When Aliko Dangote said he did not consider having a son a priority, he was saying something that should make Nigerian families pause. Not because he is a billionaire, and not because his family circumstances are ordinary. They are not. But because the question of the male child has occupied such a powerful place in our imagination that many Nigerian families still behave as though a daughter can be loved, celebrated and educated, yet somehow remain an unfinished sentence until a son arrives.
Dangote has three daughters. Asked whether he still hoped to have a son, he said plainly that it was not his priority. He went further, saying he did not think a son would have done better than his daughters and warning that the son a person desperately prays for may eventually be the one who brings the family name down.
That is an uncomfortable thought because Nigerians have traditionally attached an extraordinary burden of expectation to the male child. The son is expected to carry the family name, inherit the property, continue the family business, look after his parents, protect the family and preserve its legacy. The daughter, however accomplished, is often described as someone who will eventually “belong to another family.”
But what exactly makes a son more qualified for these responsibilities?
If the answer is strength, character, intelligence, loyalty, competence or love, none of those qualities is exclusively male.
The irony is that sometimes the son everyone is waiting for has not even been born, yet he already occupies a privileged place in the family imagination. He has an inheritance waiting for him. He is already being imagined as the future head of the family. He is the child who will supposedly remain when the daughters marry and leave.
Meanwhile, the daughters are already there.
They are the ones growing up, going to school, building careers and businesses, supporting their parents and sometimes becoming the financial backbone of their families. Some daughters become the children who sit beside their parents through illness, pay hospital bills, solve family problems and remain emotionally present long after everyone else has moved on.
Yet a woman can have three daughters and still be asked, with remarkable casualness, “When are you going to try for a boy?”
Try again.
As though the children she already has are attempts that did not quite produce the desired result.
There is something deeply painful about the message hidden inside that question. A girl may never be told directly that she is not enough, but she can grow up understanding that her parents were still waiting for somebody else.
And perhaps that is why this conversation needs to move beyond the familiar argument about whether sons are better than daughters. They are not. The more important question is why we continue to assign different destinies to children before they have had the opportunity to define themselves.
A son is raised with the assumption that he will carry the family forward. A daughter is sometimes raised with the expectation that she will eventually leave and become somebody else’s wife. We then act surprised when family structures reproduce exactly the loyalties we taught children to have.
Even the idea of legacy deserves to be questioned.
What carries a family name: a surname or a life well lived? Is a family legacy preserved because a man bears the name, or because somebody preserves the values, reputation, work and achievements associated with it?
A son can inherit a famous name and squander it. A daughter can marry, change her surname and spend the rest of her life adding distinction to the name she was born with. A son can live thousands of kilometres away and barely call home. A daughter can become the person her ageing parents depend upon for everything.
The gender of the child cannot guarantee the character of the adult.
There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation that we should not avoid: women themselves sometimes become the strongest defenders of the preference for sons. A mother who has given birth to several girls may be the one insisting that she must continue until she has a boy. Sometimes she is responding to pressure from her husband or his family. Sometimes she has simply inherited the same belief system that she is now passing to her daughters.
That is how culture survives. It does not need men alone to enforce it. People who were once wounded by an expectation can grow up and enforce the same expectation on somebody else.
None of this means that there is anything wrong with wanting a son. There is nothing wrong with hoping for a particular child, just as there is nothing wrong with celebrating a son when he arrives. The problem begins when the desire for a son becomes a judgement on daughters, when inheritance becomes gendered entitlement, or when a family refuses to recognise the worth of the children already standing before them.
Perhaps what many parents are really looking for is not a son at all.
Perhaps they are looking for someone who will carry their name with dignity, protect what they built, remember them when they are old, stand beside them when they are vulnerable and leave something worthwhile behind.
If that is the real wish, then the better question is not, “Where is the boy?”
It is this:
When will a daughter finally be enough?
Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
08034861434
