Detty December is A Psyop

In essay I will.......

2 Years ago I made a viral video about the ‘Yahoonisation of Lagos’ as someone who newly joined TikTok and wanted to rant as a way to let out my frustration of missing a spin class. At the time I was in Cape Town for work and during my car ride back to my hotel I did what every regular person does these days to pass time and I began to scroll through my FYP. On it were countless videos at the time of Locals in Lagos complaining about ‘Detty December’ and all the ills that it brings but at the same time followed up by countless videos of diasporans being excited to come back home to enjoy essentially all the things locals took for granted (in their own view).

At the time of making that video I pointed out how Lagos was “a paper town made up of paper people”, I phrase I borrowed from John Green’s book: Paper Towns and it feels even more relevant to deconstruct what Detty December has become in 2025, through the lens of that my 2023 TikTok video and John Green’s Book.

Paper Town is essentially a book examining perception vs reality.

One of its core themes is on the dangers of idealisation. It follows the main protagonist Quentin (Q) who has a crush on his neighbour Margo (M). In Q’s mind M is the perfect girl of his dreams and he dedicates most of his time in the story trying to get M to notice him as more than a friend. One day M runs away from home, no one knows where she’s gone but she leaves behind clues with which Q and their mutual friends pick up on, beginning a road trip to New York to find her in this paper town (both physically and metaphorically).

If I were to sum up the recurring theme of all discourse around Detty December in Lagos today, I’d say people are bargaining with this tension of perception vs reality. Let’s unpack some of these realities vs perception.

Brief Socio-Economic and Political History of Detty December

(Because we’re in a literacy crisis globally, I need to caveat here and say this is mainly through the lens of my lived experience and environment, if this is not your lived experience or reality that is okay feel free to use the comment section as added context that readers can learn from and help improve their larger understanding).

In order for you to understand the term IJGB (I Just Got Back) you have to understand the migration that happened over the last few decades.

The late 80s and 90s saw a surge in emigration among middle and upper-middle-class Nigerians to Europe, the US, and Canada, driven by military coups and economic decline following the oil boom. This cohort, largely contemporaries of the author’s parents (Gen X), typically completed their full education within Nigeria; sending children abroad was then reserved for those deemed “rascals” to avoid social embarrassment. These individuals attended government, missionary, or federal unity schools.

In the 1980s, Nigeria’s educational system remained robust, with institutions like the University of Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello University, and the University of Lagos attracting top talent.

By the 90s things had worsened and overseas postgraduate degrees became a popular path for career advancement or emigration. Post-1999, political and economic stability encouraged many Gen X returnees to rebuild roots locally where they would take up roles in government and multinationals or found what are now some influential firms across banking, law, and FMCG. While not all such organisations were returnee-led, many founders leveraged international experience to contribute to national development.

These Gen X parents, having experienced the deterioration of public education during the military regimes of the 80s, subsequently raised Millennial children who were primarily enrolled in private institutions. For those members of the Gen X cohort who remained in Nigeria, and for the Boomers who witnessed this decline firsthand, a new ecosystem of elite schools emerged. Establishments such as Lifeforte, Olashore, Atlantic Hall, Chrisland, Lagos Prep, and CTC were founded to cater to their offspring and other children from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

Residual post-colonial, yet still colonially-influenced, schools like Grange and Corona also continued to thrive. Owing to the inherent nature of class stratification, access to these exclusive institutions was limited to a select economic bracket. During this period, school selection was predicated on perceived excellence in academics, robust extracurricular offerings, and, critically, strong affiliations with prestigious British boarding schools. A smaller subset of students attended International Schools in Francophone Africa or Kenya, typically the children of globally mobile professionals.

By the commencement of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, the Nigerian economy was flourishing, resulting in an augmentation of disposable income for upper-middle and middle-class families. This period ushered in a new dimension of hierarchical differentiation among the elite: sending children abroad. While many will humbly claim this decision was driven by the perceived decline of the local education system (a debatable assertion at best), the reality is that the elite were seeking a novel means of establishing social stratification.

