had already made up its mind. That is the sitting room. That is Nigeria. Call something an "uprising" and you have already decided what side it is rising against. The phrase "olodo uprising" assumes the country's new folk heroes chose ignorance the way a movement chooses a cause, deliberately, defiantly, as a badge. But watch the mother closely. She never once asks "how" her rich son made his money. She never asks what he had to learn or risk to get there. She only asks what the result was. That is the real trick of the phrase. It skips the investigation and goes straight to the sentencing. Nigeria isn't rewarding ignorance so much as it has stopped asking the one question that would prove whether ignorance was ever really there. None of this means the mockery is imagined, though. It would be dishonest to pretend the mockery of careful, educated speech is imagined. It isn't. People who reason slowly and speak in qualifications are often read, online and in sitting rooms alike, as pretentious, or worse, as people who talk instead of act. That reading has a source. It comes from a country where too many people have watched the careful, credentialed ones talk and talk and still not arrive. The mockery is misdirected far more often than it is fair. But it did not appear from nothing. It grew out of disappointment repeated so many times it hardened into a reflex. That reflex has a slogan now. "School na scam" sounds like a rejection of learning itself. It is not. It is a verdict on a specific broken promise, the one that said a certificate would buy a stable life. That promise failed an entire generation in real time, in front of them, degree in hand, no job to show for it. "School na scam" is not really a claim about the value of knowledge. It is what disappointment sounds like when it has been repeated so many times it starts to rhyme. But grief is not the same as proof, and here the rich brother's own line should be turned back on him, gently. "At least I feed my family" sounds like proof that hustle alone got him there, that intellect had nothing to do with it. It almost never actually works that way. The paths outside formal schooling, trading, building an audience, mastering a trade, still run on their own literacies: reading a market, timing a post, negotiating a price, learning a craft by hand until the hand stops making mistakes. The brother who never went to school is not proof that school doesn't matter. He is proof that Nigeria has not yet agreed to call his curriculum a curriculum. It would be satisfying, after all this, to end with a winner. Neither brother deserves one. The rich brother is not wrong that results matter, that promises unmet for years start to sound like excuses. But he is wrong to think results are the only form of evidence a life can offer. The educated brother is not wrong that what he is building takes real time, real skill, real patience most people do not have. But he is wrong to think that being right should be enough to be heard. Both of them are partly true. Neither of them is finished being tested. And a country that only has patience for people who have already crossed the finish line will always mistake "not yet" for "never." Which brings us back to the mother, who never answers her own question. She doesn't have to. Her silence already voted. And that, more than any online debate about creators and graduates, is the real olodo uprising: not a war between the educated and the successful, but a quiet agreement, spreading across an entire country, that we no longer have the patience to listen to anyone who hasn't already won. The son who is still building can talk about his goals all he wants. Nobody in that room, and increasingly nobody in this country, has the time to wait and find out if he was right. He will only be believed in hindsight. By then, it will not matter what he said. Only what he has. Maybe that is the more honest reading of the uprising. Not a revolt against intelligence but a revolt against patience.

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