Nigeria has grappled with tribalism for decades, a deep-rooted wound that stirs intense emotions and divides citizens along ethnic lines. With over 250 ethnic groups, and the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo as the largest, this diversity should, in an ideal world, be a source of unity and cultural richness. Instead, it has too often been weaponised by its citizens. In Nigeria, tribalism manifests in pure hate, harmful stereotypes, and a blame game that tries to pin all the country’s problems on specific ethnic groups.
Today, tribalism does not exist just in the physical world; it also exists online. Recently, old tweets belonging to one Otas Evbuomwan, a staff member at a Nigerian fintech company called Risevest, resurfaced, and what they revealed was ugly. In tweets dating back to 2013, she had made several tribalistic tweets about Yoruba women, tagging them “dirty”, “smelly”, and disparagingly “black.” Apart from this case, Yoruba women have long been targeted on Nigerian Twitter with ethnic slurs, coordinated mockery, and open hostility, for no crime other than their ethnic identity. What many dismiss as mere “Twitter fooling” is bigotry expressed in casual language, thriving in a country that has become increasingly desensitised to tribalism because of how common it is and how unapologetic people are about it.
This online expression of tribalism challenges the belief that it is only the older Nigerians who are tribalistic. There is a common assumption that younger Nigerians are more exposed to social media and a globalised world, and so are naturally more progressive when it comes to tribalism, and that we are moving past it. The reality is different. Young Nigerians remain as divided as the older generations were. They openly make tribalist comments on social media and hold on to inherited feuds. To understand why tribalism persists and adapts, we have to go back a little.
Before independence, ethnic competition had been embedded in the colonial administrative structure. The British ruled through indirect rule and deliberately cultivated divisive regional identities such as the Muslim in the North, the Christian and minority-Muslim Yoruba in the Southwest, and the Christian Igbo in the Southeast, as administrative conveniences that eventually hardened into political identities. After Nigeria gained independence in 1960, ethnic violence became a regular part of Nigerian life. The 1953 Kano riots, which killed hundreds, were partly fueled by tensions between Hausa and Igbo people. The 1966 military coups, first in January led largely by officers of Igbo extraction, and then the July counter-coup led by Hausa officers, were seen through ethnic lens, no matter what their motivations were. Afterward, Igbo people were massacred in the north, a tragedy that directly precipitated the Nigerian civil war.
On May 30, 1967, the military governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra. In response, the militarygovernment, led by General Yakubu Gowon, refused to accept the secession and launched a military campaign to bring the East back under federal control. Between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria fought a civil war that killed somewhere between 500,000 and three million people, the vast majority of them Igbo. The military government imposed a total blockade on Biafra, cutting off food, medicine, and supplies from reaching civilians. This was not a side effect of war but a deliberate strategy. Obafemi Awolowo, then vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council, was quoted as saying: “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war.” At the height of the crisis, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people died daily from starvation. Almost two million Biafran civilians died from the blockade, and three-quarters of them were small children. Biafra surrendered on January 12, 1970, with the government declaring “No Victor, No Vanquished.” There were no truth or reconciliation efforts, no formal reckoning with the barbarity of what had happened, and no accountability or restitution. The bank accounts and property seized from Igbo people were never returned, the owners were offered a flat payout of twenty pounds regardless of what they had before the war. The ethnic animosities that drove the war were also never truly resolved.
Post-civil war, Nigeria failed to address ethnic divisions at their core, opting instead for a system where ethnic identity became the central means by which political power was negotiated. The federal character principle and the rotation of the presidency are acknowledgements that Nigerians do not trust each other enough to compete on any other terms. In a country with economic, security, and leadership failures, ethnicity remains the lens through which political conflict is viewed. When Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijaw man from Bayelsa, became president, the North accused southerners of enriching their own. When Buhari, a Fulani man from Katsina, came to power, the South accused the North of Fulanization, of seeding herder-farmer conflicts to displace farmers and claim their land, and of stacking federal agencies with northerners, and now, Tinubu, a Yoruba man, won the 2023 election, the Yoruba people are now experiencing similar accusations.
The ethnic tensions became worse during the 2023 gubernatorial elections, which were held after the presidential polls. Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, is Igbo, from Anambra. He ran a campaign that captured young people across Nigeria. The Obidient movement was real and genuinely cross-ethnic in several places. Obi actually won 582,454 votes to Tinubu’s 572,606. This was a margin of just under ten thousand votes in a state that had been Tinubu’s main stronghold. It was a remarkable result that exposed just how deeply the Obidient wave had cut into the political establishment’s grip on the city. But winning the presidential vote in Lagos did not protect anyone. What followed was something else entirely.
