MEN AND THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
Some 106 male parents fled their homes in Gombe in 2023 alone. They were fleeing the high cost of living; shirking their responsibilities as men of their houses; in essence, abdicating their thrones as men.
The men who fled definitely included young fathers and middle-aged fathers. Burdened by fatherhood, they had absconded from their masculinity.
When men begin to flee, then there is a problem. Men fleeing as a result of a problem that is not’ traditional’ raises even graver concerns.
It is women that flee usually, or are thrown out, or returned like unwanted items to their homes. Men stay put and face whatever it is head on. Before now, when men fled their homes, it was as a result of the siren calls of other women.
If Nigerian men in Gombe are now fleeing their homes, surely, a catastrophe is at hand. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should be alarmed.
He has not fled his home. He has also not fled the country he swore to serve through thick and thin. But men like him are fleeing their homes. It makes little news when a cub flees the pride to chart its path elsewhere. However, when the owner of the pride suddenly ups and flees, alarm bells must chime.
Why are Nigerian men running away? The reason is simple: oppressive hunger. It is said that he who fights and runs lives to fight another day. But not in this case. The men who can no longer provide for their families feel like failures. They make themselves feel like failures. The society makes them feel like failures.
When a man can no longer provide for his family, it is not just the society that makes him hear of it. In most cases, his woman makes him know it.
She may grab a fistful of his shirt occasionally to remind him of his receding masculinity, or she may just shout to give the children an earful about their irresponsible father. The woman may decide to close her kitchen to the ‘useless’ man or worse still close her legs. The ultimate humiliation the ‘useless’ man’s wife can mete out to him is to go into the arms of a man who can provide for her. A man who is not as useless as he is. Maybe a thieving politician.
Nigerian men must summon an emergency meeting. This is a human rights issue. In a country where patriarchy is the pillar upon which the rights of women have been pillaged for generations, patriarchy now faces its gravest threat yet.
More men will flee their homes according to the NHRC. Unable to cater for their families, they will return with great shame to the bachelorhood they proudly renounced many years ago.
Women must call for protests as the men call for an emergency meeting. They have always been told to know their place. Their status as second-class citizens have always been pointed out to them. They have always been sermonized to about the need to play second fiddle. And now, they are being asked to become bread winners.
Surely, they cannot allow the men to eat their cakes and have it. If they are to remain as second class citizens because men are stronger, and are created to provide bread, then the women cannot be burdened with being breadwinners.
Nigeria risks violently turning an age-long order on its head. Men are being brutally stripped of their masculinity here, and the risk is clear and grave.
A country shorn of its men is a burnt offering for its many enemies. Nigerian men know inflation and inflation knows them. It is not an inflation of the phallus. That would be welcome. It is the inflation that matters to economists and bothers the poorest the most.
Basic goods and services are no longer affordable to many Nigerians. Tables have been stripped bare of plates and proteins. Stores have been shaved of staples. Most dangerously, hearts have been stripped of happiness. And hope.
President Tinubu and his cabinet of men must stop men from abandoning their families and running away. They must halt a trend that is becoming a heartbreaking moral and sociological crisis for families. It is a grave injustice to now ask women, so poorly treated in Nigeria’s unjust gender games, to assume the role of breadwinners because their men are running away.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
