What Do Nigerian Fathers Know About Money? We Asked Four of Them.

This Father's Day, we asked one question. What would make this Father's Day unforgettable for your dad? 

The answers surprised us. They were mostly wishes to say beautiful words aloud, gifts opened with joy, and the look on a father's face when he feels truly celebrated. So we made that possible. Four fathers walked into our office, not knowing what awaited them. By the time they walked out, they had been honoured in a way they never expected. 

After the letters were read and the room had settled, we asked the fathers a few questions about what they had loved most about raising their children, what had been hardest, and what they had learned about money across decades of providing for a family in Nigeria. 

They gave us insight into how a generation has thought about wealth in this country.

When asked about the toughest period of raising their children, three of the four named money without prompting. School fees came up repeatedly. One father described the years when his three children were simultaneously enrolled in tertiary institutions. The salary, he said, was small. He found himself thinking constantly about how to make the maths work each term. Another spoke about the start of his marriage. His wife had nothing of her own when they began. Within a short time, they had a baby. "That time was very difficult for me," he said. "Without anybody's assistance."

When asked how he had managed during those tight years, one father said something striking. He had borrowed from a cooperative at his workplace. Asked whether he had also borrowed from friends, he answered: "No. I don't even have friends." He said it as a matter of fact. The cooperative was what he had, and so it was what he used.

Before structured financial products were accessible to most working Nigerians, before professional asset management was within reach for the average earner, fathers stretched their incomes through a patchwork of informal tools. Salary advances. Workplace cooperatives. Esusu and ajo. Borrowing from a sibling, repaid over months. These tools worked, often. But they worked at a cost. They left fathers carrying the financial weight of their families largely alone, with few mechanisms to plan beyond the next month, the next term, the next year.

Asked what advice he would give to fathers raising young children today, another father did not hesitate. "Education is most essential for children," he said. "No matter the difficulties, you must train your children. Let them go to school. Let them be literate. Give them a good education." It is the unspoken contract of Nigerian fatherhood across the previous generation. Leisure, savings, retirement planning, and personal comfort could be cut to pay the school fees. The university bills got met somehow. That single commitment shaped the futures of millions of Nigerians, including many of the working-age professionals reading this piece.

Toward the end of the conversations, one of the fathers was asked what dreams he had carried as a young man. His answer was striking in its simplicity: "Build a house. Get married. Build a house. Buy a car. That is all." A modest list of three goals of a home, a family, the means to move around, and a generation organised their working lives around making them possible. For them, wealth meant a built life. Wealth was something you could point to at the end of a long working life and say, I built that.

The conversations were short, but they gave us the underlying ethic. Provision is patient work. Wealth is built across decades. Education is worth almost any sacrifice. And the dreams worth chasing are often smaller and more achievable than the noise around us suggests.

A younger generation has inherited a different situation, one in which asset management is more accessible, professional advice is within reach, and money has structured ways to compound over time. Our work today is to take the patience and discipline our fathers practised and pair it with the structures and tools now available. 

Perhaps the most generous thing the previous generation of Nigerian fathers gave us was the chance to think about money differently than they had to. Father's Day is as good a day as any to acknowledge that and do something about it.