My wife has a habit of sending me essays from Tara Aisida’s column, “This Is Lagos,” and I have learned to read them the way one reads a courtroom transcript: slowly, carefully, looking for the crack where the argument breathes. Aisida writes with the discipline of a judge. She gathers perspectives, weighs contexts, and rarely leaves herself exposed. So when her July 10, 2026 piece landed with the question “Do our homes really need a leader?” I expected nuance. What I found instead was passion dressed as neutrality, a woman writing from shared interest rather than from the detached bench.
Her thesis is simple and seductive. Marriage, she argues, is a partnership built on mutual understanding, concession, dialogue, and flexibility. Therefore, it does not need a boss, a CEO, an organizational chart. “Marriage is not a company, children are not employees and Love cannot be managed by an organisational chart,” she writes. The purpose of family, she insists, is relationship, not efficiency. When we go hunting for the “CEO of the home,” we only manufacture power struggles.
To make her case, Aisida quotes the social media chorus we all know: the man cites Scripture, “the man is the head of the home,” the woman counters with the bank alert, “I pay half the bills,” and someone else asks why leadership should be tied to money or gender at all. She then reframes leadership itself. Real leadership, she says, is not about control but responsibility. Even the biblical model of headship, she argues, is tied to sacrifice, service, protection, and accountability, not domination. The tragedy, she notes, is that “headship” was hijacked into unquestionable authority, and that distortion has caused enormous pain.
Aisida is at her sharpest when she describes the modern home. Women are now educated, earning, investing, sometimes out-earning their husbands. Men are braiding hair, cooking, attending PTA meetings. The old stereotypes no longer fit. So why, she asks, do we still force responsibilities along gender lines instead of competence? She borrows the language of organizations: the strongest teams succeed not because one person knows everything, but because different strengths are pooled toward one goal. Therefore, if one spouse is better at finance, let them lead finance. If the other has higher emotional intelligence, let them lead the emotional climate. Leadership, in her view, should be functional, fluid, shifting. That, she says, is teamwork, not weakness.
She also tries to redeem the word “submission.” It has become radioactive, she admits. Women hear oppression, men hear subjugation. But real submission, she argues, is voluntary cooperation rooted in love and trust. Every marriage requires mutual yielding, compromise, apology. And on the question of deadlocks, she is optimistic: healthy couples talk, pray, seek counsel. If a marriage constantly needs someone to “pull rank,” the problem is not leadership but communication.
I agree with her where she is strongest. The rejection of ego, abuse, and domination is non-negotiable. No home thrives where one voice is a tyrant. But her conclusion, that homes do not need a leader, only two emotionally mature adults, rests on assumptions that do not survive contact with reality.
First, she sets up a false dilemma. She presents us with two options: authoritarian hierarchy or leaderless partnership. Political scientists and family sociologists have long argued that the two are not opposites. Max Weber’s theory of legitimate authority and James MacGregor Burns’ work on transformational leadership show that authority and cooperation coexist in every enduring institution, from militaries to families. Partnership does not erase leadership; it redefines how it is exercised.
Second, Aisida attacks a strawman. She equates leadership with barking orders and “my house, my children, my money.” But leadership, by definition, is not ownership. It is accountability. Sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that every social system needs both instrumental and expressive roles to function. One role often orients toward goal attainment, the other toward cohesion. In practice, that looks like someone who, in the final instance, bears the weight when consensus fails. To empty headship of all operational meaning, as Aisida does, is to reduce it to poetry.
Third, she commits what philosophers call an appeal to modernity. Because women now earn more and men now cook, she suggests the principle of leadership should dissolve. But research from the American Psychological Association consistently shows that competence in a task is not the same as responsibility for the whole. A brilliant CEO does not automatically become the best CEO. In marriage, a spouse may be superior at budgeting but not at moral guidance, conflict mediation, or long-term vision. Conflating skill with stewardship is a category error.
Aisida also underestimates human fallibility. She assumes couples will always talk it out, pray it out, reason it out. Organizational behavior studies tell us otherwise. Even the most mature boards have tie-break rules because disagreement is structural, not moral. Families are no different. When two reasonable people reach an impasse, someone must carry the final responsibility. Without that, you don’t get equality. You get paralysis.
Ironically, her own proposal reintroduces leadership through the back door. She wants one spouse to “lead” finance, another to “lead” emotions, another to “lead” negotiations. That is not the abolition of leadership. It is the fragmentation of it. And it leaves an unanswered question that haunts every partnership: when the financial lead and the emotional lead disagree, who arbitrates? Who answers when the decision fails?
There is also the cultural and religious layer she skirts. In most Nigerian, religious or biblical traditions, headship is not primarily economic. It is symbolic and political. Children bear the father’s name, the family is traced through the father’s lineage, not because the father is the richest, but because society needs a visible point of accountability. Anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that kinship systems create order through such designations. That does not justify tyranny. It simply means the title carries weight beyond salary slips.
And yes, women wield enormous soft power. As mothers, they shape children’s values, language, and temperament. That influence is real and often decisive. But soft power and formal responsibility are not interchangeable. One can be influential without being accountable, and vice versa.
The deeper danger in Aisida’s argument is idealism. She imagines two perfectly mature adults who will always listen, yield, and choose unity. That marriage exists, and it is beautiful. But institutions are not built for ideal people. They are built for tired, emotional, fallible people. Leadership structures exist precisely for the nights when love is thin and consensus is gone.
So where does that leave us? Aisida is right to call out the counterfeit version of leadership that masquerades as control. But in trying to kill the counterfeit, she risks killing the real thing. The evidence, from theology to sociology to everyday living, suggests that homes do not thrive on the absence of leadership, but on the quality of it.
The question is not “Who is in charge?” in the sense of a crown. The question is “Who is willing to serve, to listen, to protect, to be held accountable when things go wrong?” Scripture, properly read, and social science, properly applied, point to the same answer: servant leadership. Humble, not domineering. Accountable, not oppressive. Flexible in function, but clear in responsibility.
Marriage may not need a CEO. But it does need a compass. And a compass, by nature, has a point.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
