The disillusionment of a young satirist

The afternoon of Wednesday, August 12, 2026, was a particularly confounding one for the group of journalists who gathered in the conference room at Inception Hotel. They had all been sent out by their various editors earlier that day to partake in what they were told was a “routine emergency press conference.” But what was promised to be routine turned out to be not so routine after all. 

It started when the convener of the press conference shuffled unescorted into the room and sat down in front of all the arranged microphones and the cameras pointed at the high table. The reporters thought the young lanky fellow who had just strolled in had missed his way. But that thinking quickly faded when the ushers went to make sure he had what he needed and finally disappeared when the moderator formally introduced him.

The buzzing room settled into an uneasy silence, but the young man took his time.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Can you all hear me?”

There was a brief, scattered murmur of acquiescence from the audience.

“Thank you so much for coming here today. My name, for your report, is John Doe. If you wish, you may call me Chinedu Taiwo Ciroma. I don’t really care much about appellations. In the past few years, I’ve gone by many aliases, from concerned citizen to anonymous source. So, again, it doesn’t really matter how you choose to identify me in your report. All I’m concerned about is that my message is passed across. And I’m trusting you to do that.”

The journalists exchanged looks of bewilderment. They were stunned, veterans and cubs alike. The convener carried on.

“First and foremost, you should know that I am a scribe of words and thoughts, of prophecies, analysis, and predictions. I am a writer. But over the past few months, I have noticed something rather disturbing. Everything I write just seems to come to pass.”

There was a sweeping murmur in the room, indicating that the men and women who have made it their lives’ work to report on happenings around them did not exactly find the young man’s “ability” impressive.  

Unperturbed, John continued anyway. “You see, I’ve always loved writing. In fact, I daresay God blessed me with a gift for writing so impeccable that it is beyond my years. I can’t count the number of exams I aced, the number of awards and competitions I’ve won, or even the number of trainings and workshops that I myself have personally facilitated.”

“In the beginning, it was fun. I was in-depth; I was solemn. I was also light and breezy. But I couldn’t bear not having a real message. I didn’t want to just write fiction, poems, and screenplays. I wanted to write things that actually mattered. And that was where things began to get difficult. I had very strong opinions about the things happening in our country. I can’t tell you the number of opinion articles and exhaustive analyses I have written.”

“The problem was that my articles were too emotional. I can’t tell you the number of drafts I have deleted. And on the rare occasion where I don’t delete them, they don’t get published. Newspapers and blogs kept rejecting them. On one occasion, one editor even called me to appreciate my level of ingenuity and apologise profusely for not wanting to be sued. Another called me to warn me about the potential security risks I could face if I kept writing articles like that.”

“And so, I switched up. I started writing satirical pieces. At first it didn’t really come out smoothly, but soon, it was all I could write. Everywhere I turned, in everything I did, I saw the metaphorical twisted humour in our society. I couldn’t stop writing. In fact, I would say every satirical article I’ve ever written is an ode to an opinion article that would have had me hanging upside down in a dingy underground cell.”

The man looked around the room for a reaction. The cold and unimpressed eyes of twenty-something journalists stared back at him. Slightly stunned, he cleared his throat and continued.

“Soon things started to get downright weird. It started as a series of mere coincidences. The other day, thinking about how preposterous it would be to have government tone-deaf to the plight of citizens, I adapted the popular ‘Let them eat cake’ expression credited to Marie Antoinette into a satire for the Nigerian context. A few days later, our first lady told people to start frying akara.”

“I once wrote, purely for laughs, that a minister would announce a grand new initiative to solve a problem created by the government’s previous grand new initiative. Three days later, a minister in this country did exactly that. I wrote another piece about graduates paying to afford their jobs. A few days after, a prestigious newspaper in this country released a feature analysis on the issue. After that one, I wrote that, at the rate we’re going, electricity would soon become a luxury available only on public holidays. The next morning, I woke up to a headline about the state house switching to solar due to electricity costs.”

