By Publisher
Kindly share:
Welcome to Yahoo Nation, where the national anthem should rightly begin with “Arise, O Compatriots… and Collect Your Share.” The only country where fraud is not a crime; it’s a career path. Where the national motto might as well be: “In God We Scam.”
In this proudly dysfunctional republic, the finest export isn’t oil, or Nollywood, or even jollof rice, but 419 logic, mastered from the very top and graciously passed down to the street-level fraudster with a cracked iPhone and three WhatsApp lines.
Let’s be honest: The so-called “Yahoo Boys” are simply overzealous interns in the Nigerian School of Scammership, where the true professors wear agbadas, give campaign speeches, and swear by the constitution they rewrite over pepper soup and Hennessy.
Every four years, Nigeria hosts the grandest ritual of deception known to mankind: Elections. It’s a sacred period when politicians descend from their convoys, kiss dusty babies, make promises they have no intention of fulfilling, and tell you, “This time, we’ll fight corruption!”
“We will fix the electricity!”But darkness remains more reliable than light. Paying for electricity that never comes has become the people’s patriotic duty.
“We will create jobs!”And the biggest employer turns out to be Yahoo, where graduates swap CVs for scam formats.
“We will improve security!”Yet the only secure entities are the leaders behind high walls, while citizens learn the art of dodging potholes and stray bullets alike.
And just like that, they get into office, and Nigeria gets into intensive care.
The newly elected Honourable Yahoo Excellency immediately disappears behind bulletproof glass, heavily guarded by police officers who haven’t been paid in months. Within weeks, the treasury begins to cough. Suddenly, foreign trips become essential. Committee upon committee is formed to study why electricity doesn’t work, often in well-lit Swiss hotels.
Meanwhile, the poor voter, who was promised 24-hour light, is still cooking with firewood and watching the neighbor’s generator like a jealous lover.
Our very own Economic and Financial Crimes Commission , EFCC, the beloved anti-graft agency, is Nigeria’s version of Shark Tank, except they only fish out catfish.
At midnight, a dozen EFCC operatives storm a dingy apartment in Lekki. There, they find a 22-year-old with $100 in crypto and a badly photoshopped FBI badge on his laptop. The cameras roll. He is paraded like Pablo Escobar. Twitter rejoices. The agency tweets: “Another victory in the war against cybercrime.”
Meanwhile, Senator Pocketdeep, who just awarded himself a ₦5 billion contract to build a borehole (which is still leaking), is sipping champagne in Dubai with his mistress, two bodyguards, and a conscience permanently in airplane mode.
Of course, EFCC can’t arrest him. He has “immunity,” a magical Nigerian invention that means: If you steal big enough, you become untouchable. It’s like a Ponzi scheme, just with official letterheads and national budgets.
I wonder who drugged the EFCC, or did it just look away. Is the EFCC also a scam, a camouflage?
Imagine the gargantuan discovery by the Senate of all places. Is it not strange that the Senate has uncovered ₦210 trillion in financial malfeasance in the audited accounts of the NNPC from 2017 to 2023? A space of mere five years?
Where was governance, the EFCC, ICPC and the rest of them? This is hardly surprising though; scam is a trademark in Nigeria, and whoever must excel, must be adept at it, and master how to cover his tracks
Let’s be fair to the Yahoo Boys. What else were they supposed to learn from a country where: The national budget is padded more than an Instagram influencer’s selfie; roads are commissioned with ribbon-cutting ceremonies and potholes on the same day, and “serving the people” means servicing one’s pocket?
These boys didn’t fall from the sky; they were manufactured in Nigeria. The average Nigerian youth grows up watching leaders promise free education while looting the university system into oblivion. They watch pension funds vanish, borehole contracts awarded to ghost companies, and subsidy removed to subsidise foreign bank accounts.
So, what do they do? They open Gmail, forge a bank alert, and hustle a lonely retiree in Nebraska. Morally wrong? Absolutely. But when morality becomes a luxury the government can’t afford, don’t expect its citizens to keep the receipt.
It’s hard to tell who the real scammers are: The boy who sends a fake love letter to a white woman or the politician who sends a fake budget to the National Assembly. The difference? One uses poor grammar; the other uses executive power.
