Strategic Olodo: When Smart People Decide to Perform Stupid

The quiz on this site has a category called Strategic Olodo, which is what you get when your drift score is low but your performance score is embarrassingly high — meaning, in plainer English, that you aren't actually drifting at all, you're simply choosing to look like you are. That decision deserves to be understood on its own terms, because it is quietly becoming one of the defining patterns of Nigerian digital life.

The strategic olodo is not confused about the value of education; they have the degree, they did the reading, they suffered through the group projects where exactly one person did all the work (usually them). They know what depth looks like because they spent years cultivating it, and they have also, painfully, learned that depth does not pay the way performance does — at least not on the platforms where most Nigerians now park their attention.

The three patterns

A few recognisable versions of this exist. There's the credential hider, who quietly deletes the university degree from the bio after noticing that the viral posts always come from a persona that never mentions school. There's the code-switcher, who writes carefully argued paragraphs in a group chat and then posts "abeg who did this ehn 😭😭" to their public feed because that is what the numbers reward. And there's the full persona, someone who has built an entire online identity around appearing less educated than they are and who now earns more from that performance than from anything their degree ever promised.

Each of these patterns shares the same underlying logic: the person is running a rational economic calculation. If Platform A rewards Performance X and quietly buries Performance Y, and you happen to be capable of both, then choosing X isn't self-deception — it's strategy, the same kind of strategy that made your uncle switch from selling bread to selling data plans in 2013.

The half-life of strategy

But strategy has a half-life, and the question the quiz can't answer — the one this post is really here to ask — is what happens when the performance runs long enough to become the person, because at some point the mask stops being something you take off in the evening and starts feeling like your actual face.

There is a cost to pretending that doesn't show up in the metrics. When you spend years performing a version of yourself that performs better, you slowly drift out of range of the version that doesn't need an audience; the strategic olodo still has the education, but they stop using it in public, stop offering the perspective that took years to build, and stop being the one who asks the difficult question when everyone else is happily laughing at the easy joke — not because they've forgotten how, but because the algorithm has quietly taught them it doesn't pay.

Then there is the audience effect, which is its own trap. When your followers know you one way, introducing them to the other way is genuinely risky: the code-switcher who tries to post a serious essay after months of viral jokes watches the engagement collapse in real time and the confused comments arrive like uninvited guests. The platform doesn't only reward performance — it punishes inconsistency, and "inconsistency" in this context just means showing your full range.

The Nigerian specific

The Nigerian context makes this pattern more visible than it might be elsewhere. In a country where the formal education system has been quietly missing its own deadlines for decades, and where a viable digital economy has sprouted up without anyone signing off on it, the choice between depth and performance stops being abstract and starts looking a lot like rent, food, and whether your parents' investment in your schooling returns anything at all. When the system that was supposed to reward your intelligence stops picking up the phone, pretending to be something else stops feeling like betrayal and starts feeling like ordinary common sense.

But common sense has a way of becoming identity. The strategic olodo started as a response to economic pressure, and the risk is that they end up as a permanent persona — someone who has grown so fluent in performing that they no longer remember which parts were performance and which parts were the real them.

There isn't a clean answer here. The platforms aren't rearranging their incentives any time soon, the Nigerian economy is not exactly rolling out a buffet of alternatives, and telling anyone to simply "be authentic" while their landlord is texting is not advice — it's a luxury opinion.

Still, the adaptation comes with a warning. Performance is easier to maintain than depth because performance has feedback loops and depth doesn't; the metrics tell you immediately when a bit is landing, while depth just sits quietly in the corner, requiring faith, until one day you realise you haven't visited it in months and the door is slightly stuck.

Of the four quiz results, the strategic olodo is the most reversible, because the underlying capacity is still very much intact. But reversibility asks for honesty about how long the strategy has been running, and whether the person performing the olodo still remembers where they last put the real self.