PART I

My father grew up in Mbano. He attended missionary secondary school in the post-war years, when the East was still pulling unexploded mines from its soil. He led the literary society in his community and put on plays – The Gods Are Not to Blame, The Cassava Ghost – that sold out. He tutored schoolmates and other community members in the arts.

He wanted to study in America and knew he would have to pay for it himself. In the Nigeria of the 1970s, this was not an unreasonable thing for a young man to believe.

Immediately after secondary school, he moved to Lagos, where he knew no one. He found employment with NEPA as a Stock Control Analyst – with a secondary school certificate. He worked there for two years and saved enough to get himself to New York and pay his own tuition, room and board.

He has since spent most of his career as a professor in the Nigerian university system.

PART II

My father was not unusual. Many young men in the post-war years dreamed at the same scale. The oil boom of the 70s carried with it a redolent air of hope, a sense of a future that could be grasped at with both hands. But in the time since then, Nigerian fathers have lived an interesting life.

They’ve had that hope snuffed from them. As their aspirations frittered away, their economic standing vanished with it. Ten million Naira in pensions accrued by the year 2000 is worth four hundred and fifty thousand today. All they are left with is the nostalgia of what used to be a better time – and nostalgia, it turns out, does not pay school fees.

There is an unmistakable despair you notice when you spend enough time around Nigerian fathers – especially those who became fathers in the 1990s and early 2000s. I have often wondered what these men think about when they are quiet. What they look forward to in the years ahead, and whether looking forward  is even the phrase they would use. 

The biggest casualty of the stolen hope of their generation of fathers has been their presence at home.

In the global north, when income levels among men decline, the rate of marriage declines with it and the rate of absent fatherhood rises precipitously. In Nigeria, that has not exactly been the case – marriage rates have barely moved in thirty years, although young adults are getting married later by about three years on average. Nigerians still marry;  they only get into it more exhausted than they used to.

There is, however, a specific kind of fatherlessness broiling in Nigeria: the aloof father. He is physically present in the home but missing in time, engagement, involvement and closeness to his children. Not for lack of desire - but because he is stymied by his own problems, chief of which is money and what money worries do to a man.

There is a widespread sense of purposelessness that has ensnared many fathers. As the ability to remain economic providers continues to get stripped from them by the many failures of the state, they have not been able to reinvent themselves. But the opportunity is right there in the next room.

Fatherhood offers a man another identity to stand on. A man suffering at work may still come home to children who are glad to see him walk through the door. But fathers have not been able to see this, in a way that mothers have done remarkably well. The role of mothers has modernised. Fathers remain stuck. 

Our cultural understanding of fatherhood has not caught up to economic reality. Fathers still believe their only role is financial provision, but that is not how most families work today. In nearly a third of Nigerian households, it is the mother who brings home the larger pay. This would have been unimaginable to my father's generation.

That is why fathers are alive when they provide, and aloof when they cannot. And their expression of aliveness when all is well is sometimes worse than the aloofness – prideful maltreatment of spouses and children, inability to take feedback, creative excuses for domestic absence. It is not self-evident that this form of aliveness is useful.

The reduction of a father to his ability to provide bread has been ruinous – not least for the father himself, who has robbed himself of the purpose and fulfilment that comes with knowing his children. 

We are still stuck in what I call the era of the CEO Dad. A family led by a CEO Dad operates as follows: the CEO (Dad) hires an executive manager (Mum) to manage the staff (children). The CEO concerns himself only with executive functions – finance and the occasional state visit to the dinner table – and has little involvement in the day-to-day affairs of the staff, who are expertly managed by the executive manager. He receives reports. He does not do fieldwork.

As a child in this family, you grow up afraid of your father. His horn at the gate in the evening meant fun was over and smaller children disappeared to the inner rooms. You learned to assemble a compliant second personality for the hours he was home, one your friends would not recognise. You feared him, and in your own way you loved him, but you did not like him. He was happy with you when you were doing well, but you suspect he did not care about you, he cared about how well your achievements rubbed off on him. At long last, something he could mention to his friends, something to bring some spark to the doldrum that has occupied his life for longer than he would admit. 

He is the CEO Dad. His era is over.

PART III

Nigeria's middle class has vanished in the past twenty years. There are no short-term policy solutions for its restoration. For most Nigerians, the economic routes back: currency stabilisation, industrial policy, urban housing supply, power reforms, tighter monetary policy - are entirely out of their hands. They can do nothing about them but wait, wistfully, on the policy actors.

