The most dangerous inheritance is not poverty. Poverty is visible. You can point at it, measure it, organise around it. The most dangerous inheritance is a broken definition of success — one that looks respectable, that the community applauds, that your parents will announce at church — but that quietly traps generation after generation in the exact same place.
Nigeria gave us a success template designed for a different era.
House. Car. Government job. Owanbe. Chieftaincy title for the men, big wedding for the women. Children in private school. Send money home. Build something in the village. Make the family proud. For the generation that built it — our grandparents navigating post-independence chaos, our parents surviving military governments and SAP and economic collapse — that template made sense. It signalled stability. It said you had made it past the disorder into something solid.
We are not navigating post-independence chaos anymore. We are navigating a world where the fastest-growing companies are five people with laptops in a room, where entire industries collapse and new ones appear within a decade. The old template is not just outdated. It is actively harmful. And we are still running it.
We confused the signal for the substance. We learned to want the markers of success more than the conditions that produce it. We optimised for looking like we had arrived instead of building the skills and systems that would actually keep us there.
Talented young Nigerians are choosing careers based on what the title sounds like at a family gathering. Not on what the role builds in them, not on where the industry is going, not on what it compounds into over ten years. Entrepreneurs quit too early because the business has not yet produced the visible markers of success and the social pressure becomes unbearable. “Your mates are buying cars.” “Your mates are getting married.” As if your mates are your benchmark. As if speed toward the wrong destination is something to celebrate.
We were taught to want outcomes, not processes. Status, not competence. Recognition, not the unglamorous work that earns it. This has produced a very specific kind of person — excellent at performing success, uncomfortable with the sustained, invisible work of building something real. We know how to look the part. We are less practiced at doing the part, especially when nobody is watching, especially when it is taking longer than expected, especially when the results are not yet photogenic.
Then there is the theological layer, because you cannot discuss Nigerian ambition without the prosperity gospel. God wants you to have the house. God wants you to drive the car. Your blessing is coming. I grew up in this. I understand what it does — the hope it manufactures in genuinely difficult circumstances. But I also know what happens when the theology replaces strategy. When prayer substitutes for planning. When waiting on God becomes a reason not to think rigorously about your market, your odds, your skills. The text itself says faith without works. We turned it into faith without thought, then called the thought a lack of faith.
You have to audit your own wants. Not to reject your culture, but to separate the things you actually want from the ones that were installed in you by a culture that needed you to want specific things to function. That audit is uncomfortable. Some people will not understand the path you choose. Let them. You are not building for them.