Kunle was raised in a house where the rules were clear and neatly folded like ‘bottom-box’ Sunday church clothes.
His father woke up at 5 a.m. and rang the bell for morning prayers every day. It was a compulsory morning service that everybody must attend, groggy or half awake. Daddy ironed his own trousers, polished his shoes in silence, and left for work while Mummy supervised morning chores and breakfast like a field marshal.
Kunle’s mother was a good woman by the standards of her generation. She cooked, cleaned, raised four children and called her husband “Daddy” even when she was angry with him. She washed clothes with her hands, not washing machine.
Kunle grew up watching a familiar script: Men lead. Women support. Men provide. Women made babies. The lines of duties were finely marked. Women didn’t want to behave like men. When a woman was praised and called ‘obinrin bi okunrin’, that is a woman strong like a man, she smiled, accepted the praise but like a good woman, returned to her place in the society.
Life was simple.
Then Kunle met Zara.
Zara had started her fashion and beauty accessories business at 18. While other girls were learning contouring and concealing tricks on Instagram, Zara was learning how to negotiate with wholesalers in Balogun Market, Lagos.
By the time she was 25, she had three stores, a thriving online business, and workers who called her Madam Zara. Yes.
By the time she married Kunle, Zara had climbed halfway up a ladder and she had no intention of slowing down for marriage. Kunle thought he knew everything about ‘today’s woman’ that he married but the expectations he came into marriage with were traditional, solidly so.
He wanted dinner at seven, freshly made, not microwave-warmed.
Zara sometimes didn’t get home at nine. She made her soups and neatly packed and tagged fried rice, yam porridge, beans, etc. in the freezer.
Kunle expected his wife to slow down once the baby arrived.
Zara expanded the business instead.
He expected to be the “head of the house.”
Zara expected to be a partner.
Kunle wasn’t a bad man. He was not violent, lazy or irresponsible.
He was simply raised for a world that no longer exists, our parents’ season.
Zara , on the other hand, was built for the world we are already living in, one where women are allowed to have as much as they want.
Gradually, their marriage became a long but tense negotiation table. Who drops the baby at daycare? Who attends the PTA meeting? Why must a man cook?
Why must a man eat pounded yam done with food processor?
Why can’t Kunle get freshly made soup?
Why must a woman always be in the kitchen?
What is wrong with a man operating the washing machine and microwave?
Kunle wasn’t wicked and Zara wasn’t rebellious.
They were simply products of two different trainings. The tension and collision that followed were inevitable.
Then, there was Bose, the Female Boss.
In an office somewhere in Lagos, the managing director is a 38-year-old woman named Bose.
She studied civil engineering, got an MBA, and swiftly climbed the corporate ladder with the determination of someone who refuses to apologise for being excellent. Or being a female boss. When she was a site supervisor, she worked as hard and long like her male colleagues.
As MD, she leads a management team of twelve men, most of them older and raised in homes where their mothers asked permission to buy pepper.
Every Monday morning when Bose walks into the conference room, there is a silent discomfort floating in the air like invisible perfume.
Some of the men call her “our daughter.”
Some call her “this small girl.”
A few simply refuse to look her in the eye when she gives instructions.
One senior manager insists on bypassing her and reporting to the chairman directly.
Another once joked during a meeting:
“Madam, don’t be too hard on us. We are old enough to be your uncles.”
The room laughed.
Bose did not. It was not funny, really.
It was already lonely at the top long before Asake made a blockbuster song of the theme. The weight of leadership was heavy enough without also the traditional men adding the invisible battle of legitimacy.
One day, after one of the older managers had ignored her directives, Bose asked him if he knew the consequences of insubordination.
The man smiled and said something that was not meant to be insulting.
He said, “My daughter, it is not that I disrespect you. But you must understand that where I come from, women do not tell men what to do.” That summed his attitude up.
Bose replied quietly with a smile that did not reach her eyes;
“If you want to keep your job, you will do what I asked or go back to that other place where men do what they please.”
She went home that evening and asked a question many young Nigerian women are asking quietly.
Are Nigerian men ready for the women Nigerian girls are becoming?
Today’s women are not like the mothers who raised today’s men.
Let us state the obvious. Nigerian daughters have changed.
Not a little. A lot.
Girls who used to be told to “learn how to cook so your husband will not chase you away” are now learning coding, digital marketing, aviation, robotics, law, politics and entrepreneurship.