But something every Nigerian household can do immediately without policy or capital is invest in fatherhood.

The middle class, where it still exists anywhere in the world, maintains its status across generations not through money alone but through family premiums; the non-financial investments that parents make in their children's lives. The evidence is concrete. A father who reads to his children for twenty minutes a day between the ages of one and six is making one of the highest-return investments available to him in their long-term development.

Those children become adults with larger vocabularies, stronger comprehension, and a self-sustaining drive to read, even after controlling for family income. Three-year-olds with involved fathers score measurably higher on cognitive tests. Girls who are close to their fathers at sixteen have better mental health at thirty three. Children whose fathers are absent at birth – measured simply by whether a father's name appears on the birth certificate – face higher infant mortality, independent of socioeconomic background.

The data says the same thing from every angle it has been examined: a father's presence is not only valuable when he’s prosperous. It is in itself a valuable provision. The poorer you are, the more your presence matters. This is one of the few facts that is currently in our favour.

Now consider the advantages money buys children when they are young: summer holidays abroad, expensive British schools, big birthday parties with event planners and drone videography, chauffeurs, personal bedrooms and the luxury of privacy, an army of nannies. These are lovely things. But they are of little consequence in predicting long-term outcomes for children. You can raise children who do just as well – and the research is not shy about this – by reading twenty minutes a day to your child, eating dinner with them three times a week, and providing an environment of purpose around them. These are benefits that many rich parents, for all their resources, cannot seem to afford. But you can.

If the primary role of a father is provision and protection, what then do children need to be provided, and protected from?

Children do not only need provision in the form of money, nor protection only from physical danger. They need language, attention, spiritual scaffolding, confidence, habits, friendships, emotional security, and a picture of how to live. Not an anecdotal lecture on how to live but a picture. A living demonstration, daily, of what it looks like when a grown man conducts himself with care. This is the job of a father, to mirror character that forms a model for his children to strive toward. Money is not a substitute for these.

Present fatherhood is state defence. Just by itself, it repairs what is broken and nips social vices in the bud. Warren Farrell, in The Boy Crisis, found that prisoners, mass shooters and ISIS devots share something in common: the vast majority grew up without fathers. ISIS and the Hitler Youth before them recruited from the same pool; boys with absent fathers, boys void of purpose. Nigeria ranks fourth on the Global Terrorism Index. Boys here are recruited into banditry and militias before they hit puberty. It would be foolish to imagine these boys are exempt from the same pattern.

Present fatherhood will not fix everything. But in Nigeria right now, it may be the most powerful weapon available that does not require dependence on the government. In the twentieth century we conscripted men to the army. Today we ought to conscript them to fatherhood.

The fact that our fathers rob themselves of the opportunity to protect their families and the state in this way – because they have believed that only money counts – is utterly wasteful.

For men: whatever legal enterprise you are involved in to take care of your family, no matter how modest its fruit, is noble. The nobility is not in the size of the bounty but in the dignity of purpose that informs its pursuit.

PART IV

I grew up in Calabar, forty years after the war had ended. By then the optimism that had carried my father’s generation had begun to wither in mine. 

I did not grow up with financial advantages. Far from it.

I was, however, never ignorant of the more powerful advantages I grew up with – parents who cared and were immovably invested in my affairs, sometimes to my annoyance. Parents who imbued me with a sense of identity; who cultivated me to be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck; who made me courageous; who made me believe that I was as good as any and better than none; who corrected me when I used tenses wrongly; who proudly gifted me the last naira note in their wallets when I came home with perfect marks in a subject I loved; who allowed me to go out into the world and learn from my own mistakes; who did not hold on to me longer than necessary when their job was done; who stayed married to each other through thick and thin; who made their nuclear family the central project of their lives - often at their own personal expense; who taught me to stop chewing like a goat; who disciplined me to learn that good things can be taken away if you do not care for them properly; and taught me that you can overcome bad habits.

Everyone can have this, no matter how financially disadvantaged you are.

But it will require every father to permanently step down from being CEO in his own home, and get his hands on the plough.

Nigeria is governed by three desires: greed, envy, and the most undignified of the three, fear. All our politicking, our hustling, our frantic japa-ing all flow from these three springs. Even the quality we are most often praised for - our famous ambition, our ingenuity, the "drive" that foreign visitors never stop remarking on - it is not at all clear that any of it is really ours.

