The short series To Kill a Monkey, directed by Kemi Adetiba, came highly anticipated and did not disappoint upon release. One of the first of its kind, the show tackles the hot topic of cyberfraud head-on, complete with the conspicuous consumption and glamor that often accompany the crime. Yet it does not sugarcoat the deep anxieties or risks engendered by illicit accumulation, nor does it sidestep their consequences. From the outset and via the eight episodes of the series, the viewer is compelled to walk in the shoes of the main characters and feel the weight of the moral decisions they face. Through this immersive lens, the storyline engages Nollywood thematic staples such as rags-to-riches, loss, urban precarity, the oppression of the poor, and police corruption. At the same time, it wades into less familiar terrain, including the technologies of electronic fraud and trauma-induced psychosocial distress. These intricacies are embodied by a compelling assemblage of longtime screen favorites like Stella Damascus, Bimbo Akintola, Ireti Doyle, and Chidi Mokeme, alongside lesser-known but refreshing faces such as William Benson, Bucci Franklin, and Sunshine Rosman.
What makes To Kill a Monkey unique is its unashamed (and at times, humorous) commitment to messiness. Early in the series, the narrative undertakes the tedious but necessary work of situating the viewer within the conditions of suffering and precarity that render scamming a conceivable—indeed, rational—livelihood pathway. It follows the life of Efemini Edewor simply called Efe (played by William Benson), a young-to-middle-aged man hustling in Lagos, whose existence is defined by diminishing options. His rent is overdue; he needs money to bury his recently deceased mother; he is drowning in debt which swallows his meager earnings as a waiter; and he struggles to feed his family. As if these troubles were not enough, his wife becomes pregnant with triplets, though the loss of one of the babies brings him an unsettling sense of relief. His predicament is crystallized in his manager’s biting remark, “God does not like you,” uttered after advising him to seek spiritual help (Episode 1, 00:10:45). Efe’s story resonates on two levels. First, it dramatizes the lived realities of many university-educated youths navigating chronic unemployment and underemployment in African urban centers while attempting to acquire or utilize in-demand skills—digital technologies, in Efe’s case—as a means of survival or a vehicle of hope. Second, it renders visible the poverty trap as a compounding quicksand that it is, produced through intersecting pressures and often escapable only through a dramatic rupture.
Efe’s dramatic shift emerges through a chance encounter with Oboz, an old acquaintance, convincingly portrayed by Bucci Franklin, who has since become wealthy and expectedly surrounded by loyal “boys” who enjoy his patronage. At the end of his tether, Efe pleads for access to Oboz’s source of wealth and is initially unsettled when he realizes it is built on fraud. Regardless, he enters the world of digital scamming armed with three assets that quicken his rise to riches and power: a desperation to escape poverty, advanced digital skills that open new frontiers for their network’s scamming enterprise, and strong social intelligence. Running parallel to Efe’s story is that of a police detective whose life has been shattered by the loss of her entire family in an auto accident. Returning to work, she confronts hostility that exposes the fraught dynamics of gender, mental health stigma, and workplace intimacy. Determined to regain her place in the system, she becomes fixated on cracking “the monkey case”—the increasingly popular criminal exploits of Efe and his fraud network. But her loss continues to haunt her.
Among the series’ strengths is its illumination of some of the affective conditions that undergird scamming alongside economic desperation. Agreed, the disposition of extreme poverty, the near absence of legitimate economic options, and the allure of quick riches are powerful pulls to the fraud enterprise. But the series goes a step deeper to show how scamming is also deeply entangled with spiritual and ritual practices, as shown in the opening scene. New recruits, in some cases vulnerable, unsuspecting youth, are often required to swear oaths of loyalty or silence to a deity. Many are bound to scam networks by the fear of loss or harm. Indeed, numerous young people are trafficked into scam operations, provided with technical equipment such as laptops and data of individuals or organizations, and compelled to work for fraud syndicates that appropriate their earnings while brutalizing them. For these youths, total obedience is the cost of freedom. This reality blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. Like recent research into cyberfraud coming out of Nigeria and parts of Asia have shown, the series depicts systematic training through apprenticeship or slavery-like arrangements as a dominant mode of recruitment.
At the same time, the series demonstrates how digital skills can be transferred across domains, revealing the porous boundaries between legitimate and illicit digital labor. While Efe honed his tech skills in programming, he never imagined the countless ways it can be put to use. In fact, the title and image of “tech-mogul” became a convenient decoy and explanation to his sudden, incredible wealth. An equally important revelation is the way fraud is morally rationalized. Efe and his network adopted the image of the monkey as a metaphor—which informs the series’ title. This symbolism is made explicit in Episode Four. By targeting foreign banks and Western-based multinational corporations, Efe and his goons mobilize the monkey figure to invert racist stereotypes in their efforts to outsmart their targets. Relatedly, the series exposes the complexity of policing in Nigeria. The theme of police corruption is neither new to Nigerian social life nor to its media representations, and To Kill a Monkey does well to weave this reality into its narrative to show how self-interest, workplace politics and conspiracy intersect within Nigerian law enforcement.
Wonderful as it is, the series has very few limitations. For one, it misses a good opportunity to dissect how the suffering of some of its characters are structural rather than particular. Like many Nollywood productions that avoid overt state critique, it appears to turn a blind eye to how inequality is systemically produced by state-level political-economic issues. Similarly, and in a manner that mirrors the logics of fraud itself, the series relies heavily on invisibility to perform much of its aesthetic and moral work. The precise modalities of extraction employed by Efe and his network are made blurry. Those who perform the bulk of the labor such as the trafficked youth are rendered largely invisible, while the roles of women, who sustain the economy through productive, emotional, and reproductive labor, are flattened. Nevertheless, the series made good effort to strike a moral balance. Fraudsters are at once portrayed as bad actors and as implicated subjects caught up in an intricate maze of survival; their culpability is nonetheless unmistakable. This tension is encapsulated in Efemini’s adult daughter’s rebuke as his universe collapses: “The world has not wronged you; you are what is wrong with the world” (Episode 7, 00:45:10).
To Kill a Monkey is, by far, Kemi Adetiba’s strongest production so far, ahead of both The Wedding Party and King of Boys.
