MC Oluomo: The Grammar of Grind in Nigeria’s Degree-Obsessed Farce
Jerry Adesewo
In Nigeria, where a university certificate is often brandished like a royal sceptre (even if its owner’s crowning achievement is a LinkedIn post about “disruptive synergies”), Alhaji Musiliu Akinsanya, better known as MC Oluomo, stands as a delicious paradox. The man is a walking rebuke to the notion that formal education is the sole gateway to relevance.
Recently, social media critics—armed with a thesaurus and a superiority complex—mocked Oluomo’s grammar, sneering at how he mispronounced “kudos” as “kundusi.” Sneering at how an “uneducated” man could command such influence. But here’s the punchline: while his critics’ tweets gather dust in the digital void, Oluomo’s legacy is etched into Lagos’ chaotic streets, where PhDs in English Literature can’t untangle a traffic jam, but a Primary Six dropout can.
Lagos, Africa’s most frenetic megacity, operates on a unique dialect—a blend of hustle, haggling, and sheer survival instinct. In this linguistic free-for-all, MC Oluomo isn’t just fluent; he’s a poet laureate. His “broken English” isn’t a deficiency—it’s the lingua franca of Lagos’ transport underworld, where verbs like “control” and “settle” carry more weight than Shakespearean sonnets. While his critics nitpick subject-verb agreements, Oluomo brokers agreements between warring transport unions and the state government. His grammar may falter, but his results? Impeccable.
Consider this: On any given morning, as Lagos’ educated elite sip lattes and draft tweets about “good governance,” Oluomo is already knee-deep in the city’s arterial gridlock. With a mix of charisma, coercion, and streetwise calculus, he orchestrates the movement of 10,000 danfo buses, 5,000 okadas, and the occasional runaway goat—all before 9 a.m. His tools aren’t spreadsheets or policy papers but a sharp tongue, a sharper intuition, and a network of agberos (touts) who’d sooner jump into the Lagos Lagoon than defy his orders. Try that with a degree in Public Administration.
His criticism hinges on a tired Nigerian trope: that education equals intelligence, and intelligence equals competence. Yet, in a nation where graduates queue for visas to escape the dysfunction their “intelligence” couldn’t fix, Oluomo’s “uneducated” genius is a masterclass in practical brilliance.
Let’s dissect the irony:
Picture this: A dimly lit conference room in Lekki, where the air smells of overpriced lattes and unfulfilled promises. A group of “experts” with alphabets trailing their names—BSc, MSc, PhD—gather for a webinar titled “Sustainable Development in Emerging Economies: A Holistic Approach.” They quote Keynes, drop terms like “circular economy,” and nod solemnly at PowerPoint slides filled with pie charts no one will ever act on.
Meanwhile, outside the gated estate hosting this intellectual feast, the streets are dark—not metaphorically, but literally. The same “sustainability champions” haven’t noticed their neighbourhood’s fifth power outage this week. Their solar-powered Wi-Fi routers hum softly, but their ideas? Static. They’ve mastered the art of talking about light but can’t fix a blown fuse.
The “Uneducated” Oluomo
Now shift the scene to Oshodi at dawn. The sun hasn’t yet pierced the fog, but MC Oluomo has already held three meetings—no Zoom links, no agendas, just a folding chair and a Nokia brick phone. He never wrote a thesis, but his life’s work is etched into Lagos’ asphalt. His dissertation? “How to Extract Order from Anarchy: A Field Guide.”
While academics theorise about urban planning, Oluomo plans—divining bus routes from chaos, turning gridlock into cashflow, and silencing rival transport unions with a glare sharper than a professor’s red pen. His office is the street; his credentials are the sweat-soaked naira notes drivers hand him by 7 a.m. He doesn’t know what “decentralised governance” means, but he has decentralised Lagos’ traffic crisis better than any textbook could.
While Nigerians tweet about Oluomo’s syntax, the transport czar is too busy proving that in Nigeria’s economy of chaos, street smarts are the ultimate currency. His “verbs” may not conjugate properly, but they command armies of drivers. His “nouns” might be colloquial, but they name-check political heavyweights. When Oluomo declares, “Who no gree, go hear word,” Lagos listens.
Obsession on Certificates Over Capability
The mockery of Oluomo’s education reveals a deeper Nigerian neurosis: our obsession with certificates over capability. We idolise degrees like talismans, even as our institutions crumble under the weight of “educated” incompetence.
Case in point: Nigeria’s Ministry of Power, staffed by Ivy League engineers, has kept the nation in darkness for decades. Meanwhile, Oluomo—a man whose highest qualification is a Primary School Leaving Certificate—powers Lagos’ transport system daily. His “illiteracy” illuminates more than their PhDs ever will.
Imagine a Nigeria where only the “educated” could lead. Picture professors in lab coats directing danfo drivers: “Kindly decelerate your vehicle to align with urban traffic flow optimisation parameters!” The drivers’ response? A Yoruba proverb and a middle finger.
Leadership here isn’t about diction; it’s about diction-aries of survival. Oluomo speaks the people’s language—literally and metaphorically.
Yet, to reduce Oluomo to a mere “illiterate success story” is to miss the point. His rise mirrors Nigeria’s chaotic genius: a place where formal systems fail, so informal savants thrive. He’s not an anomaly; he’s an archetype. The mechanic who fixes your car with a toothpick. The market woman who calculates exchange rates faster than a Bloomberg terminal. The agbero who navigates political intrigue like Machiavelli in flip-flops. These are Nigeria’s real professors, teaching masterclasses in ingenuity.
Final Grade
Oluomo’s greatest lesson? That Nigeria’s obsession with paper qualifications is a distraction from the real work of nation-building. While universities churn out graduates who can’t graduate from their parents’ couches, the “uneducated” are rebuilding the country—one pothole, one bus route, one negotiated truce at a time.
So, Netizens, keep your grammar guides and snarky tweets. Oluomo will keep his Lagos—a city that hums not because of polished English, but because of the gritty pidgin of progress. In the end, history won’t remember his syntax. It will remember that while the educated debated verbs, the “verb-less” man moved the nation.
Oluomo may not master grammar in the Oxfordian sense, but he speaks the grammar of power fluently — a language of command, charisma, and control that no university curriculum offers.
MC Oluomo and the Grammar of Power
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