There were documented attacks on Igbo voters and Igbo-owned businesses. People were ethnically profiled at polling units, stopped, questioned, and turned away. MC Oluomo, the former chairman of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), was caught on video bellowing at a polling unit: “I repeat am again, any Igbo wey dem born very well, make him come vote here.” People who had lived in Lagos for decades felt, in those days before and during the election, that their belonging was conditional.
Tinubu had lost his home state, and his hold on Lagos had to be retrieved by any means necessary. The Labour Party’s gubernatorial candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, made that retrieval feel even more urgent to the establishment. His mother is Igbo, a fact that, in the political culture of Lagos’s ruling class, made him not quite Lagos or Yoruba enough. For those who controlled the machinery of the state, a Rhodes-Vivour governorship would have meant losing Lagos to the same ethnic and generational coalition that had just humiliated them in the presidential vote, so they could not allow it.
Beyond the elections, some Nigerians have continued to share their experiences or witness tribalism happen on social media. Last year, Uzo Njoku, a Nigerian visual artist, announced an exhibition she was staging in Lagos called ‘An Owambe Exhibition’, leaning on the Yoruba word that Nigerians across ethnicities use to describe a Lagos-style celebration, O wam be. What followed was a weeks-long smear campaign, harassment,and ethnic aggression that would be laughable if it were not so concerning. Yoruba critics accused her of misspelling “owambe,” claiming that the correct form uses an “n” where she had used an “m.” Both spellings have been used interchangeably for decades by individuals and acclaimed publications alike. TVC News, which hosted an interview with Uzo Njoku, in which the anchor pressed her on the alleged misspelling, had itself used Njoku’s exact spelling in multiple video titles on its own YouTube channel. The accusation was never really about the supposed incorrect spelling, but about an Igbo woman daring to stage an exhibition in Lagos, using a Yoruba-inflected word, in a political climate in which Igbo presence in the city had been publicly and violently contested just months earlier.
As the controversy escalated, the harassment quickly migrated from the spelling into something more menacing. An account on X threatened her with the “Charlie Kirk treatment.” A petition purportedly written by the Oba of Lagos to cancel Njoku’s exhibition circulated, misinformation spread about her art, and she was told to go back to Anambra. The exhibition, which she had given up an Art Basel collaboration with Google to prioritise, was put at risk of cancellation. A woman who had done nothing more provocative than celebrate Lagos nightlife through her art was being made to feel that Lagos would not have her or that she had no part in Lagos.
These recent incidents show how democracy has given tribalism new tools to thrive. Social media amplifies ethnic bigotry with little to no consequences. Politicians who have no policies to run on, run on ethnic belonging instead. Electoral outcomes are read as ethnic wins and losses, so ordinary people scrolling through their feeds absorb the message that ethnicity is what matters and act accordingly.
A unique form of tribalism is the way northerners are othered in Nigeria. People from other ethnicities tend to agree on at least one thing: that they are smarter and more sophisticated than the average northerner. The word ‘aboki,’ Hausa word for ‘friend,’ has been turned into a slur, thrown at anyone who looks or dresses northern, who is Muslim or appears stupid. However, it is a classed slur. Aboki is seldom used to refer to the northern elite. The word only lands on the average person–the gateman, the suya seller, the woman in the market. This contempt and misinterpretation is not simply ethnic, it is also about class and condescension, a refusal to extend full humanity to northern Nigerians unless they have achieved enough to be inconvenient to dismiss.
The normalisation of these different tribalistic behaviours reflects on individuals like Otas Evbuomwan. She was a person who had internalised the idea that it was acceptable to insult people based on their ethnicity. This is a common characteristic of Nigerian everyday culture and how it reflects in our daily conversations and our media.
Nigeria has already paid that price once, in a civil war that caused damage to the Igbo people, which has never been fully reckoned with. The generation posting tribalistic content or views on social media right now did not fight that war. Many of them were not alive during the violent crises in northern Nigeria in the early 2000s. They grew up in a Nigeria that preaches national unity while practising ethnic division, so they are simply the products of a culture that has outsourced its unresolved grief and anger onto tribalism, sustained by a lack of consequences and a complete absence of any serious effort at societal reorientation.
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