Ikenna Okeh re-introduces us to the chaotic energy of Lagos in his novel Yahoo! Yahoo!, taking a hard and exciting look at the subculture of Internet fraud and digital and love scams that thrive in the shadowy world beneath the city’s surface. The focus is on the life of a Nigerian romance scammer and the way he sees the crime subcultural world he inherited from poverty-driven desperation, a political elite that cannibalises its youth and their dreams – and an emotionally alienated demographic niche from both the global north and south. Victims are “clients” in this world and they are quite comprehensively categorised: “the crazies, the emotionally unstable, the romantics, the time wasters, the zealots, the freaks, the outrightly ridiculous, and everything in between.”
The focus is on the life of a Nigerian romance scammer and the way he sees the crime subcultural world ...
The idea of the KYC (Know Your Customer) process was formalised in the US as part of the Bank Secret Act (BSA) in 1970. Okeh provides opportunity for a rare peak into the evolution of BSA’s KYC from a bank regulation protocol to a clear mapping of target victims of digital financial fraud, known in West Africa generally as Yahoo! Yahoo!, a street slang pinched from its early emergence from the email spams of the pre-Y2K flopped apocalypse.
This is Okeh’s known style as a socially conscious Nigerian writer. He weaves relatable moral conflicts and complex human experiences into an engaging reading delight ...
The internet scam (yahoo) subculture is seductive and pervasive, drawing in earnest and desperate individuals with promises of quick wealth. Lagos, presented by Okeh, is crafted from reality, with an audible hum, a noisy power generator that never shuts off: cars honking, voices shouting, and beneath it all, the quiet click of keyboards spinning lies into new digital gold from inside overpriced hotel rooms in dinghy suburbs. That’s where yahoo boys find their place; in the shadows of the state’s secret and cannibal reputation.
With lighthearted perfection, Okeh weaves a profound sense of the horror that lies under the normal in the characters within this novel. There is Ola Money, Big Naira, Osas Pounds, Joey Wire, Emmy Lotto, Ade Aza, and Terry CC. The names do not sound horrifying because they have been socially washed, just like the impact of the political and governance horror that produces them. But these are names that hide criminals who will take your life savings and disappear, with absolutely no qualms. Just like above them in the social pecking order, political elites—who murder their own people with no conscience and supervise rotten schools with no chairs—sit with smiles over expensive champagne and dinners in the company of Oxford University representatives in London to discuss donations to fund their libraries and scholarships. Both the characters of Okeh’s creative mastery and the unreferenced political idiots, who grooms the mind of the urban yahoo boy, move in tandem, with tangible moral ambiguity.
The yahoo subculture is seductive and pervasive, drawing in earnest and desperate individuals with promises of quick wealth.
Cat-fishing scams can only work with chameleon candour. So Chidi, the main villain, can shift easily from Rebecca Simmons in New York to Susan Wembley across the country, in one breath, sitting before his laptop in Lagos—while the two clients/victims imagine they are chatting with two different men from two different lives. To Chidi and his colourfully named friends, whether the name is Rebecca or Susan is completely irrelevant as long as the women have money to be stolen. Rebecca sends her daydreams; Chidi sends his bank details. That’s how it works—love is just another story yahoo boys sell.
The allure and the grind, the thrill and power of success, and the relentless effort required to maintain the façade is all interwoven in a matrix of inversely proportioned desires and expectations, which Okeh traces with simple sentences and simpler sensitivity. Chidi sees the world through the lens of this underground economy, where every message typed is a step toward survival or ruin, towards acclaim in pricy and loud nightclubs with its attendant social crown. Or death.
This is Okeh’s known style as a socially conscious Nigerian writer. He weaves relatable moral conflicts and complex human experiences into an engaging reading delight.
