Opinion
Yansh, Nigeria’s most famous linguistic export, now in the dictionary – Farooq Kperogi
Yansh, Nigeria’s most famous linguistic export, now in the dictionary – Farooq Kperogi
I started writing a short, casual article on yansh (the Nigerian Pidgin English word for a woman’s posterior, which probably first emerged as a humorous mimicry of the crude English word ass or arse) a few weeks ago but stopped midway because the prurience of the subject matter is inconsistent with my public persona as a high-minded prude who is not given to lascivious frivolities (more on this misperception later).
News of the inclusion of nyash, among other Nigerian words, in the Oxford English Dictionary has given me the perfect excuse to resuscitate the article without any feeling of guilt or fear of being misunderstood.
I am neither puritanical nor licentious. As I will show shortly, like everyone else, I have my guilty pleasures. But my interest in the word is purely sociolinguistic and was sparked by my observation that in Anglophone African social media spaces (by which I mean the digital arenas of such countries as Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Liberia, southern Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia), yansh has emerged as the preferred term for the female backside.
The remarkably enthusiastic adoption of this uniquely Nigerian English word across English-speaking Africa in the last few years has led me to conclude that it is far and away Nigeria’s most famous linguistic export in modern times, comparable to American English’s “OK,” which started life as a playful, slangy and jocular abbreviation of the humorous phrase “oll korrect,” but which every single variety of English on earth now uses without thinking twice.
Of course, Afrobeats takes the credit for popularizing yansh in Anglophone and, increasingly, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. Several continent-wide Nigerian hit songs have yansh in them, the latest being the playfully provocative “Water Water Yansh” by Muripounds, OBA DDJ45 and Emmyblaqcfr_, released in 2025, which has taken the continent by storm and has probably done more for posterior diplomacy than any cultural exchange program ever could.
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However, as with all words powerful enough to transcend their immediate linguistic environment, yansh has acquired a variety of spelling variants outside Nigeria, the most famous being nyash. Other variants include yanshi, nyashi, yanch and yanchi. There may be more.
From my informal and non-systematic observation, which may well be inaccurate, the transformation of yansh to nyash appears to have first emerged among East and Southern Africans. The digraph “ny,” used to represent the voiced palatal nasal consonant, is common in Nilotic and Bantu languages.
There are no Bantu or Nilotic languages in all of Nigeria, although Tiv is a Bantoid language and Kanuri is a Saharan language, which is often grouped with Nilotic languages in the Nilo-Saharan language family.
Now, although the nasal consonant digraph “ny” is not common in Nigeria, Nigerians, especially younger Nigerians, appear to have enthusiastically embraced the Nilotic-Bantu rendering of yansh as nyash. That is why Chella’s 2024 sensational song “Nyash Na Nyash” adopts the Nilotic-Bantu spelling. The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary predictably followed suit and adopted nyash as the preferred spelling.
Chinua Achebe once said that any language that has the temerity to transgress its immediate environment and encroach on the territory of other people should learn to come to terms with the inevitable reality that it will be domesticated. Yansh left Nigeria, became nyash in eastern and southern Africa and returned to Nigeria as nyash, a fully naturalized linguistic citizen with a foreign accent.
Talking of yansh, a perfectly well-bred gentleman with whom I have had a polite and dignified relationship for years unintentionally sent me a mildly raunchy photo on WhatsApp of a woman with an exaggeratedly protuberant hindquarters and a naughty accompanying text sometime in mid-2025.
Although I was taken a little aback, I knew straight away that I was not the intended recipient because of the nature of our relationship. He is a highly cultured, well-mannered, religious and unctuous gentleman with whom I engage only in elevated, highfalutin conversations about transparency, honesty, probity, good governance, moral decay and related matters of civilizational urgency.
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He was utterly mortified when he discovered that it was to me he had sent the photo along with the naughty text. He apologized profusely and pleaded that I should not misjudge his moral character because of it.
I assured him that I did not think any less of him because of his misadventure and that every human being has both a private and a public script in relational encounters. I added, for good measure, that we all have guilty pleasures we are not proud to announce publicly.
But days later, he returned with even more elaborate apologies. It was then that I decided to tell him that I shared the same guilty pleasures as he did and that I actually liked the photo.
