Written By: Pascaline Opeodu
In Nigeria, Twitter is a tribe. A tribe of tight-fisted word users, whose only duty is to go to the station, jump on any available bus called ‘Hashtag’; they don’t wait for proper onboarding, na as e dey hot! The bus sometimes leads to nothingness, and sometimes, to something.
As long as Nigerians have something to say, everything trends!
The 280-character factor
‘Grab as much as you can’ is our average response to scarcity. This is why we store water in basins and drums, why we iron our work clothes a week ahead, and why we leave our houses at 4.30 am to go to work. It is only natural that when resources are limited, people want to make the most of it.
By no fault of ours, Twitter permits very limited use of characters on its platform. For a Nigerian to manage these limited characters require a good degree of savagery. Consequently, with our communication evolution, savagery has graduated from social media use to everyday informal communication.
We make twitter trendier!
Over the years, our style of communicating online has evolved. It is not a contest, but Nigerians make twitter very interesting. When you are having a bad day, just go on twitter, it’s the funniest comedy show that requires no entry ticket.
And if you doubt us, we double-dare you (we don’t single dare in Nigeria) to keep up with this thread:
In Nigeria, one word can mean everything……E.g;
“Eh ehn” = No wonder!
“Eh ehn” = I told you so
“Eh ehn” = So what?
“Eh ehn” = As i was saying
“Eh ehn” = Please continue
“Eh ehn” = I’m listening
“Eh ehn” = Can i help you?
“Eh ehn” = Really?
“Eh ehn” = I remember
“Eh ehn” = So what!
Let’s put it this way; We are at war with our words, at war with hashtags, our limited Twitter characters, and at war with some trends we didn’t know how they came about. We have sworn in the presence of our preferred audience, our pillows at midnight with axe-carrying mosquitoes as witnesses that we will go the extra-mile to make Twitter trendy and worth your while!
Go without saying?
We hail the hardworking Nigerian youth, who after staying stuck in traffic for hours still has enough power to be savage on twitter. We hail the reality TV star that gives us something new to talk about every day on Twitter. We hail the young boy or girl, who with his 1% battery, decided to post funny videos and comments on twitter to make other people laugh and argue with their keypads, or better still their ancestors. These are the Nigerians we hail, and it is because of these people that twitter became trendier!