The girl who once waited for a man to “settle her” is now settling herself, everywhere. She is not waiting to get married to drive her husband’s car. She goes into marriage a car-owner, some with Ph.D and many already confidently striding the management floors of blue-chip companies.
Gone are the days when women wanted to be secretaries, nurses and teachers. These days, they want to be Senators and Group Managing Directors. They want to be Chief Justices and Senior Advocates of Nigeria. They fill Medicine and Surgery, Architecture, Nuclear Physics and Climate Science and Agriculture as first choices for University admissions.
They are building companies, buying houses, making tough decisions and leading teams. A lot of women are earning more money than the men around them. This is not feminist agenda. It is simply the reality, the uncomfortable truth.
The shocking truth is while we started preparing our daughters for the future, our sons are still being prepared for the past. We are not telling them that if they had 50 female course mates in the university, they are going to battle, compete for positions through life with 500 or more women.
There is a yawning training gap.
If you go to many Nigerian homes today and listen to how children are raised, you are likely to hear something like this.
A girl is told:
“Be hardworking.”
“Stand on your feet.”
“Have your own money.”
“Don’t depend on any man.”
But the boy is told something different.
“You are the man of the house.”
“Your wife must respect you.”
“A real man must control his home.”
Control. Respect.
Authority. Leadership. All good values. But are we teaching the boy reality lessons?
That the woman beside him may not need controlling. She may only need partnership. He is not prepared for a wife who earns more, travels more, has stronger opinions.
His woman will not shrink herself to protect his ego. So when he finally meets such a woman, confusion begins. For centuries, masculinity was built around providing and leading. But what happens when the woman can provide too? Or sometimes even provide more? When that happens, won’t the old masculine compass begin to spin wildly?
Many Nigerian men interpret equality as disrespect, independence as rebellion, ambition as competition or even arrogance.
So instead of partnership, marriage becomes a tug of war and workplaces battlefields.
There is also the angle of silent fear in the heart of many parents.
Many parents secretly admire ambitious daughters.
But they are quietly worried.
“Will a man marry her?”
“Will she submit?”
“Will she not scare men away?”
So they try to soften the girl’s ambition while still encouraging it.
But very few parents ask the more urgent question;
are we raising sons who can handle strong women?
Today and tomorrow will demand a different kind of man. Not a weaker or softer man. Just a wiser, hands-on one who understands that leadership is not threatened by partnership.
A man who can cook dinner without feeling demoted, clap when his wife wins an award without feeling smaller.
We are in a season where a man who can change his own child’s diapers without calling it “helping his wife.”
A real man who knows that masculinity is not measured by how small his woman becomes but by how strong both of them grow and how far they do life together.
Back to Kunle and Zara
One evening, Kunle came home early.
Zara was still at work.
The baby was crying.
The nanny had left.
For the first time in his life, Kunle found himself doing three things his father never did. He warmed milk, change diaper, and rocked his son to sleep.
Something strange happened.
He did not die.
His manhood did not shrink.
The roof did not collapse.
When Zara came home tired that night, she saw something she had never seen before.
Her husband asleep on the couch with their baby on his chest.
That was the beginning of peace in their home. Not because Kunle surrendered authority. But because he discovered partnership.
Bose the Boss eventually called a leadership retreat for her team.
where she told them something simple.
“I am not here to compete with you. I am here to lead the company. The sooner we work together, the sooner we all win.”
Slowly, performance replaced ego.
And one of the older managers later told her something that sounded like an apology.
“You remind me of my daughter. She is also stubborn like you. Maybe the world is changing.”
Yes sir.
The world has changed.
So here is the question sitting quietly on the dining table in many homes.
While we teach our daughters confidence, ambition, and independence, are we teaching our sons emotional intelligence, partnership, and adaptability?
Or are we still raising them for a version of womanhood that is disappearing?
Because today’s daughters are not in the kitchen satisfied with being heard and not seen.
They are in boardrooms. They are at the airports as pilots and co-pilots, not just cabin crew. They are in courtrooms as justices, not clerks. They are in campaign offices as candidates and not just cheerleaders. They are leaders in tech hubs, studios. They are at the head of the table.
A society where daughters grow faster than sons will always produce friction.
Not because the women are wrong or the men are wicked but because the training was incomplete.
So perhaps it is time we update the curriculum. Let’s teach the girls to soar and the boys how to fly beside them without feeling threatened.
Because the future Nigerian woman is already here.
Happy International Women’s Day, again.