Like him, I said, I share and receive such photos with only a few trusted friends. I routinely call one such friend, who is probably reading this and who is a well-regarded title holder in a historic northern Nigerian emirate, an unrepentant “yanshist,” our lexical invention for a man who has an outsized fondness for well-sculpted feminine hindquarters.
When he is in the mood for high-octane mischief, he retaliates against my calling him a “yanshist” by calling me a “Professor of Yanshology.”
This self-disclosure gave my prim and proper acquaintance tremendous peace and comfort. He no longer apologized, although he never sent me another yansh photo, either.
From dance floors to dictionaries, yansh has completed a remarkable linguistic journey. It is proof that Nigerian Pidgin English, long disdained as street slang, is exporting vocabulary, humor and cultural swagger across the continent and back again. Not bad for a word that started life as a joke about anatomy and ended up as a global African idiom.
Yansh, Nigeria’s most famous linguistic export, now in the dictionary – Farooq Kperogi
Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism
Opinion
How opposition Tinubu would treat President Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi
How opposition Tinubu would treat President Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi
How opposition Tinubu would treat President Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi
Opinion
Adelabu’s Power Lines as Laundry Lines
Adelabu’s Power Lines as Laundry Lines
Azu Ishiekwene
In many parts of the country, the rains poured down earlier in the week, bringing much physical and psychological relief from the searing heat.
The absence of electricity from public supply channels made it worse. Average daytime temperatures throughout March ranged from 33 degrees to 38 degrees centigrade in Lagos and Abuja, respectively.
Nigeria’s public electricity grid must rank among the most intractable problems any developing country could face. There is hardly anything more constant than the announcement of grid collapse, which leaves businesses and homes seeking alternatives and incurring unplanned expenses while paying for electricity not supplied.
What Candidate Tinubu promised
During his 2023 campaign, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said that if he didn’t fix the problem, he shouldn’t be voted in for a second term. He must be regretting that statement now. Since the beginning of his administration in May 2023, there have been multiple grid collapses, with the highest number recorded in 2024 at 12. Even when incidents were fewer, sporadic outages have continued. The failure, on face value, is attributed to a mix of technical, structural and administrative weaknesses in the system. But there is more to it in the sense in which it is said: “The more you see, the less you understand.”
So unreliable is the public electricity supply that the Presidential villa appropriated N10 billion in 2025, and an additional N7 billion in 2026 for the installation of a solar mini grid that will effectively disconnect Nigeria’s seat of power from the national grid, bedevilled by ageing transmission lines which collapse repeatedly from sabotage, poor maintenance, and frequency imbalances.
The joke is on us
Nigerians, ever ready to make a jest of their tragic maladies and long suffering, are beaten when it comes to power outages. They are shocked beyond humour. If the high-tension cables were not too high overhead, people in communities through which they run would not hesitate to hang their laundry on them – knowing from experience that the lines are just part of the landscape and are very likely to be without electricity.
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I have seen a video of a masquerade performing on a streetlight pole. Of course, the crowd applauded its invincibility; yet, both the crowd and the masquerade knew better. The lines had not been electrified for months and were unlikely to be for the spell of the circus.
Hope was rekindled at the beginning of the Tinubu administration when news filtered through that the currently embattled former governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, had not only produced a blueprint, but was going to be given the assignment of sorting out Nigeria’s notorious electricity sector. I learnt reliably that, as part of his plan, El-Rufai was discussing a $10 billion investment agreement with the Saudis before he ran into rough weather.
The coming of Adebayo
That was how Adebayo Adelabu took the job – a job at which he has performed so disastrously, saying he failed would be an honour. But it’s not his fault – it’s the fault of the President who appointed him and the Senate that cleared him for a job that he was clearly incompetent to perform, either based on his record or based on any hope of redemption. He is brilliant, but the power sector is littered with the remains of brilliant people, among whom he is now a fossil.
His better years were when he worked as an auditor at PWC. He was also the Executive Director/CFO at First Bank, and later a deputy governor at the Central Bank. He may not have been directly responsible for the misfortunes of these institutions at the time, but he doesn’t exactly smell of roses.
In the normal course of things, his banking career should have been a yellow flag. Still, Nigeria being Nigeria, the quota system and political connections ensured that he defied gravity.
