Even when the average adult literacy was significantly low in the eighties, many Nigerians were well-known readers who relished a good book and could tell stories from their quest. Fast-forwarding to 2023 when literacy is hovering around 69%, the highest it has ever been, readers feel like a dying breed, so here is off to show you how come.

To test the lack of appetite for reading among Gen Z youths, renowned bibliophile Mr Komolafe Ajayi experimented to test if the audience could pick up a book worth ₦5000 over free internet data of 10 gigabytes.

It was only a confirmation instead of a disappointment when it turned out that most of the participants involved in the exercise chose the data.

If you observe, our reading culture was better when our literacy level was even lower, Mr Ajayi tells the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) 30, 40 years ago, do we have the number of graduates that we have now? No.

But our fathers were reading William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and other books then while our Gen Z and Gen Alpha nowadays don’t read. Even Millennials who came before those two generations don’t read.

So, if young people don’t read, what could be the cause is the next question to answer. Doing that would mean touching down at the vibrant scene of creativity in Nigeria’s megacities.

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Once the content is ready and has been published, the producers look out for traffic that their social media posts and video clips might have created with the hope to monetise the data, and this is where the youths are heading too it seems.

Back in 2020, former National Librarian Prof. Lenrie Aina visualised how extreme the lack of reading books has become. He said this when the National Library of Nigeria he headed was donating books to the inmates living in prison centres all over the federation.

In the statistics, only two African countries were listed amongst [the] countries that are reading. These countries are South Africa and Egypt; Nigeria was not among these countries.

As a matter of fact, Nigeria was rated as one of the lowest in terms of reading culture in the world. This has prompted us to see that we try to make Nigerians read.

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Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.