If your parents were early adopters to this trend, you were dispatched overseas as early as Year 7 (JSS 1). Second-movers typically sent their children by Year 9 (JSS 3), and late adopters transitioned their children abroad around Year 11 (SS2 or SS3).

Continuing this hierarchy, unless a student’s family maintained a residence in the UK or their boarding school destination, the expectation was a return home during Half Term or the end of a Term. However, the frequency of these returns to Nigeria began to diminish concurrently with the accelerating decline of the nation’s economy during this period.

In 2010, the exchange rate stood at ₦150 to $1. A flight ticket from Lagos to London cost approximately $700, equating to about ₦105,000. If a child returned home 3 to 6 times annually, the yearly expenditure ranged from ₦315,000 to ₦630,000. By 2015, the rate had shifted to ₦193 per dollar. By the time the last of the Millennials completed university around 2019, the exchange rate had soared to ₦500 per dollar. This represents a staggering 233.33% increase in the expense of educating and repatriating children from abroad.

The persistent weakening of the exchange rate naturally necessitated that children returned to Nigeria less often. It is crucial to highlight these subtle shifts before we fully address the term IJGB.

When a child returned home every half term, the distinction between those based locally and those abroad was less pronounced, particularly since most upper-middle-class Millennial children of secondary school age attended boarding institutions anyway. If a child was absent from the local church or hairdresser for a few weeks, the assumption was simply that they were at school. Even among peers, this meant maintaining regular social contact every few weeks. However, the simultaneous rise in local inflation and the spiking exchange rate lengthened these periods of absence. The current necessity of employing the phrase “I just got back” (IJGB) is a direct consequence of children being away for significantly longer stretches than the community was accustomed to.

Unsurprisingly, this translated to less time spent bonding with local friends.

In many boarding schools, black students were a clear minority, and the Nigerian students among them naturally began to cluster together across the UK, Canada, or the US. This clustering was a direct consequence of establishing new friendships and seeking novel social experiences to navigate the existential challenge of being a minority. These network clustering would go on to influence what we have as our entertainment today in Lagos.

All of this to say the influx of people coming into the likes of Lagos in December was not simply ‘organic’ it was influenced by the economic and political changes that happened over the last 2 decades which in turn reshaped socio-cultural norms.

Fake Life Pro Max & Social Media

If we return to John Green’s Paper Towns for a moment, and consider the inherent danger of idealisation, this pervasive ‘Detty December’ agenda was successfully enforced by the demographic detailed in the previous section because, for them, it genuinely represented an ideal existence. When one transitions from a town or city requiring self-reliance i.e. managing laundry, making one’s own bed, wrestling heavy luggage onto public transport, working mundane retail jobs for résumé padding, and enduring casual racism in comparison to a city like Lagos, the contrast is stark. Upon arrival in Lagos, bags are immediately handled, a driver chauffeurs one everywhere, daily meals are prepared, and rooms are meticulously cleaned. Internships or jobs are readily available through parental connections or family friends. Consequently, the primary concern shifts entirely to leisure, specifically, how to spend the funds provided by mummy and daddy. It is only logical that life appears greener on this side.

From the crucible of boarding school to the experience of university life abroad, these children of the elite developed extensive experience in organising events for their cohort, a mindset that persists robustly today. The very individuals I once knew who dabbled in forming rap groups are now the architects of the contemporary Alte music scene. Similarly, those who organised parties across various university hubs are now the prominent club promoters or DJs running in the hottest venues in Lagos. This is not to diminish the substantial influence of locally based individuals in shaping the current cultural landscape, but the specific form of “exclusivity” that is now the hallmark of Detty December originated from the elite’s desire to cultivate social environments familiar and entertaining to them.

