By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
The motorcade announced him before anyone saw his face. It swept into the forecourt of the event centre with a choreography every Nigerian can read at a glance: the pilot car with its hazard lights blinking, the tinted SUVs in tight formation, the men in dark suits who stepped out first and scanned the compound as though a birthday party might be concealing an ambush. A guest arriving late that evening could have been forgiven for thinking a state governor had come to honour the celebrant.
It was not a governor. It was a man in his early forties, dressed in a silky safari suit that caught the light each time he moved, and he walked towards the entrance with the unhurried stride of someone who has not, in his adult life, been asked to wait. At the door stood a small army of bouncers, big men hired for one purpose: to decide who belonged inside and who did not. Nobody asked him for an invitation card. They greeted him the way you greet a man you have been told to expect, with half a bow and a familiarity that bordered on relief. The doors swung open.
What happened next is the reason I am still thinking about that evening.
The moment he stepped into the hall, the proceedings simply stopped. The master of ceremonies lost his thread. The band trailed off in the middle of a highlife number. From different corners of the room, voices rose with his name, and the name travelled across the hall faster than he could walk through it.
He did not look for a seat. He went straight to the high table, and the dignitaries seated there, men and women who had been introduced earlier with long strings of titles, rose to their feet to receive him. Nobody handed him the microphone; he took it. He said a few warm words to the celebrant, announced a gift of five million naira, and before the applause had finished rolling round the room he raised a hand to the crowd, turned, and was gone. The whole visit could not have lasted ten minutes.
He was clearly popular. That much was plain to anyone with eyes. But his popularity, it turned out, was the least interesting thing about him.
A Phrase at the Next Table
For a good while after the motorcade pulled away, the birthday seemed to belong to someone else. The celebrant was still at the high table and the jollof was still going round, but the real event had moved to the tables, where guests leaned towards one another and traded what they knew. Everybody had a version of him.
Some remembered that he had spent long stretches in correctional facilities, and they said it without much drama, the way you might mention that a man once lived in Kaduna. What struck them was not that he had been inside but that he kept coming back out and, each time, climbing back into money and relevance as if prison were merely a long layover between flights.
Others spoke of him with something close to admiration: the charm, the nerve, the uncanny knack for getting whatever he set his heart on. And a few were plainly unsettled. They had spent their lives being respectable, and here was a man they considered a rascal who had just made a hall full of respectable people stand up in unison.
Beside me sat a university professor, a quiet man who had watched the whole performance without comment. When the conversation reached our table, he put down his glass and summed the man up in two words.”Notoriously popular,” he said.
I have turned that phrase over many times since. It is not especially clever, and the professor did not deliver it as a punchline. What held me was the contradiction folded inside it, and the ease with which everyone at the table accepted it. Nobody laughed at the oddity of the pairing. Nobody said, surely a man cannot be both. The phrase landed as plain description, the way you might say a road is long or a market is crowded. That ease was the real news. It suggested that a contradiction had been quietly absorbed into ordinary speech, and that we no longer noticed it was one.
So I asked the obvious questions. Can notoriety turn into a kind of popularity? And, more troubling, can popularity, once it grows large enough, wash notoriety clean?
The woman on my other side seemed surprised that I found any of this surprising. She reminded us, gently but without apology, that a good number of the people who became powerful, influential or spectacularly rich in this country had lived rather notoriously on the way up. Then she pushed further. Perhaps, she said, in Nigeria it is not enough to have competence, character, money or connections. Perhaps you also need a measure of notoriety and popularity, not only to rise but to stay risen.
I resisted her at first. It sounded like the kind of cynicism people offer at parties because it makes them feel worldly. But I have lived with her argument for some time now, and it has proved much harder to dismiss than I expected, because the evidence for it is not hidden at birthday parties. It is on the front pages.
The Ladder of Being Known
Let me be careful. I am not saying every popular Nigerian is notorious, or that every notorious Nigerian ends up popular. Either claim would be silly, and unfair to the many people in this country who have earned their standing honestly and quietly. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable. The wall between the two conditions is far thinner here than it ought to be, because we live in a place where being seen is itself a kind of power.
Think about the questions that open doors in this country. Before anyone asks what you can do, someone usually asks who you know, and not far behind it is a quieter question: who knows you? In such a place, recognition stops being a pleasant side effect of achievement and becomes a currency in its own right. It can be earned, saved, spent and borrowed against.
And recognition, once it becomes currency, rewards a very particular sequence. The man who makes a loud entrance is remembered. The man who breaks protocol is discussed. The man who is discussed becomes known. The man who is known gets invited. The man who is invited gets access. And access, in Nigeria, can open doors that competence alone will leave firmly shut, however long competence stands outside knocking.
Notice what is missing from that ladder. At no rung does anyone ask whether the man is good. Goodness is not forbidden. It is simply not required.
