In the past few years, as podcasts have proliferated and embedded themselves in the fabric of culture, they've paradoxically become a punchline. Spend enough time on social media and you'll stumble upon exasperated harangues by people claiming society has had enough of podcasts. Spend some more time and perhaps you'll stumble into the corner of the internet where male podcasters are regarded as walking, breathing red flags. In this precinct of social media, while female podcasters aren't quite held with the same level of contempt, they're also treated with suspicion. The opening sentence of an essay by Naomi Ezenwa for Culture Custodian titled The Great Decline of Meaningful Conversation in Nigeria’s Media Space adequately captures the consensus on podcasts in this part of the world: “Everyone has a podcast—or is about to launch one. From living rooms to YouTube studios, microphones are plugged in, ring lights are on, and conversations are being recorded at a dizzying pace.”
More insightful is the second paragraph, in which she takes on the question of whether the explosion in podcast popularity reflects increased consumption of the form. “As Nigeria’s talk media continues to grow, we must ask: is anyone actually listening, or is everybody just talking?” She writes. Spotify’s Top Podcast list, one of the many dispatches the company released last December to mark the end of the year, adds an interesting dimension to the conversation. The top five podcasts in Nigeria are: Apostle Femi Lazarus, Apostle Joshua Selman, I Said What I Said, The HonestBunch Podcast, and The Oyedepo Podcast. The obvious throughline is that a critical mass of podcasts here are faith-based. This becomes clearer when one glimpses the top ten podcasts, seven of which are faith-based. This observation has already begun to stir an array of conversations, everything from the outsized power religious figures wield over the country, to the dichotomy between the religious fervor that pulses through the country and our dysfunctional society.
The more salient and surprising observation however is that the seven putative faith-based podcasts on the list are in fact not really podcasts. As one of the more freewheeling media, there's hardly a single definition of what makes a podcast. Podcasts however share a few things in common. They tend to favour a conversational tone and are episodic. The archetypal podcast typically has anywhere between a single host and a small cohort who dispatch opinions or narratives into a microphone. Podcasts are typically built around the hosts, whose personalities, made manifest through podcast episodes, drive audience loyalty and shape the show’s sensibility. By contrast, the faith-based podcasts on the list are simply recordings of church services, lacking the conversational style or narrative structure that defines typical podcasts.
“Well, that still leaves three true podcasts in the top ten,” one might conclude. Except that in number 10 is a nondescript account that posts scraps and snippets of the wildly controversial internet personality Geh Geh, culled from all corners of the internet. Many of the episodes sound grainy and their runtimes range between two and eighteen minutes. Even more bizarre are the episode titles, which include: Four Signs Your Girlfriend is Into Hookup, Davido album is the Best in 2025, and You’re a Celebrity. This leaves I Said What I Said and The Honest Bunch Podcast, which sit at numbers 5 and 6 of the top ten list respectively, as the true podcasts in the top ten list.
While Spotify doesn’t release quantitative data on podcasts to the public—monthly listeners, streaming numbers—the paucity of true podcasts on Spotify’s Top Podcasts list suggests that despite the seeming ubiquity of the medium, podcast consumption in Nigeria remains low. One rebuttal to this assertion is that the overwhelming presence of Christian podcasts on Nigeria’s top podcast list is simply a function of Nigeria’s huge Christian population. This theory however falls apart once one looks to Kenya, which, despite a Christian population of roughly 85-90 percent of its total population (nearly double the percentage of Christians in Nigeria) has in its top Spotify podcast list a healthy mix of podcasts from genres as varied as romance, self-development, and comedy. In South Africa, a country whose Christian population makes up 80-84 percent of its population, a similar dynamic is at play. With podcasts like Trevor Noah’s What Now, Podcast and Chill with MacG, and True Crime South Africa in its top Spotify podcasts list, the nation displays a strong and healthy level of podcast consumption.
Having established that despite the seeming ubiquity of podcasts in Nigeria, podcast consumption remains pitifully low. The question then becomes what the reason is for this dynamic. I suspect the problem is two-fold. On one hand, Nigerians haven’t yet adequately taken to the medium of podcasting. Winding down after a day of work or simply passing time by listening to a podcast are not widespread activities, especially considering our level of internet penetration which most studies place at around 50% of the population. A lot of work is still required to adequately sensitize Nigerians to the medium. This could take the form of targeted marketing campaigns, strategic partnerships with telcos to subsidize data for audio streaming, or even community-driven listening initiatives that demystify podcasts as a “niche” pastime.
On the other hand, the ecosystem itself has not matured enough to sustain widespread adoption. Discoverability remains poor, monetization pathways are uncertain, and creators often struggle to maintain consistency without institutional support. Until key players develop clearer infrastructures, such as platform-backed curation, local investment, and stable revenue models, the average Nigerian consumer is unlikely to see podcasting as an essential part of their media diet.
Still, this obscures the larger and more trenchant problem, which is that the vast majority of podcasts are focused on co-opting viral conversation topics and trends as opposed to cultivating any real sense of thematic identity or providing value to listeners. What emerges, then, is a glut of interchangeable shows, each chasing the same headlines, recycling the same talking points, and offering little that feels durable or necessary. In a media landscape saturated with familiar clattering, audiences have little incentive to commit their time to content that feels ephemeral, derivative, or totally unmoored from a coherent perspective.
