Yesterday, I stumbled on a video clip—likely from a live show, not sure whether a radio or just a social media post—featuring a man analysing the lives of the so-called “Abuja boys.” What struck me wasn’t just his understanding of the life of Abuja big boys, but the painful accuracy of his diagnosis. He spoke not as an outsider, but as someone who understands the Abuja’s fake life, shallow affluence, and borrowed prestige that defines life in the nation’s capital.
After three years living in Abuja, I can say without sentiment that much of the city’s life is fake. If Abuja is fake, it just reflects a concentrated metaphor for a wider problem in our society—the erosion of real values under the weight of middle-class insecurity.
Our generation of parents, especially the upwardly mobile class, is raising children who are increasingly disconnected from real life. We give them the aesthetics of comfort without the foundation of resilience. We offer them soft landings but no social coping strategies. Many of us never speak about how we grew up—fetching water over long distances, trekking kilometres to school, enduring the harsh but character-building discipline of boarding schools where “gabza” and “fitsarin doki”, insect filled beans, sometimes expired were our regular dishes.
We have replaced lived experience with lifestyle. We mask our own childhood struggles and, in doing so, deprive our children of the context that shaped us. They see the destination but never the journey. And in Abuja, where image trumps substance, this has bred a generation high on entitlement and low on emotional durability. A situation that once in a while comes during the departmental or Faculty Board of Examiners meetings. The self-entitlement is out of this world.
The problem is not modernism or TV reality, but parenting philosophy. A society that neglects to transmit its survival wisdom across generations will produce fragile elites, disconnected from reality and unfit to lead.
Does this sounds familiar?
It is time for parents, not only in Abuja, but in Kaduna, Gombe and Kano to confront a hard truth: if we do not actively pass down our scars, our children will inherit only our masks.