Our popular culture understood this long before our sociologists did. In April 2019 the musician Naira Marley went on Instagram Live and told his fans to pray for internet fraudsters, the “yahoo boys”, because, he argued, it was they and not the politicians who kept money circulating in the streets. Weeks later he released a song called “Am I a Yahoo Boy”, complete with a video in which his character is bundled into a police van.
Within a day, life copied art: the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arrested him and later charged him with fraud offences, which he denied. He spent about a month in custody. Days after his release he dropped “Soapy”, which became a street anthem across the country and won a viewers’ choice award the following January. The arrest did not interrupt the ascent. It powered it.
The rapper had merely said aloud what the ladder already knew. Notoriety is not a detour from visibility. It is often the fastest lane onto it.
This is where notoriety becomes interesting. In the dictionary it means being widely known for something disreputable, while popularity means being liked, admired, approved. The two words ought to live on opposite sides of the moral street. But societies have never been very good at handing out rewards according to the dictionary. Sometimes they reward visibility. Sometimes they reward nerve. Sometimes they reward the sheer ability to command attention. And sometimes they reward exactly the person who has understood that the social game was never really about being respectable. It was about being impossible to ignore.
Reputational Alchemy
We have a long memory for this, even if we rarely say it aloud. Nigeria has shown again and again a curious gift for turning yesterday’s scandal into today’s credential. The pattern is familiar enough to recite. Someone becomes notorious.
The storm passes, as storms here usually do. Money or influence arrives, or never left. And one day the person reappears in respectable spaces, first at the edges and then nearer the centre. The same people who once lowered their voices when his name came up begin to put it on their invitation lists. He becomes a patron, a benefactor, a chief, a political associate, a philanthropist, a guest of honour.
Consider the homecoming of James Ibori. In 2012 the former governor of Delta State pleaded guilty in a London court to money laundering and fraud and was sent to a British prison. When he flew home in February 2017, crowds were waiting for him from early morning. Kinsmen sang and danced from the Oghara junction on the Benin expressway to his country house, some with leaves in their hands and chalk on their faces, chanting that their great leader was back.
Serving officials of the state, the speaker of the House of Assembly among them, joined the welcome. A week later a thanksgiving service was held in his honour, and a senior cleric, in his homily, described him as a light that must be jealously shielded and protected. One newspaper columnist observed that he had received “the type of reception that no Nigerian Head of State has ever received,” and concluded that Ibori “must have something going for him.”
That sentence is the whole mechanism in miniature. The size of the crowd becomes the argument. If so many people came out, the reasoning runs, the man cannot be what the court said he was.
Or consider Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the Bayelsa governor who jumped bail in London in 2005 while facing money laundering charges, returned home to a hero’s welcome, was later convicted in Nigeria, and in 2013 received a presidential pardon from the man who had once been his deputy.
Or Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame, former governors of Plateau and Taraba, whose convictions for stealing public funds were upheld all the way to the Supreme Court, and who were pardoned by the Council of State in April 2022. The anti-corruption agencies protested. Civil society protested. But back home, as one international analysis noted at the time, both men remained hugely popular, and news of their pardon was received with wild jubilation.
Then something close to magic happens. The biography begins to fade, but the reputation does not. It stays, only now it is read differently.
What used to be called recklessness is now called boldness. Arrogance becomes confidence. Contempt for rules becomes fearlessness. Crime becomes, in the soft language of the reception hall, a rough past, and whatever was once plainly unacceptable becomes street credibility, the kind of thing a young man might mention with a certain pride. What was shameful is folded into the legend of how he made it.
Sometimes the alchemy does not even need a pardon. Government Ekpemupolo, better known as Tompolo, was a commander in the Niger Delta militancy of the 2000s and was declared wanted by the EFCC in 2016 over the alleged diversion of billions of naira; he maintained that it was political persecution, and he was later cleared of the charges.
In August 2022, the national oil company announced that a firm linked to him had been handed a pipeline surveillance contract reportedly worth about forty-eight billion naira a year, to protect the very infrastructure that the militancy had once targeted. Senators defended the arrangement on the strength of its results, and there are serious people who argue that it has reduced oil theft. That may well be so. But notice the grammar of the defence. It is entirely about the outcome. The question of how a man travels from the wanted list to the contract list in six years is treated as impolite.
And sometimes the electorate itself performs the conversion. Ayodele Fayose was impeached as governor of Ekiti State in 2006 amid allegations over the handling of public funds, and spent the following years fighting those allegations. In 2014 he returned and defeated a sitting governor, a man widely admired as a thoughtful administrator, in all sixteen local government areas of the state.
His campaign gave our political vocabulary a new phrase, “stomach infrastructure”, the idea that a hungry voter cares more for rice and cash in the hand today than for roads and policies tomorrow. Whatever one makes of the allegations against him, the lesson many drew was simple: a loud, generous, street-level presence can outrun a quiet record of competence.
