At a time when Nigeria’s social crises have become the norm, Netng is launching the #MyNaijaPain campaign that asks young Nigerians to turn up the volume — through rap, monologues, and skits. This is why.
There are many pain points in our day-to-day lives as Nigerians, and many of us are exhausted. This exhaustion is not despair, but it is something more complicated. There is something special about a country that consistently asks more of its people than it gives back, and a people who have decided, with remarkable creativity and stubbornness, to survive anyway.
At Netng, we spent a lot of time thinking about how our documentation of pop culture can honour that beyond reporting the headlines and stories based on our own understanding. We want to actually render the human experience beneath the statistic.
What does it feel like to lose your borrow-me-credit lifeline when your salary is three weeks late? What does it sound like when a loan app calls your mother to tell her you owe money?
The #MyNaijaPain Challenge is our attempt to answer that question at scale.
The honest answer is that the most important content about Nigerian life is not being produced in newsrooms. It is being produced on phones, at night, between shifts, by people who will never consider themselves to be journalists but who understand, instinctively, that this storytelling is how you make sense of an overwhelming world.
We have seen it in the skits that go viral because they capture something true about the Japa experience. In the rap verses that explain the daily lives of the youth, in a language the algorithm does not catch. In the movies and dramas that come from creators who have never been booked for a production but who carry entire worlds inside them.
These voices exist. What they have not always had is a platform that takes their content seriously — that says, your truth, delivered in Yoruba or Pidgin or broken English, is worth more than a polished production with a corporate brief behind it.
That is what #MyNaijaPain is. It is an open platform with a clear brief: Nigeria is not fine. Tell us how, in 90 seconds, in whatever creative language you speak.
The Issues We Want Talked About
We chose the campaign topics deliberately. Fuel price means more to Nigerians than to other nations because it is our national resource. The cost of living crisis is not a macroeconomic abstraction; regardless of the CBN reports about declining inflation, many Nigerians still know that their salary, whatever it is, is no longer enough.
For millions of low-income Nigerians, market traders, artisans, and domestic workers, borrowed airtime was a lifeline. It was how you called your child’s school, followed up with a business deal, and stayed connected when you could not afford to. Its removal affected real people in real ways, and almost no one with a platform has treated it as the consumer rights crisis it actually is.
Then there is Japa. The word has become so normalised in the Nigerian lexicon that we sometimes forget what it actually means: that a significant portion of the country’s most educated, most creative, most capable young people have concluded that their best life is not available to them at home. That is a national emergency dressed in casual conversation.
We want all of this in the content you put out for the challenge. As raps, as monologues, as skits, because sometimes the most direct route to the truth is through art.
On Discovery
There is a secondary mission to this campaign that matters as much as the civic one. Nigeria has an enormous, largely underground creative economy. Rappers who have never been signed. Actors who have never been cast. Skitmakers who are building audiences on their own, without managers or agencies or label deals.
#MyNaijaPain is a discovery engine. It is a structured reason for these talents to produce something, put it in front of an audience, and be seen. The prizes matter because the winner will walk home with ₦600,000 while the runners-up get ₦400,000 and ₦250,000 respectively. It signals that we take this seriously, but the visibility is the longer-term value. Every strong entry gets reshared by Netng across all platforms. Every entry that hits becomes part of the editorial conversation.
What We Are Asking
If you are between 16 and 25, and you have something to say about this country, say it. Shoot it on your phone. Edit it however you know how. Post it with #MyNaijaPain. You do not need a studio. You do not need a director. You need a truth and 90 seconds.
If you know someone who fits that description — a young rapper, an actor, a skitmaker — send them this. The best thing about a campaign like this is that it belongs to whoever shows up for it.
We will be watching. So will the country.
