I have stumbled into a debate as old as humanity itself. Who deserves a man’s deepest loyalty between the one who gives him a wife, or the one who gives him a job? It is the same ancient puzzle asked differently: between teacher and parent, between family and breadwinner, between the one who raises you and the one who sustains you. Both deserve gratitude. Yet one question keeps cutting through sentiment to something more primal, who has sacrificed more, empowered more, changed the trajectory of your life more?
That question returns now because we keep hearing a sweeping proverb passed off as gospel: blood is thicker than water. The assumption is tidy and comforting. It tells us that kinship will always come first, that parents, siblings and relatives will protect their own before outsiders. In family life that often holds. In politics it collapses.
Politics humbles us because it exposes a need we try to dress up in emotion and morality but cannot escape. Beyond love, beyond faith, beyond clan, there is the quiet, stubborn demand of survival. This is what political scientist Harold Lasswell captured when he defined politics as “who gets what, when, and how”. What we get is not abstract. It is food, income, dignity, status, access. Max Weber called this the monopoly of legitimate power over the distribution of life chances. In plain terms: politics is the job. It puts food on the table. It makes and breaks careers. It confers identity.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy helps explain why. He argued that physiological needs such as food, shelter, safety…must be met before higher needs like belonging, esteem, and self-actualization can dominate behavior. Political economist Karl Polanyi went further, insisting that in modern societies the economy is “embedded” in social relations, and that people will reorder even sacred loyalties when livelihood is threatened. Thomas Hobbes called it the first law of nature: self-preservation. When a choice is framed as between pleasing family and protecting the job that defines your independence, most people, consciously or not, choose the job. That is not betrayal. It is biology meeting structure.
We try to suppress this truth by elevating religion or family as the highest calling. We tell ourselves that devotion will provide. But as sociologist Emile Durkheim observed, religion gains force when material life is secure; ritual cannot substitute for bread. A hungry man cannot pray with the same strength. Secure the economic base first, and then family and faith can be practiced with depth rather than desperation.
This is why politics often defies the “blood is thicker” rule. To serve in government is to make decisions that will inevitably embarrass, disappoint, or alienate people you love. It is to sit in a room and choose policy over kinship, state interest over family pressure, because the office demands it. And because the office also rewards it.
Nigeria’s recent history is littered with such fractures, not as scandal but as pattern. A father becomes a fierce critic of a president while his daughter takes a role in that same administration, explaining that long personal ties predate political disagreements. A former vice president leads an opposition coalition against an incumbent, while his son defects to the ruling party and publicly endorses that president’s re-election, calling it a personal choice. A national chairman of an opposition platform watches his daughter obtain a ticket on the ruling party’s platform and campaign for the same president he opposes. A former governor known for his criticism of the federal establishment sees his son appointed into the presidency as a senior aide.
The pattern repeats across generations. A former president endorses one candidate, his son joins the rival’s campaign and says politics is not war. A Senate President leaves the ruling party for the opposition, his sister stays and serves as minister under the government he now challenges. In the First Republic, a son defeated his father in an Eastern House election on opposing party platforms. Brothers have run against each other for the same seat, one on the ruling party, the other on the opposition. In-laws have been made between men who spent years as political adversaries, their children’s marriage described in the press as putting politics aside.
Political scientists call this “party dealignment within kinship networks.” It reflects what Nigerian commentators often summarize as “no permanent friend, no permanent enemy, only permanent interests.” But it is more than cynicism. It is rational actor behavior. As Anthony Downs argued in An Economic Theory of Democracy. Political actors maximize utility. When the utility of a party, a patron, or an office outweighs the cost of family disapproval, individuals follow the incentive. The family does not always rupture. Often it adapts, because Nigerians have learned to compartmentalize: disagreement at the podium does not require hatred at the dining table.
What all this suggests is uncomfortable but liberating. We should stop assuming that a relative’s appointment, association, or endorsement equals the politician’s own alignment. A son in the APC does not cancel a father in the ADC. A daughter campaigning for a president does not invalidate her father’s opposition. A sibling serving as minister does not mean the brother in opposition has sold out. These are parallel tracks running inside one family, powered by the same engine: the pursuit of economic security, relevance, and agency.
The larger lesson is that before we ask people to stand firmly for family or for faith, we must first secure the economic power that makes standing possible. Maslow was right: until food, shelter and safety are handled, higher loyalties are fragile. Politics distributes those basics. That is why it keeps dictating status, morality, even faith and relationships.
So no, blood is not always thicker than water in politics. Sometimes the job is. Sometimes survival is. And sometimes, in the Nigerian way, both can exist in the same house: one at the rally, the other at the inauguration without the house falling down.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