I have come to call all of this reputational alchemy: the slow conversion of bad social capital into good social currency. Like the old alchemists, the society that performs it does not change the metal. It changes what it agrees to call the metal.
There is a further twist. Notoriety may sometimes be the first stage of popularity rather than its opposite. An unknown man, after all, cannot be notorious. Before anything else, he has to be seen. And once he is seen, the conversions can begin. Visibility becomes recognition. Recognition becomes access. Access becomes influence. Influence becomes wealth. And wealth, with a certain grim irony, can eventually buy the one thing the whole journey lacked, which is respectability. The circle closes. The man who once needed notoriety to become known ends up needing popularity to make his notoriety bearable to polite company, and in time the popularity does its work.
Our elders had a proverb for the proper order of things: ezi aha ka ego, a good name is worth more than money. What the last three decades seem to demonstrate is a quiet revision of the proverb. A loud name can bring the money, and the money, given time, can go back and buy the good name.
None of this is unique to Nigeria. Every society has its reformed scoundrels and its celebrated rogues. But our soil is unusually fertile for them, because so much of life here runs on networks, personal relationships, visibility and nearness to power, and so little runs on institutions that remember and records that stick.
The Room Appoints You
There is another layer to this, and it deserves our discomfort.
We like to believe that a society is governed by its formal institutions: the laws and the courts, the universities and the churches, the corporations, the parties, the professional bodies with their codes of conduct. But every society is also governed by a second, unwritten set of permissions, and people learn those permissions much faster than they learn the law. They learn, very early, what will actually be tolerated.
One of the most powerful of these unwritten permissions is collective admiration. Once enough people admire someone, his conduct begins to be read through a different lens. The question people ask quietly changes. It used to be: how can he behave like this? It becomes: how did he become so successful? That is not a small shift in wording. It is a moral turn. We stop examining the conduct and start studying the outcome. Success becomes evidence. Money becomes testimony. Popularity becomes proof. The crowd itself becomes the certificate.
Nowhere is the certificate stamped more solemnly than in our places of worship. It is a familiar sight across the country: the thanksgiving service for the politician freshly released from detention, the front pew reserved for the benefactor everybody whispers about, the harvest bazaar where the loudest bid comes from the man whose money nobody dares to trace, the church or mosque project named for a donor whose fortune has no visible source.
The Ibori thanksgiving was only a larger version of what happens in many parishes on many Sundays. One of the men pardoned in 2022, Jolly Nyame, is himself an ordained minister. None of this means the faithful approve of theft. Most would say, sincerely, that they are practising forgiveness. But forgiveness that asks for no confession, no restitution and no change of life is not forgiveness. It is a reception. And when the altar receives a man with applause, the congregation learns that the altar’s opinion of his past has been settled.
I think this explains how a man with no formal authority over that birthday hall could command it so completely. He held no office there. He was not the celebrant, not the host, not a relative as far as anyone could tell. What he had was older and, in the right conditions, stronger than office. He had recognition. The bouncers recognised him. The high table recognised him. The crowd recognised him. And because each person in the room could see that everyone else recognised him, the recognition fed on itself until it hardened into something that looked and behaved exactly like authority.
That is how informal power works. Nobody has to appoint you. The room appoints you.
The Freedom We Secretly Envy
Why would a room do that? Why would decent people, many of whom disapproved of him before he arrived and would disapprove of him again once he left, rise to their feet in the moment?
Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in a kind of envy we are reluctant to admit. The notorious man is often notorious precisely because he refuses the rules that fence in everyone else. And he is often popular because people quietly admire his escape from those same rules.
That admiration grows strongest wherever people feel trapped inside systems they do not respect. Spend enough of your life queuing at offices where the queue means nothing, filling forms that nobody reads, waiting for approvals that go instead to whoever knows the right person, and the rule-breaker starts to look strangely attractive. He appears free. He does what others only fantasise about doing. He walks through doors that others wait outside. He speaks while others hold their tongues. He takes what others must beg or bargain for. He arrives in a convoy, and the room stops for him.
The same envy explains one of the stranger episodes in our recent economic life. In 2016, millions of Nigerians poured their savings into MMM, a scheme promising monthly returns that no honest enterprise on earth could pay. Its founder, Sergei Mavrodi, was no secret. He was a Russian who had already been convicted in his own country over an earlier version of the same scheme, and he had not even bothered to change its name. The warnings from regulators were loud and frequent. It did not matter.
The scheme’s notoriety was part of its appeal: here, at last, was a system that appeared to work for ordinary people, precisely because it did not belong to the official system that had failed them. When MMM froze its accounts in December 2016, the deposit insurance corporation estimated that some three million Nigerians had lost around eighteen billion naira. Many of them had been told exactly what it was. They joined anyway, because a famous rule-breaker seemed more trustworthy than a respectable institution.
