By Oluwafemi Adekoya

Outrage no longer remains confined to speeches, editorials, or street protests. Today, it increasingly takes the form of memes, jokes, remixes, and viral images, amplified across social media by the saturated skit-making industry. This process is often called the memeification of outrage: the conversion of anger, grievance, or moral shock into shareable online humour.

While memes do not erase the seriousness of the original issue, they change its form, making it more accessible, more repeatable, and often more entertaining. As a result, outrage becomes both a political expression and a cultural performance.

In Nigeria, outrage rarely stays serious for long. A political scandal, police abuse, celebrity controversy, or another pang of economic hardship often becomes a meme within hours, turning anger into captions, skits, remixes, and viral jokes. This “memeification of outrage” is not just a playful Internet habit; it is one of the main ways Nigerians process public frustration online. It helps us move on to the next big scandal.

Recently, President Bola Tinubu affectionately nicknamed First Lady Oluremi Tinubu as “Iya Alakara” (bean cake seller) during the Presidential Press Corps Dinner in Abuja. A video of the event shared by Aso Rock TV showed Tinubu smiling as he greeted guests before introducing his wife with the nickname.

“Good evening, gentlemen of the press, ladies and gentlemen, my dear wife, the First Lady, Iya Alakara,” the President said, drawing laughter from members of the audience. This playful remark followed public debate sparked by the First Lady’s suggestions that Nigerians should consider small-scale, low-capital businesses. Many Nigerians criticised the First Lady’s statement, arguing that it appeared insensitive to the country’s prevailing economic hardship and diminished the struggles of citizens facing rising living costs.

Though meme culture is not exclusive to Nigeria, we frequently turn political blunders, scandals, and social frustration into jokes, captions, skits, and branded slang. From ‘Oga at the top’ to ‘Akara and Kulikuli’, the common pattern is that a serious controversy quickly becomes a viral comic reference, allowing people to process anger through humour.

Even the Presidency and the National Assembly have caught on to the viral moments. From the President’s Iya Alakara to the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, occasionally lightening proceedings in the Senate, serious matters easily turn to jokes. Akpabio jokingly referenced a viral video involving Senator Adams Oshiomhole while responding to Mr Oshiomhole’s opposition to the confirmation of former Federal University Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) Vice-Chancellor, Abayomi Fasina, as a non-career ambassador.

Oshiomhole and some senators had opposed the confirmation of Mr Fasina over sexual harassment allegations levelled against him.

Teasing Oshiomhole over a viral video that purportedly showed him aboard a private jet with a woman, Akpabio said lawmakers initially dismissed the footage as a possible artificial intelligence (AI)-generated fabrication.

“I don’t want to go outside what we are doing. I would have asked a question. When there was a picture showing one of our senators in a plane massaging the leg of a girl. Senator Oshiomhole, your very good friend, Senator Lalong came to give me security information. He said that we just ignored the massage because we thought it was AI, but if you have other evidence, we have a petition before us. We can look into it if it is not AI.” In other words, protest and watch us open the can of worms.

Nigerian meme culture has long been tied to politics and public life, with researchers noting that memes and hashtags function as archives of electoral commentary and dissatisfaction with governance. In this sense, a meme can do what a long political statement cannot: it can be brief, funny, and still sharply critical. But we play too much. Our politicians equally laugh it off and no longer take us seriously.

Memeification weakens accountability even as it appears to challenge power. The same tools that help communities voice dissent can also normalise cruelty, spread misinformation, and reduce complex social problems to punchlines. This is why the memeification of outrage is best understood as a double-edged phenomenon: it can mobilise, unite, and expose, but it can also distract, distort, and dehumanise.

The meme culture is being abused. Netizens joke about ransom for kidnapping and how unsafe the roads have become. Outrage that becomes a meme loses its moral urgency, turning real suffering into entertainment.

Online crowds now use memes to ridicule victims, trivialise injustice, or escalate dogpiling against individuals who become public targets.

During the week, netizens saw how a break-up between a couple turned into a viral moment on the harmful methods of ‘treating infections’ through the insertion of plastic pipes in the anal cavity from the rectum. Ignoring the consequences of memeification can be damning. With most Nigerians living well below the poverty line, for how long are we going to continue laughing away our sorrows rather than demand accountability and good governance?

Beyond memes, it’s high time we became more interested in critical discussions that affect the nation and its future. The Internet does not just host outrage; it actively rewards and reshapes it. That is why we have an army of young Nigerians becoming social media influencers, skit makers and content creators.

Nigeria’s hustle economy is growing and being rewarded by the Internet. The 2024 job report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) disclosed that 84 per cent of Nigeria’s working-class population is self-employed. In 2025, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) published a report titled ‘From Hustle to Decent Work: Unlocking Jobs and Productivity for Economic Transformation in Nigeria’. The report reveals how Nigeria’s economy is running in a ‘survivalist’ mode, with 93 per cent of the nation’s workforce trapped in informal employment.

The report highlights the overwhelming reliance on informal, ‘hustle’ activities, which are actively hindering national development and poverty reduction. Today’s hustle is evident in the amount of content young Nigerians churn out on TikTok and YouTube. Many have become skit makers, own a YouTube channel, or are planning to.

Memes have become our getaway from everyday challenges and poverty. Research on online moral outrage shows that people are more likely to repeat outrage when they receive likes, shares, and other forms of feedback (Share of streaming revenue), and that outrage is also shaped by the norms of the communities they inhabit. Skit makers see the potential in online incomes and leverage it.

Ultimately, the memeification of outrage reflects a central truth about digital culture: people do not only communicate opinions online; they package emotion for circulation. Nigerians have seen different satires packaged as skits (Governor Amuneke and others), but they are rarely sustained and mostly lost to humour and fast-paced content consumption habits. While memes have become one of the main languages through which people interpret political anger, social frustration, and public scandal, they can be easily trivialised.

Outrage becomes dangerous when it is reduced to spectacle: people laugh, share, and move on, while the underlying problem remains untouched. Yes, macroeconomic reforms may have stabilised the currency and supported GDP growth, but for many Nigerians, daily life is still harsh. The gap between the numbers on national balance sheets and the reality of survival is too wide to ignore.

As our crises are drowned in jokes, memes, and performative anger, Nigerians must recognise a hard truth: memeification can amplify criticism, but it can also drain it of urgency. Problems that we treat as entertainment instead of emergencies will not disappear — they will deepen and return stronger.