He remembers with relish his first haul: “The first time I got a payout—five thousand dollars from a widow in Texas—I felt like a king. But kings don’t sleep, not when the next mark’s waiting, not when the internet’s slow and the lies have to be perfect.” This is what it is all about. Yet Okeh decides to make Chidi different, as if there is a moral reflection deficit evident in the thousands of real characters engaged in the yahoo crime business gratification chain. Lol. As if inner conflict should be a requirement for making fiction stand out from their source reality. As the story unfolds, Chidi begins to reflect on his actions and the world he’s part of. This introspection might highlight the tension between his personal justification and the harm inflicted on his victims, offering a window into his evolving self-awareness. His heart is not cut from stone, in other words. He sends some money to a client/victim who lost her job. “This, I have kept to myself, never to breathe a word of it to anyone.” Now, you have to be careful when you cast that stone. If it lands on Chidi’s compassion, you will be guilty of something too.
This ability to make the characters compound morally makes "Yahoo! Yahoo!" afloat with moral paradoxes that Okeh manipulates with candid objectivity. But it does something more vocal in the story itself. Nobody is completely innocent and nobody is completely guilty in a jungle where the goal is to take more than you give. When Chidi lays out his masterly crafted trap of being a US marine with stolen pictures and fake profiles, one of the people the trap attracts is a Nigerian middle-aged woman in Abeokuta who drives a battered Volkswagen beetle, deals in secondhand clothes, and her Facebook profile littered with “pictures of herself and her kids.” Chidi muses, with disappointment: “She must have seen the picture of an American soldier and her greed is spurring her on to befriend him.” And right there is the proverbial cat dropping out of the proverbial bag: greed.
Greed is the moral currency and the lowest common mental denomination that binds the yahoo boy ecosystem together, for both the client/victim and the villain. From the days of the famed Nigerian Prince to the more subtle methods that evolved from that pioneer regal format, greed slithers through every process of the digital banditry machine. Even the oyinbo people, pretenders to the most vulnerable victim status, have a big seat at the greed table. And when Chidi meets an OG (original gangster) in the game, his question—“Oyibo people dey do yahoo too?”—is met with a laugh. “Every country get their own scammers…” is the supreme judgement of the OG. You can tell yourself it’s just business, that your victims got money to spare and you have got none. That every country has their own scammers. That you are not unique. But at night, when the screen’s dark, and you are lying down on the bed, can you see their faces—Susan, Rebecca, Linda, etc.—and wonder who’s really the fool here? The answer is simple. The scammer who can do that is redeemable. The scammer who cannot is lost completely. All scammers are not equal. They become equal only when the FBI or the EFCC comes knocking.
Greed is the moral currency and the lowest common mental denomination that binds the yahoo boy ecosystem together.
A synthesis of the moral landscape in the story suggests it’s not just about one man but about how he perceives the ecosystem of scams around him—its players, its rules, and its impact on Nigerian society. This can include interactions with fellow scammers, law enforcement, or family, shaping his understanding of his criminal place in the criminal world he shares with others whose choices may have the same equidistance from a moral core, but at the same time not quite coloured the same. “Nobody innocent,” the OG tells Chidi, “but na the people wey no get mouth to defend themselves, na them dey collect bad names.”
“Street no get king,” surmises the OG.
It is raw wisdom like this, coming from criminals and wrestled into hypothetical altruisms, that make Okeh’s genius very visible. The characters are raw, but their mental space is not wholly disfigured. Their questions challenge rationale. Their motives seek universality. Their faults reek of profound insights. Yet their crimes are potentially earth scorching for their victims. The novel blends gritty realism with a nuanced character study. It portrays Chidi’s journey through a morally grey landscape, where survival and ambition blur ethical lines, and where Lagos itself is as much a character as the people within it. Still, it leaves spots on Chidi where it is not psychologically safe to hit with the reader’s outrage because the rebounder is another question that has no easy moral answer.
This is Okeh’s known style as a socially conscious Nigerian writer. He weaves relatable moral conflicts and complex human experiences into an engaging reading delight, as seen in his other novels like The Operative, and Rogues of the East. But in Yahoo! Yahoo! the strongest case is made for an outlook that requires constant vigilance of psychological examination at every nook of moral outrage. It is only righteously ethical that the story ends in irony. Chidi saves all the money he can with his mother. She invests it in the Russian scammer’s renown MMM ponzi scheme which sends him back to where he started. Maybe, who knows, that can prove to be either enough karma for Chidi. Or enough pain to redeem him. Or both.
Yahoo! Yahoo! is available at Nuria Store Kenya. Click here to get your copy.