ABUJA: Guests poured in through an entry gate on the ground floor of a castle. Inside, vendors dressed as medieval court jesters sold balloons.

At Magicland, a privately owned theme park in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, the country’s recurrent crises — from galloping inflation to armed insurgencies — fade into the background, at least for one afternoon.

Nigeria’s fragile middle class has been battered by two years of soaring prices amid the country’s worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. At Magicland, one content creator from Borno state — where international headlines typically centre on jihadist attacks — filmed TikTok dances as a brightly coloured big wheel towered behind her.

Others took to the carnival rides, including 26-year-old public health worker Mary Adeleke, who said she’d once been an adventurous person. “But as I grew up, with how the country’s structured and all the struggles, I lost that part of me,” she said, adding she was on a quest to regain it, one roller coaster at a time.

The west African nation is, by some metrics, a success story: a tech powerhouse, a major exporter of global cultural staples like Afrobeats, and the continent’s leading oil producer. But rampant inflation, a cost of living crisis and continued insecurity have proven hard for much of the country’s 228 million people.

Walking out of a swinging pendulum ride, Victor Bamidele, 28, offered a review.

“I thought it was something that would take my soul out of my body,” the medical device supplier said in typically colourful Nigerian English.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2025