There was an era when event discovery was restricted to closed Blackberry Messenger groups or niche discussions on Facebook or Bebo. However, the rise of Twitter and Instagram liberated upper-middle-class youth to broadcast a curated version of their lives, content previously confined to a select few into the wider country, the diaspora, and the global audience. I am particularly reminded of one popular shot: the video featuring individuals seated in the back of an SUV, a driver visible up front, with the expansive Lagos in hazy Harmattan dust stretching ahead of them. This was once content exclusively posted privately (adhering to the socio-cultural norm of not publicly disclosing one’s arrival or departure); it has now been co-opted and normalised as a public declaration.

Again, this existence is illusory. When Lagosians assert that this environment is “not a real place’, or a paper town, it is precisely because these social media snippets constitute a mere 5-to-10-minute highlight reel, utterly devoid of the underlying reality. The aesthetic video capturing a journey across the Third Mainland or Ikoyi Link Bridge is part of the con; it deliberately omits the entire experience one must endure upon landing at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, or the grueling traffic necessary to reach one’s residence while expertly navigating potholes and narrowly avoiding someone hitting your car.

Those infamous visual narratives of affluent Nigerians balling at the club, popping bottles at weddings, or the beach, having the time of their lives, completely shields viewers from the considerable effort and maneuvering required simply to arrive at these venues and to put on this show in the first place.

I will not be one of those who condescendingly preaches that these events are ‘not actually fun,’ because for a significant period, they genuinely were. The degree to which they remain enjoyable today is a separate debate entirely.

That singular week of incessant revelry documented on Instagram Stories and now TikTok represents a bedrock of what we call fake life, precisely because such a schedule would be wholly impossible during any other month (not to be confused with fake life used as a slur to describe actual con artists in lagos pretending to live a life that is not theirs in order to con someone out of money). Outside of this December period, real life is people who are tethered to their jobs, pressing through deadlines, parental duties, and the responsibility of being a mini government unto oneself. Yet, for one or two weeks a year, they are permitted to completely unwind, transitioning seamlessly from the beach to a club, to another club, to a wedding, to brunch, and back to the club.

In their idealisation of Lagos, these upper-middle-class Nigerians, who have unintentionally marketed this lifestyle, failed to accurately portray the manifold hardships inherent in visiting or residing in the city. So, when members of the diaspora with tenuous or non-existent ties to Lagos, or mere tourists, arrive anticipating an unadulterated good time, they inevitably feel cheated. Those who follow me privately know that I am religiously dedicated to speaking about the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of living in Lagos, which I view as an act of service. This is because I understand precisely what it is like to be viewing this from the other side of the screen, in a frigid climate, psychologically convinced that the only missing piece of one’s life is Lagos when 9/10 times, this is simply untrue.

Lagos is not a place one visits without established, close connections, whether friends or family, living there. Regrettably, due to this ‘Fake Life’ phenomenon, December in Lagos has fostered a new category of visitor and an associated mentality that can only be accurately characterised as victims of Yahoonisation.

The Yahoonisation of Lagos

In that TikTok video I published two years ago, I posited that the current engine of Lagos is driven by fraud and illicit capital; no sector, from construction to hospitality to the music industry, remains untouched by these dubious financial currents.

The recurring visual narrative that typically saturates social media feeds emanating from Lagos during December involves carousel dumps of individuals flaunting wads of cash held to their ears, blurry nightclub photos from the most exclusive venues, images of expensive cars, and boat rides departing Ilashe at sunset, among other curated spectacles. I must reiterate: Lagos is fundamentally not a destination for those without deep-seated, reliable local connections. Yet, individuals lacking any authentic ties arrive here and proceed to inhabit these very lives.

