I have watched, with a strange fascination, how often the people who preach the loudest are the first to buckle when life puts them on the stage they built for others. We have all seen the stories. The anti-racist advocate who marches, donates, and lectures, only to go quiet or even bristle when his own white daughter brings home a Black boyfriend. The woman who once mocked a co-wife as jealous and insecure, then turns feral when her husband talks about a third wife. The man who sponsors his son to take more wives and then calls it disgrace when another man does the same to his daughter. The critic who calls women greedy for chasing wealthy men, and later finds himself unable to say no when his own daughter meets one. In each case the script flips, not because people are evil, but because conviction that has never been tested is still theory.
Sociologists and psychologists have a name for this drift. Leon Festinger called it cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable tension between what we say we believe and what we do when reality demands a price. Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory explains another part: we are comfortable with equality in the abstract, but when our family, name, or lineage is involved, the group we identify with suddenly feels threatened. Gordon Allport’s Contact Hypothesis warned us that contact reduces prejudice, but only if it is equal, voluntary, and personal. When it becomes intimate, like marriage, the abstract “them” becomes “us,” and old conditioning rises.
That is why the 1967 film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner still stings. A liberal white couple, proud of their progressivism, are thrown into panic when their daughter returns engaged to a Black doctor. It was fiction, but it held up a mirror to the 1950s and 60s, when many white Americans who supported civil rights laws still drew a hard line at interracial dating in their own homes. Even public opinion polls of that era showed the split: support for desegregation could coexist with deep discomfort about marriage across the color line. It did not always mean hypocrisy. Often it meant the principle had never been asked to live in the same house with the believer.
This is why I was not surprised, only intrigued, when the internet broke over Gehgeh. For those who missed it, Gehgeh is the online name of Emmanuel Obruste, a Nigerian creator who built an entire brand, he called it the “University of Gehgeh”. It is raw, pidgin-laced “lectures” about money, women, and survival. His thesis was simple and viral: don’t marry, stack baby mamas instead. He said it with the confidence of a professor, he said he himself had four baby mamas and two more expecting, and he even mocked TikTok stars Peller and Jarvis for daring to plan a wedding. Then about a day ago, videos leaked. Gehgeh in wine-colored traditional wear, dancing with a bride named Mary, cutting cake, doing the first-feeding rite. The date on the invitation read July 26. He posted clips himself on X. Pulse, Leadership, and Legit all ran the story, noting that as of then he had not officially confirmed the marriage.
The internet did what it always does. One camp shouted hypocrisy. How could the man who told men to run from marriage now walk down the aisle? Another camp defended him. People change, they said. Maybe the advice was for his audience, not for himself. A third camp called it content, a skit, a clout loop. Then came his rebuttal. “I never for once told y’all not to get married. Did I? If yes, show me a video,” he wrote, adding that Nigerians do not understand how social media works. Days later, Intel Region reported a second video, this time him kneeling, voice breaking: “Nigerians, please forgive me. I am a hypocrite. I didn’t practice what I preached.” He asked those who left relationships because of his words to go back and reconcile.
Gehgeh did not invent this pattern. He just dramatized it. And that is the point. Words spoken from a safe distance are a kind of content creation. They are scripted, lit, and edited. We do not know what we will do until the camera turns on us. The actress Nafisa Abdullahi once said marriage was not worth it. Maybe she meant it, from the place she stood that day. But life has a way of rewriting scripts when loneliness, love, or circumstance changes the set. Most of our grand critiques of marriage offer no alternative institution to replace it, so they float, beautiful but weightless, until reality asks for rent.
The deeper problem is not change. A student does not think like a worker. A follower does not see like a leader. The problem is subjectivism. The habit of selling one slice of truth as the whole loaf. In politics we see it too. In 2015, President Buhari was packaged as a messiah who would fix everything alone. When the weight hit, the handlers had to pivot to “change begins with me” and “Buhari cannot do it alone.” Peter Obi now enjoys a similar aura, painted as too clean to be human, a character you would only believe in a novel. Even private truths like Buhari smoking once, a quarrel with his wife, felt like plot holes because the brand had been built too perfectly. Content creators do the same. Blessings CEO has millions hanging on her relationship advice, even as her own marriage collapsed in public. She survives not because the advice is flawless, but because she is brilliant at performance, at holding attention, at making pain look like wisdom.
This is where the Gehgeh episode becomes useful, not just entertaining. It reminds us of a simple, old truth: words are cheap. Not because people are liars, but because imagination is cheap. It costs nothing to imagine how you would act. It costs everything to act when the bill arrives. Politicians and influencers both sell us a fictional world with good oratory, emotional cues, and moral framing. We buy it because it feels good, because it entertains, because it gives us someone to boo or cheer.
I am not saying everyone is fake. I am saying we should separate the message from the messenger. Gehgeh may have been sincere when he told men to avoid marriage, and he may also be sincere now that he chose it. Reality is not a straight line. Two celebrities can preach love and still divorce. A pastor can preach the gospel in perfect English and still struggle to raise his child. That does not erase the value in what they said. It just means human beings are not brands. We are contradictions trying to hold together.
So the next time a viral “university” tells you how life works, listen, laugh, learn, but sieve it. Ask what happens when the theory meets a wedding hall, a hospital bill, a daughter’s boyfriend, a co-wife. That is where principles stop being content and start being character. And that is where we all, Gehgeh included, are finally tested.