Then, in 2023, Tinubu offered him the position of Minister of Power, after his failed attempt to become governor of Oyo State on the platform of the Accord Party. That only worsened our misery. Adelabu will be best remembered for splitting electricity consumers into parallel payment bands that do not necessarily reflect improved services.
The thing is not that Adelabu failed at his job. It’s the lack of evidence that he tried. Mr Dan Kunle, an energy expert familiar with the history of that sector, told me that, “No one is saying a power minister should provide the resources to fix the sector from thin air. It’s for him to provide a solid framework that would create the right environment and attract sovereign intervention.”
Adelabu, like many of his predecessors, is running the power ministry in 2026 with the 1950 operational manual of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN). Yet, even then, when the country had a population of about 50 million, the British knew that electricity was an economic good. To provide meaningful and sustainable service, they had to prioritise not just the key administrative centres but also areas that could pay. That was why, for example, coal was shipped from Enugu to the Ijora Power Station in Lagos.
No roadmap
Adelabu has no roadmap, or if he has one for a population four times what it was under ECN, it’s a roadmap to nowhere. The same old problems persist: gas shortages, moribund plants, infrastructure deficits, massive debts, and frequent grid collapses, limiting supply to about 4,000 MW despite a capacity of 13,000 MW.
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While Adelabu may wring his hands alongside Nigerians when the lights trip off, the sector has been drowning under the yoke of N6 trillion in debt as of late 2025, fuelled by non-cost-reflective tariffs and unpaid bills to both generating and distribution companies. Some of the problems predate Adelabu, but his incompetence has worsened them.
Yet, he still has ambition. Not to redeem himself after his disastrous three years as minister, but to become the governor of Oyo State. Obviously, he believes the reward for poor performance is a higher office. He is so shameless, it means nothing to him that he holds the Olympic record for national grid collapse. It means nothing to him that Nigerian businesses are powered by Indian generators and their homes by Chinese solar panels.
Examples from Africa
Egypt, with a population of 110 million, has 100 percent universal electricity access, supported by a heavy reliance on gas (81 percent) and growing low-carbon sources like hydropower. This ensures a stable supply amid population pressures.
South Africa serves 85-90 percent of its 62 million residents but faces severe shortages. Frequent load shedding persists due to Eskom’s debt, ageing infrastructure, and maintenance issues, despite high per-capita generation.
Ghana reaches 88-89 percent coverage for 34 million people, with hydro and thermal power dominating. Urban areas enjoy near-99 percent access, while rural areas still have gaps and occasional outages.
Kenya hits 76 percent for 56 million, excelling in urban (97 percent) and geothermal power. Rural expansion lags, though targets aim for full access by 2030.
Compared to the countries above, only 57 percent of Nigerians are grid-connected, with outages occurring 85 percent of the time, and poor metering and corruption that sustain estimated billing and inefficiencies.
After watching Adelabu perform so poorly over the last two years on the national stage, I was hoping he would go away quietly, under the shadow of the darkness he has fostered. But since he insists that he won’t leave quietly – or appears determined to stay on – I’m considering a self-appointed mission to drag him to Oyo State to see how he will turn their night into day.
Adelabu’s Power Lines as Laundry Lines
Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.
Opinion
Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?
Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?
With a landmass of approximately 9.83 million km² and a population of 334–336 million as of 2025—making it the third-largest country in the world—the United States is massive. It is four times the size of Algeria, Africa’s largest country, and dwarfs Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation.
The United States is a titan among nations. Who knows—perhaps neologists will coin a new term if the U.S. eventually purchases or forcefully takes Greenland from Denmark, further surging its landmass and population. When this massive scale fuses with unparalleled infrastructure, world-class venues, and a vast market, the USA becomes an ideal host for international sporting events with strong returns on investment.
Between 1904 and 2025, the USA hosted one FIFA World Cup (with another to be co-hosted in 2026 with Mexico and Canada), four Summer Olympics, four Winter Olympics, and one FIBA Basketball World Cup. Unlike soccer, which is still finding its footing in the United States—even with Major League Soccer (MLS) having existed for 30 years—American football is the undisputed number-one sport. The Super Bowl—born from Lamar Hunt’s “light-bulb moment”—is the crown jewel. The Super Bowl has become what sociologists call a secular ritual, binding the social fabric of Americans together.