We may simply be the greediest, the most bitter, and (above all, and least flatteringly) the most fearful people alive. Which, to be fair, is not by itself a catastrophe; every civilization on earth is moved to some degree by these same urges. The feelings are universal; it is what we do with them that differs.

We have individually brilliant people, but together, we lack a culture of brilliance. Why do we not meaningfully gather into a collective? Why does our fear not push us into the protective huddle that fear, in other places, has always known how to build?

The great empires and civilisations in history all figured out how to harness greed and fear, yoke them like stubborn oxen, and deploy them into systems that protected the whole. America is, first and above all, an idea -  the country is a mere scaffolding built around the idea. Great Britain, at the height of her imperial self-regard, was held up by the celestial conviction that she had been chosen to rule the earth. I lived for a while in China -  a civilisation that reinvented itself inside forty years - and what I saw there was a grassroots, almost devotional belief in a shared national project. Our own mythology, by contrast, begins and ends at our compound gate.

The 2027 elections are here, and there’s much ado about it, but politics will not rescue Nigeria. It is an old truth that every people get the leaders they deserve, and Nigeria has the leaders we’ve all earned. Pick a random handful of everyday Nigerians from any street in Lagos or Onitsha or Kano, shuffle them, deal them out as rulers, and you will arrive, with mathematical certainty, at the same type of leaders we have always produced. Our leadership is the average of the collective risen to the top.

Even Nigerians do not trust Nigerians. You scarcely can employ a Nigerian without a permanent crick in your neck from looking over your own shoulder. I have hired, in the last decade, somewhere near 400 people in Nigeria; of these, at least 3 in every 10 have either stolen from me outright or broken their contracts by moonlighting on my time - running, from the seat of my payroll, a second and sometimes a third livelihood.

And the sickness is not limited to the salaried. I recently hired a plumber to fix a modestly leaking joint in the roof of my Lagos house; four hours after he left, my upper floor was under two feet of water. I can say, with certainty, that I did not have two feet of water on that floor when I called him. To his credit, I could now swim on the first floor - which is more than most Lagosians can say of their own homes.

You can count on the average Nigerian to leave any object, any premises, any institution, worse than he met it. So, this is not some special disease of the political class; it is now - and I say this with reluctance - Nigerian culture.

Once upon a reasonable time, a good education was the bridge by which a young person crossed into a bearable future. You immersed yourself in a pool of equally ambitious peers, built an identity in their company, graduated into the civil service or the private sector, started a family, and passed on a set of values to your children. It was never exactly easy; but for those with grit and ambition, the path was straightforward. And because the path was straightforward, grit and ambition grew in abundance.

But now, that bargain has been dismantled. What remains is a country full of people with ferocious ambition and nothing to apply it to. No real industry, limited enterprise, and certainly no public service worth the name. Worse, there are no moral guardrails on ambition. That’s pitiful.

Nigeria must become a society in which the average person can flourish. We are asking far too much of our young - demanding from every teenager the cunning of a serpent and the stamina of a mule. Young Nigerians are now starting families later. Poverty, greed and the ensuing aimlessness midwifing this delay. 

I confess that I’m worried about the children being born into this country right now. I worry that our generation of parents lacks both the skill and the moral steadiness to raise a generation capable of the rescue. I’m worried that the infrastructure of demonic intelligence that afflicts Nigeria continues to improve at a rate more exponential than we have solutions for. Above all, I worry that most of the young people of this generation will never once, in the full span of their lives, meet themselves at their full potential.

The spirit of the young Nigerian has been amputated.

What then rescues us? 

For any society to be worth the name, each member must have a reasonable path to economic dignity, and the whole must be held together by shared moral responsibility. The state can help with the former; the latter can only be summoned by the society itself. Three things 

First: a new moral order. We must de-throne money. That shining idol, sitting at the centre of every Nigerian shrine, public and private, must be pulled down from its throne. I’m not advocating for its banishment, that would be both impossible and foolish, but we must relocate it. Reduce it to a tool, stripped of its current status as the measure of the worth of a human life.

