Yahoo! Yahoo! by Ikenna Okeh, Linea House, 2025, 201 pp
Before Ramon Abbas was snared by the FBI in 2020, he was better known on Instagram as Hushpuppi.
To his millions of followers, Abbas was a glossy influencer, posing in designer clothes, stepping off private jets, living large. What most people did not know was that this lavish lifestyle was funded through a complex web of cyber-heists. In hindsight, it is unsurprising that Abbas could not resist flaunting his ill-gotten wealth. After all, he was the product of a culture where wealth, no matter its origins, is always glorified.
That societal flaw is one of the central themes examined by Ikenna Okeh in his novel, Yahoo! Yahoo! The title alludes to the popular term used to describe digital fraudsters in Nigeria from as far back as the late 1990s, when cybercafes were mushrooming across major cities, providing incubators for the evolution of online scams. But Okeh’s novel is firmly rooted in the present.
In the post-COVID-19 period within which Yahoo! Yahoo! is set, internet fraud has metamorphosed into a thousand-headed monster, drawing many young Nigerians into its maw.
The novel’s protagonist, Chidiebere Uwani (Chidi) is one such young Nigerian. We meet him in Lagos running romance scams, often posing as a US soldier stationed abroad, scheming and maneuvering to fleece unsuspecting foreign women who let him into their lives. Okehʼs depiction of Lagos has every bit of the filth, inequality, nightlife and environmental neglect that mirrors the flawed megacity most people know. But beneath it all pulses the subculture of internet fraud that defines the scope of this narrative.
With Chidi’s first-person point of view and direct, minimalist prose, Okeh ushers us into a way of life that has been normalised within Nigerian society. In this world of hacked social media accounts, multiple IP addresses, cloned emails, VPN apps, payment channels and crypto wallets, there is always the lurking danger of law enforcement. But for Chidi and his associates, young men with names like Ola Money, Terry CC, Ade Aza and Big Naira, the stress and danger is worth it because whenever a scheme pays off, the result is enough money to splurge on material acquisitions and acclamation from “hypemen” at nightclubs as men of enviable worth.
For Chidi, there is also the exhilarating joy of being able to provide and be depended upon. This is a feeling, as he puts it, of being able to “spread love and warmth at home, for that is the usefulness of a man.”
For Chidi, and the average “working boy” by extension, the ends justify the means. In a country where an extraordinary number of people live in penury, abject poverty is the greatest sin, inviting derision, dismissal and degradation. Conversely, success attracts success.
As Chidi recounts after one particularly successful scam: “I bought a Mercedes immediately and saw myself in the league of people who mattered.” This is another of the novelʼs preoccupations, the crushing social pressure placed on young men to succeed by any means necessary. Okeh shows how the greatest accelerant of this pressure is the ostentatious display of wealth online.
Towards the end of the novel, as Chidi’s world begins to unravel, another character, Billy of Asia, surfaces as an older man who, once deep in internet fraud at its onset, gave it all up to go legit. It is through him that Okehʼs moral observations are most plainly voiced, as Billy laments the proliferation of digital fraud among Nigerian youths as a symptom of a dying society.
The narrative of Yahoo! Yahoo! is often hilarious, especially in the meticulously rendered scenes of cultivating a romance scam with outrageous lies, and less subtly so in the moral ironies Okeh dissects with quiet precision: the fraudster who becomes a victim of a Ponzi scheme; law enforcement agents whose idea of justice is to shamelessly extort the very criminals they catch; the fraudster’s mother who prays to God for her son’s schemes to succeed; and the government that hunts Yahoo Boys with fanfare while turning a blind eye to public officials looting the national treasury.
With its interspersed lyrics from Nigerian pop songs that glorify fraudulent wealth, its street-edged philosophies on life and hustle, and its unapologetic portrayal of Lagos from a millennial viewpoint, Yahoo! Yahoo! achieves a well-rounded, contemporary portrait of a subculture that is as urgent as it is darkly comic and rich with depth, without collapsing into moral absolutes, even as its author takes a clear ethical stand.
In a way, Ikenna Okeh’s Yahoo! Yahoo! does for fraud culture what Eghosa Imasuenʼs Fine Boys did for violent cultism. And upon its dizzying conclusion, it satisfies doubly: as a gripping, lean read, and as an urgent critique of dark times.
***Sima Essien is an award-winning writer based in Uyo