The Poverty Industrial Complex (Or How to Sell Your Soul for 5k)

One day, in the unreal future, Nigerian Twitter discovered it had been paying its own executioners.

It was a Wednesday, which means nothing in Lagos except that it was another day closer to the weekend, another day further from last month’s salary, another day of pretending that the price of rice hadn’t jumped again like Michael Jordan in his prime. The timeline was doing what it always does — oscillating between existential dread and the kind of manic humor that only comes from collective suffering, like laughing while fighting for smokey jollof at a funeral because what else can you do when the casket is already in the ground?

Then someone posted a screenshot.

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Adewale saw it first, sitting in his one-bedroom apartment in Ikeja — the kind of apartment where you can touch all four walls from the center of the room if you’re tall enough, where the landlord charges you for breathing and the NEPA bill arrives with the regularity of a deadbeat father, which is to say almost never but always at the worst possible time. He was 28 years old and tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix, the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones when you’ve been hustling for six years and have nothing to show for it except receipts from “Both Teams to Score” investments and a Twitter account with 4,000 followers who think you’re funnier than you really are.

The screenshot was from a WhatsApp group called “FG Rapid Response Team” and it showed a payment schedule: “₦5,000 per day for Twitter engagement. ₦10,000 for trending topics. ₦15,000 if you can get blue checks to retweet. Payment every Friday. Bulk SMS to follow with talking points.”

Adewale stared at his phone screen, reading and rereading the text like it was an exam question he’d prepared for but still couldn’t believe was being asked. His first thought, the one that came before the anger and the disgust and the bone-deep weariness, was almost funny: “They’re paying people ₦5,000 a day and I’m out here arguing for free?”

Because he had been arguing. Boy, had he been arguing. Every time someone criticized the government, every time someone pointed out that Nigeria was circling the drain like water in a blocked gutter, Adewale had been there in the replies with the fervor of a newly converted zealot, defending policies he didn’t understand, explaining away corruption he couldn’t justify, attacking people whose only crime was pointing out that the emperor had no clothes and in fact had been naked for so long we’d all forgotten what clothes looked like.

And he’d done it for free. For the dopamine hit of notifications, for the savage pleasure of a perfectly crafted clapback, for the illusion that he was part of something larger than his increasingly shrinking reality.

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Chiamaka was different. She knew exactly how much she was getting paid because she was the one collecting it every Friday from a man in a black SUV in front of Shoprite, Surulere, and if you think there’s shame in her hustle then you’ve never had to choose between recharging your phone and eating dinner, never had to refresh your bank app seventeen times hoping that the pending transaction would clear before your landlord knocked on your door with the kind of friendly aggression that promised eviction wrapped in pleasantries.

She’d been recruited three months ago by her cousin PJ — not the fintech PJ from Ikoyi who wore thousand-dollar watches and spoke with the affected accent of someone who’d spent one summer in London and never recovered, but the other PJ, the one who still lived in Ajegunle and was always looking for the next hustle, the next scheme, the next way to extract something from the bones of a country that had been picked clean by better vultures than him.

“It’s easy money,” Emeka had told her over bottles of Goldberg at a joint where the music was too loud and the suya was too small and nobody cared about either because at least the beer was cold. “They give you talking points, you tweet them. Sometimes they want you to attack someone specific, sometimes they just want you to flood the timeline with distractions. Birthday wishes, celebrity gossip, anything to push the real news down where nobody can see it.”

Chiamaka had hesitated for exactly fifteen seconds — the length of time it took for her to remember that her mother’s blood pressure medication cost ₦8,000 and her salary as a customer service rep at a call center was ₦45,000 a month, which sounds like a lot until you realize it’s barely $30 and you live in a city where existing is expensive and living is a luxury reserved for people born into the right families with the right connections and the right amount of inherited wealth.

So she’d said yes, and for three months she’d been a soldier in an invisible army, fighting a war whose casualties were truth and accountability, weaponizing her own poverty against people who were just as poor but hadn’t yet realized that principles are luxuries you can only afford when your stomach is full.