Second: young Nigerians must be paid more money. A great many of the problems we experience will shrink if young Nigerians had any real measure of economic dignity. They would start families earlier; take out mortgages; support their relatives; start small businesses; take on social responsibilities; look after their communities - because they would belong. And people who belong are far less likely to become thieves, bandits, kidnappers, illegal emigrants, idle loiterers, catcallers, bloodthirsty herdsmen, drunkards, drug addicts, homeless, prostitutes, ballot-box snatching thugs, gamblers, ritualists, area boys, bitter incels, unfaithful spouses, misogynists, misanthropes, moonlighters, incompetents, fraudsters, pedophiles, absent parents, violent police officers - and did I say ballot box snatching thugs? Maybe I mention them twice because, in the accounting of our national miseries, they have earned compound interest.

I don't want to oversimplify the complexity of this money problem, but two things are immediately doable. 

• The labor market needs to pay young people more. At our top twenty companies, salaries as a share of revenue sit at around 7%. Seven per cent - and that includes senior leadership. By comparison, American firms pay out two to five times more to their employees. I will grant the obvious caveat: our enterprise giants cluster in capital-heavy sectors (oil, cement, telecoms), whereas the American comparisons lean toward the labour-heavy (retail, healthcare, logistics). However, the figures below are still grotesque:

• ~40–55% of Nigerians under 30 are unemployed or underemployed. This almost certainly understates the reality, since the National Bureau of Statistics, in its generosity, counts as "employed" anyone who has one hour of paid work in any given week.

• 85% of Nigerians earn below N100,000 monthly, and only 2.4% of Nigerians earn above N200,000 monthly.

• The minimum wage (which 80% of the population doesn’t reach) only covers 5% of living expenses in Lagos. 

In 2026! This means that there is no hope in hell for a young Nigerian to ever own property, to raise a family, to educate the children of that family, or to rest from labour for so much as a single undisturbed afternoon.

• The cost of living, in step, must come down - on three fronts especially: rent, food, transport. Nigeria offers the world one of its stranger paradoxes: at once the poverty capital of the planet (a trophy we’ve won from the Brookings Institution) and, in the person of Lagos, the third most expensive city on earth relative to local income (Numbeo's).

And this is not work for corporations or the government alone. If you personally employ a cook, a gardener, a driver; if you buy from the hawker at your window or the woman who braids your hair - pay them well. In that tiny corner of society where you are president, how are your citizens faring? What will they say of your reign when they go to sleep at night? We are all, each of us, running a small republic of one kind or another. The question is whether ours is the sort of republic a citizen would willingly stay in, or the sort they would cross a desert to flee. A culture that rewards people is built by every small sovereign deciding, in the privacy of his own little kingdom, that the people in it will eat.

Third: we must allow - and indeed encourage - young people to do the work they love. I clearly remember the pleasure of competing with my schoolmates as a boy, and later as a university debater; I saw brilliance then in its wild state, unbroken, still crackling with its own electricity. Yet nearly all those brilliant companions of mine had the brilliance wrung out of them, in time, by the grinding need to chase money. The fault was not theirs.

I find myself constantly wondering what kind of country this might become if we allowed our remarkably gifted young people to follow their real interests, however odd, however unpromising those interests might look to their guardians. If we reduce every human being to an economic-pursuit machine - and I use the phrase deliberately, because that is exactly what we have been manufacturing - how richly has the experiment rewarded us? Let us look at the harvest and be honest about its taste.

From a very young and impressionable age, Nigerian children are told to choose careers based on projected financial return. Their innocence is taken from them early. They are recast as vehicles for the delivery of future earnings, and it is precisely here - at this early initiation - that the seeds of the kleptomania we later lament are planted. A child is told: if you study this, in ten years you will afford rent, and maybe a car, and you will not be a disgrace to the family name. The child swallows the threat and begins to labour against a future debt they never took. They are chasing the shadow of a creditor who does not exist.

It is hardly surprising, then, that on reaching any position of proximity to resources, such a person pillages and plunders. They steal from their employer, drain the state coffers, enter romantic relationships with people double their age - all out of fear. Fear of a ghostly future that was drummed into them as teenagers. And greed is just fear wearing its shopping clothes.

We will not amount to much as a society if we have not first produced individuals who are alive -  individuals striving, in their own names and on their own terms, toward the good. I remember my first visit to San Francisco, and the shock of noticing how much self-belief the young there seemed to carry around with them. It just made sense.

If you are lucky enough to be a steward of young people - as a parent, aunt, uncle, cleric, or employer - your sacred task is to help them discover what they are great at, to support them through the long apprenticeship of sharpening it, and to hold them accountable to their love of it over the years. Or, failing that, to perform the second-best act of stewardship available to you:

Get out of their way.