I recently watched a viral TikTok video highlighting how a significant portion of contemporary pop culture messaging being distilled through music and influencers is actively promoting a ‘tricking’ or transactional culture to women, which they are readily embracing. We have normalised rhetoric such as “when will a man fly me out” or “just give me money,” completely divorced from the practical and often compromising realities such as that nothing is truly free. We have inappropriately co-opted the lexicon of sex work as a supposed marker of feminist empowerment. The notion that Black and non-Black women from the diaspora now actively seek a Nigerian man who will lavishly spend on them and fly them out to Lagos is worrying. This implies a willingness to exchange their metaphorical bodies for the opportunity to ‘flex’ on Instagram, mimicking the lifestyles of upper middle-class Nigerians who are living their lives either through legitimate work or by drawing upon the resources of the ‘bank of Mummy and Daddy’.

Even the specific, filtered version of Lagos that everyone seems intent on posting to their social media stories and carousel dumps represents a brazen co-option of the upper-middle-class experience, achieved without undergoing the prerequisite ‘baptism by fire’ endured by the people they seek to caricature.

Take, for instance, the recent desire for a police escort upon arrival in Lagos, a service traditionally reserved for high-ranking government officials, top-tier CEOs in sensitive positions, or diplomats. This phenomenon is now sought after by virtually everyone (never mind the moral bankruptcy of using scarce police resources to ferry private citizens around town). Similarly, the prevailing imperative to secure an Airbnb in Ikoyi or Victoria Island (nevermind the fact that a lot of people have family homes but go out of their way to pay a premium to reside in those areas) or the general obsession with occupying ‘exclusive’ spaces are all indicators of mass delusion when viewed objectively is an integral component of the psyop.

The persistent posting of videos featuring people shopping, having their hair styled, or dining out while proclaiming everything to be “cheap” only exacerbates the exploitative, neo-colonial rhetoric underpinning much of Lagos’s corruption. What is the ultimate goal of showcasing an elaborately “hacked” or “gamed” system that allows one to live extravagantly for a fraction of the cost to an audience back home?

In any analysis of the pervasive Detty December phenomenon, it is absolutely essential to establish a clear delineation between distinct categories of visitors: those who lived here for most of their formative years but now return only sporadically; those who never grew up here but have recently initiated visits; and, finally, the tourists (defined as anyone lacking genuine ties to the country, whose sole interest is the vibes).

A considerable number of individuals falling into the latter two categories demonstrate no genuine inclination to engage in the necessary work of familiarisation, the same effort we routinely undertake when visiting other globally popular destinations on TikTok such as the South of France, Tokyo, or New York. While I’ve observed mutuals scoffing at the notion of creating visitor guides during this period, I actually think that we require more of these resources, and they must be deeply contextualised. It needs to go beyond the superficial “Here are 10 places to eat” or “10 places to shop” content circulating. We need more voices articulating that the idealised version of Lagos they are currently obsessed with via social media is utterly unreal. It is hyper-curated and completely stripped of the socio-cultural and political complexities of the reality on the ground. Tourism is all its parts can be used for good but it can also be used for a lot of ills that alter the sociocultural makeup of a place for the worst.

The recurrent complaint of locals being “priced out”, a narrative predominantly weaponised by the diaspora and tourists as a display of supposed moral righteousness is hollow, as it serves only to mask their own contribution to the exploitation. Ironically, the very people being genuinely priced out are themselves. Locals are not paying ₦800,000 for their hair to be braided, you are. Locals are not spending $9,000 for eleven nights in Ikoyi, you are. Locals are not purchasing tank tops for ₦250,000 and then complaining about the quality, you are. The original allure of Lagos and much of the Global South was predicated on the promise that “your money will go further,” but the Yahoonisation of Lagos has rapidly caught up to them. Now, everyone seems desperate to harvest mass Nigerian engagement online, believing it will propel them into relevance by complaining. While I feel bad for visitors, I don’t feel too bad. We inhabit the most technologically advanced era in history with endless information online; you are an adult, do your findings before visiting.

The Impact…

One thing I will say that has been good for Lagos through Detty December is the entrepreneurial spirit that has been allowed to blossom from it. From fashion, to music to food, young Nigerians have found themselves driven and inspired to pursue honest work through the lens of culture and have not been inhibited by social class. Thanks to the growth in internet penetration and the growth of fintechs offering alternative funding from banks, young people with a few resources have been able to unlock capital and market themselves locally and globally.

