The Owambe Economy: Who Really Pays for Nigerian Weddings

At a wedding in Ibadan last year, the groom's family hired a popular live band, printed aso-ebi in three different fabrics for three different events, and fed roughly eight hundred guests across two receptions. The photographs that circulated afterward on Instagram told a story of effortless abundance. What those photographs did not show was the cooperative society loan the groom's father took out six months earlier, quietly, the kind of loan that gets repaid in monthly deductions long after the band has packed up and gone home. This is the owambe economy functioning exactly as designed, a public performance of prosperity financed by a private arithmetic that almost nobody discusses honestly.