If it seems like every other day, another Nigerian celebrity creative succumbs to alarming depths of vacuous thought and action, even as we face multiple crises, then it is because this is our current shameful reality.
Somewhere along the pop culture highway, the pedestal-ed few, from film to music and literature, collectively abandoned the reins of activism. We became inundated with a brand of celebrity that lives in a different Nigeria from their audience. And because nothing exists in isolation, this apathy has led many to begrudgingly accept that celebrities owe us only to the extent to which we use our voices. Vox populi, vox dei before vox celebritas.
Certain excuses have become standard fare for their apolitical vacuousness. First, is the fan favourite: “not all art has to be political.” Proponents of this theory believe that art—mostly music and cinema—doesn’t have to be deep. They refer to party-starter jams that are now rated as classics, and to comedic films holding up the banner of new Nollywood, in their crusade. This particular set of preachers consider criticism an unmerited venture, talk more of infusing sociopolitical commentary into the art that’s produced. The anti-Susan Sontag, if you will, in that nothing is ever too serious to them.
In his Culture Custodian essay, “How Nigerian Music Lost its Political Voice,” writer Patrick Ezema traced a genealogy of sociopolitical commentary in contemporary Nigerian music. The late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti might be the poster persona for conscious music in Nigeria—an image artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, and rather ironically, Bella Shmurda have attempted to co-opt over the years—but it stands to reason that, beyond Afrobeat’s jazz-high life imprint on Afrobeats, or Afropop, the music has always reflected the times to a large extent. One can draw a definitive line to Junior and Pretty’s 1994 single Bolanle as the beginning of this new wave. Slowly but steadily, as the genre found its voice, so also did it lose the people’s voice. Declining quality of content in the mainstream somehow coincided with Nigerian music spreading its wings beyond the continent—only that unlike in previous iterations, stadium shows and world tours didn’t require a compendium of politically aware music. The foreign labels returned to sign our artists, and they didn’t care one bit that substance was a foregone conclusion.
For avid music enthusiasts, this is certainly not your first time encountering complaints about the hollow praxis of Nigerian pop. The truth of the matter is that music, and other forms of art, are inherently political. Everything is serious. Even comedy is serious.
When your newest generation of mainstream singers, self-acclaimed alternative kids, mostly create music about hedonism and the joys of chasing wealth, they’re making a political statement about what society values. The irony is that this is also the generation with the most politically liberal takes—progressives making regressive art, but at least they know what each queer flag represents and are vocal about Congo and Sudan on X posts.
When there’s an audible decline in the quality of songwriting and screenwriting about banal quotidian issues like romance or 9‐5s, artists and labels are essentially telling listeners standards aren’t important. When the films that flood NollyTube are populated with rich bachelors and sultry housemaids, the message to audiences is simple: We do not think that you think, so here’s the film version of instant noodles. It won’t fill you up. Heck, consuming too much will make you sick. But it’s easy to create and even easier to digest once you lower your culinary standards.
This then creates a feedback loop of garden-variety work becoming the norm. In a discussion at the 2018 BAFTA Screenwriters Series in London, iconic Hollywood screenwriter, Paul Schrader (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) spoke about this phenomenon, albeit in reference to the audience’s role in building quality cinema. “When people take movies seriously, it’s very easy to make a serious movie. When they don’t take it seriously, it’s very, very hard. We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously, so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them.” Over here, the loop didn’t begin with the audience exactly. But it has been reinforced by constant support for the nadir. From box office records for populist films built on moral lessons and a dream, to paying tens of thousands of Naira to watch artists who perform 8 hours behind schedule, the loop has never been stronger. So much so that when creators deviate from this base-level status quo, many accuse them of pretentiousness.
One would be remiss to imply that all arthouse films or self-professed conscious music is automatically good. You can sing about Nigeria being a one-party state and it would still be sewer music. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Hip-Hop where rappers layer boring, unnecessarily complex rhyme schemes over even worse monotonous boom bap beats, and then lament about the audience lacking taste; as if classics and cult classics like Falz’s Moral Instruction, ShowDemCamp’s Clone Wars IV: These Buhari Times, and Paybac Iboro’s Cult! don’t exist. It’s also why stans would expect critical acclaim for a song like Burna Boy’s 20.10.20 even though his resultant politics—flirtation with Nyesom Wike and the young all-father Seyi Tinubu—makes the record taste like chunky cuts of chalk.