To people who have watched power operate for years without ever explaining itself, the man who breaks the rules can look less like a criminal and more like a master of the game. The man in the safari suit was not merely showing off. In a sense, he was showing the room its own suppressed wish.
What the Crowd Rewards
Here is the danger. When notoriety and popularity begin to feed each other, a society creates, without meaning to, a set of incentives for ever more outrageous behaviour. Any ambitious young person can do the arithmetic. Ordinary conduct earns ordinary attention. Audacity earns extraordinary attention. And the reward system begins to whisper its own curriculum: be noticed, be talked about, be feared a little, be generous at the right moments, make an entrance, create a story, and then let the story work for you.
No one followed that curriculum more faithfully than Ramon Abbas, the Instagram personality known as Hushpuppi. For years he posted pictures of private jets, Rolls-Royces, designer boutiques and champagne, and posed beside international footballers and some of the biggest names in Nigerian music. He described himself as a real estate developer. Two and a half million people followed him, and a good many young Nigerians treated him as proof that the good life was available to anyone bold enough to take it.
In June 2020 he was arrested in Dubai and handed over to American authorities; he later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money from cyber fraud and in November 2022 was sentenced to more than eleven years in a federal prison. Here is the detail that should keep us awake. American prosecutors noted in their sentencing papers that, between his arrest and his sentencing, his Instagram account had gained roughly half a million new followers. Exposure as a fraudster made him more followed, not less.
The fall of Hushpuppi dragged a second name into the light. Abba Kyari, a deputy commissioner of police celebrated for years as the country’s “supercop”, with fans who shared his photographs and applauded his dramatic arrests, was suspended in 2021 after an American indictment linked him to one of Hushpuppi’s schemes, an allegation he denied. For our purposes the verdict matters less than the pattern. For years, a great many people had admired the results and asked very few questions about the methods. That is the same bargain the room made at the birthday party.
That is why what I saw that evening cannot be written off as the eccentric theatre of one wealthy man. The more important question is why an entire room was ready to suspend its normal rules for him. That is where the real story sits. He did not build his social power alone. The audience helped build it. We like to complain about the people who bend the rules, but we rarely admit that we have created a market for rule-bending, and every market eventually attracts suppliers.
If notoriety keeps producing access, admiration and opportunity, someone will make a career of notoriety. If outrageous behaviour keeps producing publicity, people will learn to be outrageous. If wealth can go back and disinfect a reputation, people will learn that reputation is negotiable. And if popularity can overpower principle, popularity becomes a form of power in its own right.
Understanding how this works is not the same as applauding it, and I want to keep that distinction sharp. A society that mistakes visibility for value will produce people who chase visibility. A society that mistakes wealth for virtue will produce people who chase wealth by any means. A society that mistakes popularity for legitimacy will produce people who chase applause. And a society that keeps turning notoriety into respectability should not act surprised when notoriety starts to look like a sensible career plan.
This may be one of our quieter leadership problems. We talk endlessly, and rightly, about the failure of our institutions. We talk far less about the failure of our applause. We do not only have a crisis of institutions. At times we have a crisis of what the crowd chooses to reward.
The Nigerian hunger to make it is powerful, understandable and often admirable. It has built businesses out of nothing and carried whole families out of poverty. But when success is cut loose from the way it was achieved, the destination begins to erase the road. We remember the mansion and forget the methods. We applaud the donation and forget the history. We celebrate the philanthropist and forget the conduct. We count the money and stop counting the cost. And then we wring our hands when the next generation learns to chase the look of success rather than the substance of achievement, as though they could have learned anything else from watching us.
In the end, the man at the birthday party may matter less than the mirror he held up, without intending to, to the room. And the room in that mirror was not only a banquet hall. It was Oghara on a February afternoon, a parish on a thanksgiving Sunday, an Instagram feed with half a million new followers, a polling unit in Ekiti, a front page announcing a pardon. It was a society able to be uneasy about notoriety and fascinated by it at the same moment. A society that can condemn the rascal and applaud his arrival in the same breath. A society that questions his past while toasting his present, that privately disapproves of the method and publicly admires the result.
Perhaps the real paradox is not that notorious people become popular. It is that popularity makes notoriety survivable, and success makes it negotiable after the fact. Once that happens, the distance between the two words the professor placed side by side begins to close, until a phrase that should have sounded like a contradiction sounds like a plain description of a man.
So the question is no longer whether that man was notorious or popular. He was plainly both. The harder question is about the rest of us. What does it say about us when notoriety becomes one of the accepted roads to popularity, and popularity becomes one of the ways notoriety is forgiven?
That question does not belong to the man who swept into the hall and out again. It belongs to everyone who stood up when he walked in.
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