The screenshot changed everything. Someone had leaked the WhatsApp group, and now the whole timeline knew what some of them had suspected but most had refused to believe: that the government wasn’t just corrupt, it was paying people to defend its corruption, and the people it was paying were the same people it had impoverished, creating a sick ecosystem where the oppressed defended their oppressors for the price of a decent meal.

Chiamaka’s phone was vibrating like it was possessed, notifications piling up so fast her screen froze. People were connecting the dots, pulling up old tweets, creating threads of suspected paid influencers. Her mentions were a wasteland of accusations and anger, people who’d argued with her before suddenly understanding why she’d been so passionate about defending the indefensible.

She should have been scared. Instead, she felt something else — a bitter kind of vindication, the feeling you get when you realize that everyone else was playing a game and you were the only one following the rules.

She tweeted: “You people are acting surprised like you just discovered that poor people will do anything for money. Where have you been? Welcome to Nigeria, where the government weaponizes poverty and we’re all just trying to survive.”

It got 15,000 retweets in an hour.

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AY was in the group chat when the screenshot leaked, watching in real-time as the admin started deleting messages and removing members with the panic of a criminal trying to destroy evidence before the police arrive, which is funny because in Nigeria the police are usually helping you destroy the evidence for a small fee, but I digress.

He’d been in the rapid response team for two years, long enough to understand the machinery, to see how the operation worked from the inside like a mechanic who knows exactly which bolts are stripped and which parts are held together with duct tape and prayer. They had different tiers of influencers — the small accounts like Chiamaka who did the grunt work for ₦5,000 a day, the mid-tier accounts with 20,000 to 50,000 followers who got paid more to lend credibility, and then the big accounts, the ones with blue checks and book deals and TED talks, who probably didn’t even know they were part of the machine but retweeted the talking points anyway because it aligned with their brand of optimistic nationalism or whatever they called it when they chose to ignore reality in favor of vibes.

AY was in the middle tier, pulling in about ₦150,000 a month from the government, which was more than his actual salary as a junior civil servant in a ministry that hadn’t done anything productive since 1983. He had a wife and two kids and a mother in the village who needed money for one medical emergency after another, and if you think he was going to sacrifice their wellbeing for the abstract concept of “doing the right thing,” then you’ve never had to explain to your child why there’s no food in the house or why they can’t go on the school trip or why daddy looks so tired all the time like the weight of the world is pressing down on his shoulders and he’s too weak to hold it up anymore.

But watching the timeline explode, seeing people realize that their government had been paying citizens to gaslight them, AY felt something crack inside him — not his resolve, because resolve is for people who have options, but something else, something softer and more dangerous: his conscience, that voice he’d been ignoring for two years, the one that whispered late at night that maybe the money wasn’t worth it, maybe defending evil made you evil too, maybe there was a price you paid that wasn’t measured in naira and kobo.

He didn’t tweet immediately. Instead, he opened his notes app and started writing, the words pouring out of him like water from a burst pipe, uncontrolled and necessary and cleansing in a way that made his hands shake.

“I’ve been part of the FG Rapid Response Team for two years. Here’s everything I know.”

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Kemi was a different animal entirely. She wasn’t in any group chat, wasn’t collecting any payments, wasn’t part of the machinery except as collateral damage, which is to say she was like most Nigerians — caught in the crossfire of a war she didn’t start and couldn’t end, watching from the sidelines as the country ate itself from the inside out.

She was an investigative journalist for an online platform that nobody read because Nigerians didn’t click on investigative journalism — they clicked on celebrity gossip and relationship advice and listicles about “10 Ways to Make Money Online” that never actually helped anyone make money online. She’d been tracking the rapid response teams for months, following the pattern of coordinated attacks, watching how certain narratives would suddenly dominate the timeline with the precision of a military operation, noting which accounts always seemed to be online at the same time with the same talking points like they were reading from a script, which of course they were.

She’d tried to publish her findings twice, but both times her editor had killed the story, and she knew why even though he wouldn’t say it: because the platform took advertising money from government agencies, because the publisher had political ambitions, because everyone in Nigeria was compromised in one way or another and the only question was how much of your soul you’d sold and whether you could still remember what you’d gotten in return.