He paused and looked around the room. “I wrote about a government ministry spending millions to rebrand itself without changing a single thing except the logo. It happened. I wrote about a politician promising to make fuel cheaper while simultaneously explaining why fuel had to become more expensive.” 

“So you’re telling us you’ve been predicting these events?” one of the reporters asked.

“Probably. I don’t really know,” John replied.

“You don’t really know what you are telling us?” another reporter interjected.

“Haven’t you been listening?” John asked with irritation.

“I have. But have you been making sense?” the reporter shot back.

“Young man, I’ve been covering Nigerian politics for twenty-seven years. Every Nigerian with a laptop thinks he’s a prophet,” another journalist added.

John sighed exasperatedly. 

“I’m actually glad you said that because we are now at the crux of this conference. I will be bringing out evidence. Mr Ajeigbe, please send them in,” he said.

One by one, the witnesses walked in. There were six of them: a roadside trader, a university graduate, a commercial driver, a secondary school teacher, a young software developer and a retired civil servant. They had little in common except that, in one way or another, they had all found themselves living inside one of John’s jokes.

The first witness took the microphone. He spoke briefly. John had written about a trader whose business was ruined by a sudden government policy that was announced in the morning and reversed by evening. Three days after the satire was published, the same thing happened to him.

A few journalists chuckled.

The second witness spoke. Then the third.

The laughter gradually disappeared.

With each testimony, an usher walked between the rows, placing newspaper clippings in front of the reporters. Each clipping carried two dates: the date John’s satire had been published and the date the events described in it had happened to the witness.

By the time the fourth person finished speaking, nobody was laughing anymore.

As soon as the last person was done, John picked the mic once again. “I want to use this moment to crave your indulgence and to apologise profusely to this next person,” he said. Once again, the doors at the back of the room flew open and another individual was let in. This person had to be flanked on both sides as he looked quite frail. He was clutching a bowl of garri as though his life depended on it.

“Oh my God,” one of the reporters gasped. “It’s the forever garri!”

John cleared his throat. “Two weeks ago, I decided to do my worst and write a horror satire. Before I wrote it, I was already seeing evidence of the things I write about actually happening, but I was still sceptical. So I wrote a new article and titled it ‘The Forever Garri.’ I wrote it in the spirit of vote-buying in this country. Basically, I was saying that people should collect all the garri and whatever else politicians give them during elections because that is the only dividend of democracy they are ever going to get and that there is no need to worry about tomorrow because the four congos of garri will last forever.”

“In the story, I talked about a Mr Johnson who collected garri for his family and would not let them even eat of it due to the sweet taste of democracy in the stuff. He died clutching his own dividends.”

“So you’re saying this is Mr Johnson?” a reporter queried. 

John nodded solemnly. “He’s not dead, yet. We’ve done everything to pry that garri away from his hands. But nothing has worked. We even tried chopping his arms off, but the saws and axes we tried broke. He doesn’t seem conscious of anything else—just the garri. The doctors we saw were so freaked out. They ran away.”

“The sad part is—” John burst into tears. “I can’t undo any of it. And believe me, I tried,” he said between sniffles.

 “So why are you telling us all this?” an older-looking journalist asked after several moments. “Why should anyone care?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m overwhelmed by all of it. Maybe I want to warn someone else out there. Maybe I’m freaked out. Or maybe something is just fundamentally wrong with our society. I really don’t know. I just want to get it out there that I’m done writing satires,” he replied. 

And with that, he stood up. 

For a moment, the journalists remained silent, staring at him as though waiting for one final explanation.

There was none.

He shuffled out in the same mismatched sneakers he had shuffled in with.

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Oluwagbenga Kolawole is a writer and political thinker with a deep respect for the style of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard. In his spare time, he can be found blowing bubbles, fighting crime, or staring suspiciously at the news. He is also a husband to several beautiful women and the boyfriend of one beautiful lady, to all of whom he remains entirely faithful. He is the reigning champion of the World Sarcasm Federation Championship, a title he takes very seriously. You can catch up with him on Substack at thekaygeepapers.substack.com or on X at @olukolawole_.