People travel to Lagos now with the excitement of shopping at their favourite fashion retailers or eating at their favourite supper club or attending parties with rising DJs there. This is a good sign that people can and will travel for a unique experience so its in our own interest that we create and environment that allows this to thrive while protecting locals from mass exploitation.

However, It’s a shame, all of this attention has not converted into excellence in any form.

With all these hospitality and cultural sectors thriving, you would think the several music and food and fashion festivals would get better each year but each year it keeps getting worse. Poor crowd control management, late set up, late arrival of artists, poor customer service and of course the sprinkles of scamming here and there. Everyone is constantly thinking about how to outsmart others out of sheer greed. Events rarely start or end on time, and basic planning for parking or customer service is often neglected, resulting in a mediocrity galore that visitors frequently criticise.

The persistent lack of excellence in the Nigerian hosting and entertainment space remains a glaring issue, as I have yet to attend a single function this december that actually commences and concludes according to its publicised schedule. Beyond the disregard for people precious time, basic logistical considerations like adequate parking are frequently neglected, and the customer service provided by event staff is rarely, if ever, impeccable. It is all mediocrity galore and a systemic failure that international visitors are increasingly noticing and vocalising online.

Beyond setting up a detty december committee, the government itself has failed to provide the necessary infrastructure to support this seasonal surge. Meaningful improvements would include streamlining the airport experience by increasing staffing during peak periods to reduce wait times from hours to minutes, implementing better traffic control, providing tax incentives for those looking to build high-capacity venues with proper parking facilities and adequate security all round. We’ve gotten none of this, instead all Lagos got was billions spent on solar power street lights and a coastal road that opens when the guys guarding the area feel like it. Thanks a lot Jide.

For all this weaknesses it show also reveals that there a wealth of untapped business opportunities for those willing to look beyond the sexy, “front of office” roles in society like fashion design or event planning. The true potential for job creation and industry growth lies in building the “backbone” of the sector—focusing on essential services such as professional training, quality control, urban planning to inform venue selection, and sophisticated crowd management. These roles are not traditionally considered “sexy,” yet they are critical to ensuring an overall positive experience for all participants. For the industry to truly mature and thrive, individuals with vision and experience must step up to handle this vital foundational work, moving the needle from mere “vibes” toward consistent excellence.

The Elephant in the Room

The conclusion of this discourse cannot overlook the somber socio-political backdrop against which these festivities occur. While a segment of upper-middle class Nigerians and members of the diaspora indulge in conspicuous consumption—popping million-naira bottles of champagne in exclusive Lagos clubs and lavish weddings—a starkly different reality unfolds for many of their fellow citizens. In various regions across the country, families are forced to pay those same millions not for luxury, but as ransom for victims of the rampant kidnapping crisis currently ravaging the nation.

The disparity in mobility further highlights this national divide. While some spend millions of naira on international flights to return “home” for the holidays and reunite with social circles in Lagos, many resident Nigerians find themselves unable to travel to their own ancestral homes. This is driven by a justified fear of road accidents, the threat of abduction, or the rising costs of transportation that have placed basic travel out of reach for the average person.

Despite these crises, many visitors engage with the country in a way that avoids these harsh truths entirely. By remaining within protected bubbles of luxury and privilege, they return to their lives abroad singing the praises of a Nigeria that exists primarily in their imagination and within the margins of carefully constructed illusions. This detachment does not merely reflect a personal choice but serves to further perfect the broader “psyop,” maintaining lagos as this beacon of disconnection from majority of its nation’s population.

But this is just my opinion, what do you think?

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1. It goes without saying that this little essay cannot cover all aspects of Detty December and is focusing on on segment of the social class. I imagine there are several other nuanced aspects to explore and again encourage people to use the comments to add to this.