Now the timeline was doing her job for her, the crowd-sourced investigation moving faster than any newsroom could, people pulling receipts and connecting dots and building a case that was airtight and damning and ultimately meaningless because what were they going to do with it? Sue the government? March in the streets? They’d tried that before, during #EndSARS, and the government had responded by shooting protesters at Lekki Tollgate and then denying it happened even as the bodies piled up and the blood stained the Nigerian flag that was supposed to represent unity and peace and all the other lies we tell ourselves to get through the day.

Kemi watched the timeline and felt something close to despair, the kind that settles in your chest like cement and makes it hard to breathe. She’d spent her career believing that information was power, that if people just knew the truth they would demand change, that journalism mattered and facts mattered and holding power accountable mattered. But Nigeria had taught her a harder lesson: that everyone already knows the truth, they just can’t afford to act on it, that poverty isn’t just about money but about the narrowing of possibilities, the shrinking of imagination, the way hunger makes you focus on the next meal instead of the next election.

She tweeted: “We’ve known the government is corrupt. We’ve known they steal our money. Now we know they use that same money to pay people to defend their theft. We know everything. The question is: what are we going to do about it?”

It got 847 retweets and then disappeared under a flood of tweets about #BBNaija.

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By Thursday, the news cycle had moved on because news cycles always move on, because Nigerians have the attention span of goldfish on cocaine, not because we’re stupid but because we’re exhausted, because caring about everything is impossible when everything is falling apart, because outrage is a renewable resource but energy isn’t and we’re all running on empty, coasting on fumes and hope and the desperate prayer that tomorrow will be different even though we know it won’t be.

Adewale deleted his Twitter app and then reinstalled it three hours later because addiction is real and loneliness is real and the timeline is where Nigerians go to feel less alone in their suffering, to find community in collective rage, to laugh at memes about a country that’s stopped being funny but we keep laughing anyway because what else can we do?

Chiamaka kept collecting her ₦5,000 a day because rent is still due and medication still costs money and morality is a luxury she can’t afford, and if you want to judge her then you should also judge the system that gave her no other choice, that created an economy where a university graduate has to sell her integrity for less than the cost of a pizza, that built a country where survival requires compromise and compromise requires forgetting that you ever had principles in the first place.

AY posted his thread — all 47 tweets of it, detailing the structure of the rapid response teams, naming names, showing receipts, burning bridges he could never rebuild. It went viral for six hours and then got shadowbanned, and AY lost his government job and his side hustle and his ability to pay his bills, and if you think this story has a happy ending where the whistleblower gets rewarded and the corrupt get punished, then you haven’t been paying attention to how these things work in a country where doing the right thing is often the fastest way to destroy your life.

Kemi pitched another story about government manipulation of social media and got assigned to cover a state governor’s wife’s birthday instead, because that’s the kind of journalism that pays the bills and keeps the lights on and allows you to keep pretending you’re making a difference while slowly drowning in your own irrelevance.

And somewhere in Abuja, in an air-conditioned office where the power never goes out and the water always runs and the salary is always paid, someone looked at the metrics from that week’s social media campaign and decided they needed to increase the budget, maybe offer ₦7,000 per day instead of ₦5,000, maybe recruit more influencers from the universities where hungry students would sell their souls for textbook money, maybe, fan the tribal wars a bit more because clearly the current system was working, clearly Nigerians were more interested in fighting each other than fighting the people actually robbing them blind.

And they were right.

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I’ll leave you with this: There’s a special kind of evil in taking a person’s poverty and using it as a weapon against them, in creating an economy of desperation where people have to choose between eating and ethics, in building a country where the oppressed become foot soldiers for their own oppression because it pays ₦5,000 a day and ₦5,000 a day is more than they’d make doing anything else.

The real tragedy isn’t that the government is corrupt — we’ve known that since before we were born, corruption is our national language, spoken fluently by everyone from the president to the police officer to the pastor collecting tithes in a church built on the backs of people who can’t afford food.

The real tragedy is that they’ve convinced us to be grateful for the crumbs from the table they built with wood stolen from our forests, fed with food taken from our farms, decorated with money extracted from our labor.

The real tragedy is that we know all of this and tomorrow we’ll log back into Twitter and do it all over again.

Because where else are we going to go, eh?

The End