A random social media post I stumbled on yesterday has been sitting in my chest like a stone, asking a question we keep dancing around. Birthdays are strange things. They return every year on the same date we first arrived, reminding us we are a year older, a year closer, a year heavier with memory. In themselves they are quiet. But we have turned them into loud declarations. We now set expectations, unwritten rules, little agendas about how a birthday “must” look. If you cannot meet the tempo, the balloons, the guest list, the spray, you feel small, invisible, almost guilty for existing.
It is not like this with burials. Burials still have guardrails. Culture, religion, and tribe still tell you what to do, even if innovation is sneaking in there too and people are crying more about the cost than about the dead. But birthdays? We are writing the rules as we go, and the rules are getting expensive.
The post that got me thinking put it bluntly. It said the current craze in Nigeria is to celebrate birthdays loudly with stupendous money while inside the same house, or down the same street, there are people whose lives could be turned around if a fraction of that money found them. The writer gave two camps. The first says childbirth is a miracle. A whole human, 2kg and above, passes through a space barely 2 to 3 centimeters wide without tearing it apart, and comes out whole. Only God can do that. So thank Him. Celebrate life. The second camp says the opposite. Every birthday is a subtraction. One year gone from the time God allotted before the Angel of Death comes. Since none of us knows what waits in the grave where we will lie for thousands of years, why celebrate the shrinking? Whether you are for or against, the writer concluded, we should choose modesty, selflessness, and the collective good over personal show.
That message is not against birthdays. It is against turning birthdays into another ritual of status, another receipt we wave to prove we matter.
This is where theory helps us see what is happening. Sociologist Erving Goffman called life a stage, and we are all performing. In “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” he argued that people manage impressions to win approval. Thorstein Veblen, a hundred years ago, called it “conspicuous consumption”, the spending not because you need to, but because you need to be seen. More recently, Nigerian scholars of political economy like Prof. Pat Utomi and Dr. Oby Ezekwesili have warned that faulty values, not just bad leadership, keep us poor. When a society rewards symbolism over substance, leaders and citizens both learn the wrong lesson.
I have watched it play out. The real epidemic in Nigeria is not only failed leadership or a bad economy. It is a faulty orientation. Many politicians cannot leave office because they cannot survive outside it. They recycle themselves, or plant stooges, because the moment power leaves their hands, poverty rushes in. That tells you something. If even those who held the most lucrative positions with severance packages end up broke, then the problem is not money. It is management of money, and the values around it.
Think about it this way. Imagine a man earning ₦100,000 a month, and his problems are exactly ₦100,000 wide. Then imagine another earning ₦500,000, and his problems stretch to ₦500,000. At the end, both are poor. Both are complaining. The richer one is complaining louder. We do this to ourselves by tailoring our tastes to our status instead of our conscience. Clothes must match. Schools must match. Graduation must match. Funeral must match. Birthday must match. We even celebrate moving from Primary 1 to Primary 2 now, with cakes and photographers. The money goes into the economy, yes. But it robs individuals of the freedom to be there for another person. Society needs helpers, not perpetual performers.
I have also noticed a pattern. Watch the person who must change phone, car, and clothes every few months for himself and his children. In a country where everyone, I mean everyone, has a cousin, an uncle, a classmate, a neighbor still in poverty, that obsession can be a symptom of something deeper. Even the man who goes to Mecca every year, if he can afford it while people around him have never gone once in a lifetime, you start to wonder about compassion. It is not about affordability. It is about awareness.
That is why the birthday conversation stings. We are adding it to the long list of burdens we inherited from society: the wedding, the burial, the chieftaincy title, now the birthday. It has become competition. We prioritize symbolism, showmanship, self-projection. We want people to see our affluence. Then the same people we are performing for come tomorrow asking for help, and we say we are also pressed. Isn’t that irony? More money, more problems, not because money is evil, but because noble principles are missing. Who, then, is truly rich?
The citizens are not innocent either. We set the agenda. We judge books by their covers. We respect symbolism. We give titles, awards, and votes to those who look wealthy, as if wealth equals blessing, capacity, and trust. So people struggle to meet an impossible script. That struggle feeds greed and materialism, and greed feeds insecurity and corruption.
You see it everywhere in the last two years. Nigeria’s party scene has been loud, and a few birthdays broke the internet not because of love, but because of excess. In Kano, February 2026, three young princesses had a celebration where a cake alone was reportedly ₦70 million and Davido performed. People joked the cake needed a Certificate of Occupancy and asked if NEPA could even take light inside it. The total was whispered at ₦900 million, though no receipts ever surfaced, so we can only call it alleged.
In Abuja, April 2025, Obi Cubana marked 50 with “50 for 50” at Transcorp Hilton. Fifty guests got Samsung S25 phones, one for each year of his life, and in a dramatic procession someone reportedly presented ₦100 million in cash. By May 2026, Shina Peller’s surprise 50th at Five Palm in Lekki pulled in guests from Nigeria, Canada, and the UK, turning a private idea into a state affair. In July 2025, Seyi Vodi’s 50th in Abuja hosted Funke Akindele, 2Baba, the Ooni of Ife, and governors.
Then came the other viral moments: Diiadem in April 2026 arranging bundles of dollars and different currencies around her venue. “King Billions” first birthday in July 2026 with a royal castle, golden throne, and toy Mercedes. Ada Ujaligwa’s 50th in August 2026 with pink chandeliers and thousands of hanging flowers. Francis “Vintage” Udochukwu doing daily pre-birthday parties in August 2026 with cash sprayed in Igbo “ego oji” style. And the woman on TikTok who broke down her “budget” Owambe: ₦600,000 hair, ₦350,000 fabric, ₦350,000 tailoring, ₦50,000 makeup, ₦200,000 convoy, and ₦2.5 million to spray. She called it budget. The comments said, “If this is budget, I am sleeping on my life.”
That is the split we live in. With inflation biting, many workers now skip office because of transport fare daily that is not longer affordable.At the same time, the “celebration economy” is booming. Planners, caterers, QR invites, and money spray are treated as wealth circulation. Research from the Brookings Institution on African consumption patterns shows that in high-inequality contexts, visible spending becomes a signal of security and belonging. But signals can lie.
So how best do we celebrate? Maybe not by silence, and not by shame. Maybe by meaning. Rationality and ethics are not about what you can afford. They are about what you choose to prioritize: empathy, moderation, merit, value added. A birthday can be a thanksgiving without being a performance. It can feed ten people instead of impressing a thousand. It can pay one school fee instead of buying one more designer bag.
Nigeria will not change because leaders change. It will change when values change. When we stop measuring a life by the loudness of its party and start measuring it by the quietness of its impact. When we understand that contentment is not poverty, and that generosity is not weakness.
Celebrate. Thank God you are alive. But celebrate in a way that, twenty years from now, someone will say, “That birthday changed something for me,” not, “That cake was as big as a house.” Because in the end, the date will come and go. The money will finish. The videos will be forgotten. What will remain is who you were to the people around you.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