And when the EFCC comes knocking, guess who gets jailed?
You guessed it; the guy with ₦45k in his account and an iPhone 7. The senator? He gets invited as a “guest of honour” at anti-corruption seminars hosted by the same agency.
In Yahoo Nation, the size of your scam determines the size of your protection.
Nigeria loves to win, but only in the corruption rankings. Year after year, we find ourselves in the elite club of most corrupt countries, flexing like it’s the World Cup. The government responds with the usual, “We reject this rating,” like a cheating boyfriend caught red-handed who says, “That’s not what it looks like.”
But it is.
It looks exactly like what it is: A nation where civil servants drive luxury cars while civil service buildings have no functioning toilets. A nation where constituency projects exist only on paper, and school feeding programmes feed ghost children.
Take a moment to read any Nigerian budget; it reads like a Yahoo email: “Dear Sir/Madam, we have a lucrative opportunity for you. Kindly invest in our nation. We assure you of massive returns. God bless you.”
By mid-year, nothing has been returned, not roads, not jobs, not dignity.
And when you complain, they say, “The economy is hard globally.” Meanwhile, their children are studying abroad, posting TikToks from Harvard dorms funded by money meant for textbooks in Osun.
Yahoo Nation has a full cabinet, including our most beloved Minister of “We Are Still Investigating”. Every scandal is a season of a Netflix series titled Under Investigation, starring top government officials who somehow never see the inside of a courtroom, except when cutting ribbons or faking piety during Ramadan.
Lest I forget, there is also the Minister of Asking Nigerians to Pray. Certainly, prayer avails much in a country where herdsmen have picnic with farmers on their farms. Pray, what does this minister know? Why does he want us to fast and pray for food security? Is that a euphemism for starving to death? Back to sender!
In Yahoo Nation, when all else fails, bring out religion. Pastors will tell you God is testing us. Imams will say it’s the will of Allah. The leaders will host interdenominational prayers asking for “divine intervention,” while simultaneously intervening in the CBN to collect their cut.
And we, the people? We light candles. We hold vigils. We post “God is in control” while the same God is probably asking, “But what are you doing?”
Every election cycle, the ruling party repackages old lies with new logos. “Next Level,” “Renewed Hope,” “Change Begins With You,” “Not Too Young to Run,” “Reforms Are Ongoing.”
Nigerians, ever hopeful, line up to vote. The ink dries. The rigging begins. The hope dies.
And yet, we try again next time.
Why? Because hope is the only affordable thing in Yahoo Nation. It’s not taxed, yet.
They have even raided the clergy. When a priest dropped his cassock and dove into the murky waters of politics in Benue, we all thought hope had come. Sadly, he became a cheap recruit and joined them much quicker than anticipated. Now, he dances on the blood of his people, bludgeoned to death carelessly. Carnival has supplanted mourning. He has indeed given us beauty for ashes; oil of joy for the spirit of heaviness; and the garment of sycophancy our spirit of heaviness. So, let us rejoice and be merry; the dead are dead.
Let’s be brutally honest. The real Yahoo Boys wear agbadas with matching caps with hidden pockets to stuff dollars, not sagging jeans, and cruise about town in bulletproof SUVs. They don’t do romance scams; they do budget padding. They don’t forge Western Union receipts; they forge national statistics. And they don’t ask for iTunes cards; they ask for “constituency project funds” that disappear faster than Naira’s value on a Monday morning. They carry briefcases, not laptops. They write cheques, not scam scripts. They address the nation, not strangers on Tinder. They loot billions, not trick $50 iTunes cards.
The Yahoo Boy on the street is a symptom. The Yahoo Men in government are the disease.
And until we cure ourselves of these spiritual godfathers of deceit, these architects of organised dysfunction, these lootocratic overlords; we will remain a nation run by scammers, chasing their apprentices.
So, next time you see EFCC parading some broke student in a T-shirt, ask yourself: where is the man who awarded a ₦10 billion contract for a bridge that doesn’t exist?
Check the Government House. Or the Senate. Or the nearest “prayer breakfast.”
Because in Yahoo Nation, the real scammers don’t send emails.
They send policies.