Beyond the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the Super Bowl has evolved into a global marketing masterpiece. From the famous 1984 Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh, which is studied in MBA classes worldwide, to the 1979 Mean Joe Greene Coca-Cola commercial that showed genteel human warmth winning over fearsomeness, the intentionality of brands going head-to-head with rivals has been a recurring feature of every Super Bowl.
While the USA is always attractive for hosting events, the Super Bowl’s success pivots on intellection that results in ingenious marketing. For the recent Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, two brands mirrored David Ben-Gurion’s principle of “taking the fight to the enemy.” Pepsi and Anthropic’s Claude entered with an offensive strategy: Claude’s AI ad—“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”—was a calculated strike in the competitive AI market, while Pepsi’s polar bear blind test revived the sulphurous rivalry with Coca-Cola. Many companies use their ad slots to build brand identity and equity or announce arrival in the business world.
Where does Africa stand in this Super Bowl business and sports calculus? While developed nations are making groundbreaking launches with chutzpah and creativity from creative shops—all resulting in a participatory economy—Africa’s involvement is largely an on-the-field display of Négritude spirit and ravenous passion.
For Africa, the Super Bowl has become a “badge of honor” through representation. Mohammed Elewonibi, a Nigerian raised in Canada, was the first player of African origin to win a Super Bowl (XXVI, 1992, with the Washington Redskins). Since then, nearly 41 players of Nigerian origin or heritage have won—the most of any African country—including six who tasted victory with the recent Seattle Seahawks: Uchenna Nwosu, Nick Emmanwori, Boye Mafe, Jaxon Smith-Njigba (of Nigerian and Sierra Leonean roots), Jalen Milroe, and Olu Oluwatimi.
Yet, as impressive as African athletes are in making the continent proud, we have blatantly failed to translate that audience engagement into commercial windfalls like the Super Bowl on home soil. It is appalling that most of Africa’s sporting events—the Durban July Handicap, Senegalese wrestling (Laamb), or the Safari Rally—have not fully harnessed the intersection of sports and marketing. Even the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), despite its 3.45 billion cumulative viewers (far surpassing the Super Bowl’s ~125–127 million), lacks comparable marketing prestige. Why are there no global product launches during our matches? Why aren’t AI giants capitalizing on Africa’s tech startup boom?
Africa is being fed celery when it deserves the whole salad. This asymmetry stems from structural economic factors, but the genie is out of the bottle—we must be forward-looking. To turn African sporting events into “goldmines,” we must reinvent the industry, much as Cirque du Soleil did for the circus. Facing declining audiences, rising costs, and fierce competition, it lost its grip on the circus business. Cirque, however, escaped the dying circus business by reinventing it.
By viewing competition through a new lens, Africa can transform massive viewership into unparalleled economic advantage and value. Just as Cirque du Soleil created uncontested market space, African sports must adopt what W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne called a “Blue Ocean Strategy”—creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant. Much as we can not compete toe to toe with advanced economies , we should not follow them like zombies.
In their book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, the authors highlight how companies in “red oceans” fight for shrinking profits in crowded, defined markets. African sports events currently sit in those crowded red oceans. To elevate them, we need disruptive leaders willing to venture into untapped markets, create new demand, and unlock unlimited growth opportunities.
Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, in their book The Experience Economy, wrote about the need to transform commodities into experiences. As Africans, we have been able to move our sporting events from the commodity stage to the third stage—service delivery—but the experience stage is the North Star we should aspire to reach.
Our cultures, as varied as they are, define us. Despite dilution by Western civilization, our culture stands uneroded, like the mountains that litter our landscape and serve as a canopy to preserve our common heritage. This means our forefathers took culture into the realm of experience—something we are still grappling with in our sporting spectacles today. For us to make headway, our cultures—already bubbling with experience—must mix seamlessly with our sporting spectacles.
Now is the time to merge cultural events like the Eyo Festival, Argungu Festival, Gnaoua World Music Festival, Osun Osogbo Festival, Meskel Festival, and others with our sporting spectacles—that is the Blue Ocean Strategy. This can only be achieved through close collaboration between leaders in sports administration and marketing professionals selling experiences, and the time is now. As this is done, a line from David Diop’s poem Africa—“That is your Africa springing up anew”—would fill our lips.
The experience stage is the nirvana!
Toluwalope Shodunke
Can be reached via tolushodunke@yahoo.com
Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?
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