Nigeria’s social media space was rife with excitement on Sunday night when Hazel Oyeye Onou, better known as Whitemoney’s victory was announced on BBNaija ShineYaEye show.
As with every reality TV show, diverse mix of housemates converge in a secluded space like the Big Brother House to showcase their true characters while reacting to their environment.
They are isolated and placed under 24/7 surveillance with a dictator known as Big Brother or Biggie overseeing their activities.
An intriguing part of the show is that viewers contribute largely to who stays and who gets evicted out of the house using electronic votes.
The housemates amass fanbases overtime and these are the people who decide each contestant’s fate. Since the inauguration of the Big Brother Naija show in Nigeria, the fans have remained youths to date.
It has indeed been proven by Showmax that a significant portion of the viewing audience are young Nigerians accounting to “almost 50% of the viewing hours; followed by South Africans with 30%, and 15% happening in Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, Namibia and Uganda.”
During the BBNaija ‘Lockdown’ edition in 2020, over 50 million Nigerian youths cast their votes for their favourite housemates.
National Bureau of Statistics on its website on Monday, 15th March 2020, stated that the unemployment rate in Nigeria rose to 33.3% in three months through December. The numbers now are even scarier.
This is implying that a third, which are majorly youths, of the 69.7 million-strong labor force in Africa’s most-populous nation either did nothing or worked for less than 15 hours a week, making them unemployed. While another 15.9 million worked less than 40 hours a week, making them underemployed.
Over the past weeks, young Nigerians had stormed the streets on a weekday to protest the injustice meted at their favorite housemate. It was so disturbing that it alarmed some middle-aged prominent Nigerians who had one or two things to say.
Many believe that if the youths can channel the same energy to voting for the right politicians, their future would be much better.
Read also:
JUST IN ! Whitemoney Wins BBNaija ShineYaEye Edition (video)
BBNaija: How Unemployment Played a Major Role in Whitemoney’s Victory