Which then brings us to the next excuse, you can’t expect artists to speak up when people aren’t speaking up. The logic for this line of defence is decidedly more straightforward. Proponents argue that asking celebrities to lend their voice to liberation causes only makes sense if regular citizens are doing the work themselves. After all, these celebrities don’t experience the effects of poverty, femicide, insecurity, police brutality, food insecurity, and all these other injustices.
This writer concedes that citizens have a responsibility to one another, first. With regard to current issues—particularly the spate of terrorist attacks across the country and xenophobia elsewhere —it’s hypocritical of us not to speak out more. “There were parties in Lagos while babies died during the Biafran War. And now, there are raves in Ibadan while school children remain in captivity just kilometres away” All of this is true. All of this is problematic. Opting out of radically proclaiming our grievances to the government and leaders obsessed with the 2027 Elections alone is cowardice. We can’t pull an Obi-Wan and claim the high ground when even digital activism is on the back burner. There are set to be roughly 21 Raves across Lagos, Abuja, and Ibadan, in June. 21 isn’t 5 or 7. And raves aren’t the cheapest events to execute either. Escapism at such a precarious nexus point in Nigeria’s history surely is one hell of a choice. That’s a difficult truth to sit with as one who’s recently been an attendee.
A penchant for performative activism means that ready-made excuses also surface in defence of these events. There’s the low hanging fruit of pointing the spotlight on the government alone. Or the stronger steelman that these events are primarily safe spaces for minority groups who are themselves victims of the Nigerian state (Proliferation of raves in June coincides with Pride Month). When all these fail, escapism presents itself as a viable excuse. Yes, yes, and yes. None of these change the fact that revelers are too disconnected from the whole. As much as it is a logistical nightmare to cancel all of these events planned months ahead, refusing to consider outright postponements, or messages of solidarity at worst, is fast becoming an onrush towards the moving train of tone-deafness; especially with regard to xenophobia.
But for the life of us all, this does not mean celebrities shouldn’t use their voices to speak up against the chaos. The issues plaguing audiences aren’t so nuanced that our artists need extraordinarily extensive education to understand. What’s so hard to decipher about over 2,531 students being kidnapped in school attacks since 2014? And how much studying is required to learn about the impact of xenophobia?
For all the stick an artist like Portable recieves—rightly so, one must add—the fact that he contributes to societal discourse in both his music and social media posts says a lot about who the true elites are. On June 2, 2026, the controversial singer put out a video appealing for an end to stereotyping of Fulanis and Hausas living in Yoruba land, while still acknowledging the insecurity situation in the region. One would think that his colleagues, many of whom are significantly more educated than the street-hop star, would be more in tune with the situation on ground. And by education, it’s not just about attending universities, these A-listers are exposed to the world at a scale the average person can’t think of. They’ve undergone special media training. They have a network of workers, business partners, fans, and everyone else affected by such stereotypes, and even more affected by the conflict leading to these stereotypes, and yet, not a peep. Even if they aren’t directly affected, staying silent only certifies what’s continually called out—their lack of guiding politics. The average listener can tell more about Portable’s politics from listening to his 14 April, 2026 Undefeated World Star album, than from most of the mainstream releases this year. Irrefutable misogynistic to the nth degree on certain songs. Unfortunately, even with that, Portable still has more of a spine than our A-listers, a paradox that couldn’t be any sadder if you tried.
The final excuse is to accept defeat: that Nigerian celebrities have no depth to begin with and as such, requesting that they speak out is only a waste of time. One must ask if this should apply to the average citizen, as well, so that everyone just forgoes striving for sanity. If we can criticise those who accept money to sell their votes, despite acknowledging how politically-induced poverty propels their paucity of thought, then we can also criticise celebrities for staying silent because of support from ‘ST’ and other so-called patrons of the art. Especially when these celebrities benefit from our own patronage.
All this talk about turning the spotlight inward doesn’t exclude recognising their shortcomings. In Ola Rotimi’s seminal play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, after which this article is titled, the protagonist, Lekoja-Brown’s unraveling at the end—despite not being his first time—doesn’t stop everyone else from acknowledging the fact. If our celebrities are going mute again at a time like this, it is only fair that we call them out, while still acknowledging that ordinary citizens have their part to play. Two truths can co-exist.
Fans defending celebrities aren’t the problem as blind support is inevitable with mass followership of any sort. The real dilemma is that our stars are shining without substance. Their star dust is bereft of political will and empathy for the plight of paying audiences. They don’t give two kobos about deaths everywhere. And they don’t even seem interested in posturing as such. Not unless it affects their pockets.
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