Nigerian Women Are Lonely Hearts In UK
By Taju Tijani
The joy of a woman is to have a loving husband, happy home, happy kids and fulfilling career. Yes, a Nigerian woman in the UK may have a fulfilling career but what is in scarcity among their ranks are men they could proudly called husbands. Career wise, Nigerian women are beating their competing men in getting the right job with the right pay and the right prospect. They are high flyer who sometimes fly too high close to the sun where they get……..fill the gap. They call the shot in care, teaching, housing, hospitality, cleaning, mental health, nursing, catering, saloon business, retail and other sundry jobs.
Our men control the universe of IT, immigration advisers, security, warehouse, cabbing, parking control officers, bus driving, restaurant business and other entrepreneurship of all hues. Wherever you see accomplished Nigerian women professionals, there is always a prideful presumption that they are better and well educated than the men with lower jobs. This irrational assumption is causing so much heartache among Nigerian men in the UK. The UK is governed by a woman – the Queen!!! It is managed for the queen by a woman – the Prime Minister. Most middle level jobs are controlled by women. So, it is most likely that an average Nigerian male has a woman bossing him from 9 – 5pm on a daily basis.
According to Karl Kraus, a liberated woman is like a fish that has fought its way ashore. According to statistics, most women once they breathe the air of liberation, they begin to control, intimidate, manipulate and dominate any male that comes near their turf. The war of the sexes is real in the female universe. If the theatre of war is limited to the confines of offices, things would not have been the way they are now. But the war is spilling through to the romantic paradise of bedrooms where the man feels threatened and intimidated by bottom power of a different kind.
Therefore, in an island where women are over-empowered, men become sissy and waiting goons to be controlled and manipulated. Nigerian women fare worse here. Anecdotal stories are replete with sad narratives of how Nigerian women professionals are becoming bad bedfellows. Nigerian professional women are becoming arrogant. They are becoming culture vultures who feed on other people’s cultures and abandon their own. The idea of a happy home through obedience, subservience and respect for the husband are becoming Stone Age precepts of a forgotten era. To them, happiness is having total control over the home, the finances and the children. Men to them are no longer regarded with the kind of awe the Nigerian culture lay down. Western culture is the new yardstick being used to measure their homes.
This is where things are falling apart with the Nigerian women in the UK. Equality with men on all levels has come to represent European culture which has not lead to happiness in marriages. European culture is laden with emotional insecurity and moral ambiguity and there is nowhere these twin devils are more damaging than among the Nigerian family who assimilated this culture and threw their own culture out of the window. Marriages have been destroyed through male insecurity in the home. Separation happens daily among Nigerians because of western value that promotes women above men in most marriages. Instead of respect and obedience for men, the Western culture is forcefully promoting equality, empowerment and partnership in Nigerian homes to the chagrin of Nigerian men who are brought up and bred with different set of marriage values from those of their host. This value conundrum is widening by the day. This clash of culture is eroding the respect that a man deserves and the delicate structure of his ego is being systematically destroyed.
Trouble almost always begins when a woman lands a job and begins to contribute to the domestic demands of the family make up. The marriage is threatened almost immediately the couple begins to share water, light, heating and grocery bills. The arrangement may suit the owners of the culture but to a Nigeria it is an indirect way to hijack power from the man to the woman. After all, a man is supposed to provide for his family to maintain dominance, respect and obedience but once that power is taken away by other arrangement, the family is open to insecurity and eventual collapse.
To share the bills with a wife may be cool and cost effective but the damage to male ego is so huge it is causing a rethink among Nigerian men. The Nigerian woman who is contributing to family upkeep is not disposed anymore to cook food, do the laundry, take kids to school and perform her bedroom gymnastics as required by natural law. The man has to share in the cooking, take kids to school, wash the car, do the laundry and even hoover the family house. Sex is no longer on demand. It has to be negotiated and agreed on the woman’s terms.
The net effect of this are broken marriages and broken hearts. Nigerian men are walking out of their marriages and fleeing from controlling, domineering and manipulating wives who are determined to enforce the rules at home. On the other hand, Nigerian women are consolidating their power base by using their kids, The Police, accommodation and other safety net thrown at them to intimidate and send their husbands away from home. In some forced arrangement, Nigerian men are made to bear sexless marriage, sleep on the couch and play the obedient Abraham where the lady of the house rewards with the carrot or chastises with a stick.
The percentage of Nigerian women without husband is becoming a worry and concern among pastors and marriage counsellors. Nigerian women prefer their jobs, their children and their homes to their husbands. The banalisation of marriage due to control and domination by Nigerian women has remain an unending topic all over the UK. Nigerian women daily return from work into empty homes without husbands waiting with a loving and outstretched arms. Nigerian men are reliving the bachelor life even at 50 and 60s in a tragic marriage hubris that tends to give women power over their men and castrating them into goons, servitude and quiet compliance with all kinds of domestic rules that make living together impossible.
This endless tug of marriage war has led to exodus of Nigerian men to Nigeria to find respect, honour and obedience among local women yet untainted by Western values that erode the power of the man in his own home.
TT Soundings 