I had built a life on a lie I told myself convincingly enough to believe that I had healed. Then my father was scammed, and the wound I had mistaken for a scar tore open, a dehiscence so precise it felt almost instructive, as if grief had been waiting all along to correct me.
Growing up, I was never sure my father loved me the way he loved my other siblings, or the way I needed him to. Some days he would say something kind, enough to send me soaring in a euphoric high. Then, just as quickly, the insults would come, often directly contradicting what he had just praised. The compliments would evaporate; the humiliation would stay.
I was 10 when my father took a second wife. My parents had been married for 15 years at the time. I had always been a sickly child. I still am. I never understood what that had to do with anything until I heard, through a friend of my mother’s, that he had cited it as part of his justification. One sickly child out of four, said casually. As though I were a defective item in an otherwise acceptable inventory. The friend said it, not knowing I was listening, or perhaps not caring. Adults often forget that children understand more than they are given credit for; the weight of certain words, the way a conversation shifts when something true is being said. I heard it, I understood it, and for most of my early teenage years, I carried my mother’s pain as though it were my fault. As though being born unwell was the thing that had broken our family.
Perhaps the sickness had convinced him of something, because he often said it to my face without any hesitation that I was useless, that I was irrelevant to his life. One mistake and that was the reminder I would receive. One bad grade and he would tell me, with certainty, that I would never amount to anything, and even if I did, he made sure to add, I could never contribute anything meaningful to his life. He said it enough times that I began to wonder if he was right.
His abuse did not stop with me. It extended to everyone in the family, verbal, financial, and structural. He withheld money, withheld opportunities, and reserved the final say on everything. My mother bore the earliest weight of it. She was a bright-eyed young woman who had just finished secondary school when she married him, full of whatever a person is full of when they believe they have found the right person. He did not let her go to university. Years later, in her thirties, when the cellphone boom in 2004 opened a small window, she took it and started selling phones and gadgets, building something of her own. He shut that down too. There was always a reason. There was always his voice, louder than everything else, deciding what was and was not possible.
At the beginning of my career, I was, in many ways, a larger-than-life woman. Not because I had everything figured out, but because I was determined to prove that the limitations someone had placed on me were never mine to carry. Fresh out of university, I took a job at a digital marketing firm as a front desk officer. I was willing to take on whatever honest work would keep me occupied, help me gain experience, and, importantly, give me some financial independence. His first reaction was not encouragement, but intimidation. He had his lawyer conduct a background check on the company and insisted that the firm I was working for was involved in money laundering. The accusation was completely unfounded. Eventually, even his lawyer confirmed that the company was legitimate, but by then, something had already changed in me. Instead of allowing the experience to discourage me, I became even more determined to build a life and career on my own terms. That first job, which I had taken simply as a new graduate looking for a place to start, became the beginning of my journey in the corporate world. I stayed, learned, worked my way up, and continued to grow.
Which brings me to my next point. From my late teens into adulthood, I watched my siblings and me come up with what we believed were brilliant ideas, businesses we could build, products we could sell, and opportunities that could help us become financially independent. We were young, ambitious, and constantly imagining possibilities for ourselves, but there was always one phrase that my father used that brought those ideas to a halt: “they are scammers.” The suppliers we wanted to work with were scammers; the opportunities that came our way were scams; people we wanted to partner with were supposedly trying to cheat us. Somehow, almost every person or opportunity outside the small world we knew was framed as a potential threat.
The message was repeated so often that it became more than a warning; it became a lens through which we viewed the world. We learned to approach opportunities with suspicion rather than curiosity, and sometimes to abandon them altogether before we had even given them a chance. Many of my siblings never got to pursue some of the things they dreamed of, not because they lacked the intelligence, creativity, or determination to do so, but because they had been taught to fear being deceived. The possibility of being scammed became more powerful than the possibility of succeeding.
But life has a strange sense of humour. In the years that followed, my father—just after his retirement—would find himself caught in the very kind of situation he had spent years warning us about. It is not a straightforward scam story, at least not in the way we always understood scams. His story involves a supposed Sudanese general who wanted to invest millions of dollars in Nigerian real estate. Money was said to have been transferred, and then complications arose when the funds were reportedly intercepted by the Central Bank of Nigeria. What follows is a seemingly endless chain of people who claim they can help resolve the problem and release the money. There was always someone who needed to be paid. An official who required a “token.” Someone else who claimed to have the right connections and could make the process move faster. Another person who needed money to clear the funds. Each payment was presented as the one thing standing between my father and the recovery of the money. Millions became hundreds of millions and the payments have not stopped.
What makes this story difficult for me is that I cannot reduce it to the simple lesson of “my father was scammed.” The consequences went far beyond the money that was lost; money could be lost and, theoretically, earned again. The impact reached into the very foundation of our family, slowly eroding our trust in the person who had always presented himself as the sole authority and decision-maker in our lives.
My brother had wanted to go to flight school for as long as I can remember. It was not a passing ambition; it was a dream he had carried for years. When the time finally came for the family to sit down and calculate the tuition and other costs involved, my father instead bought a house for roughly the amount that would have been needed to make that dream possible. Then, almost paradoxically, my brother was put in charge of selling the house as though he had to work to earn his own dream. As the scam deteriorated our financial situation, that same house became one of the first assets to be sold. The money was redirected to people my father had only recently come to know, people who had somehow acquired his trust overnight.
My brother eventually made it to flight school, but not with a single kobo from my father. Family members and friends came together to contribute what they could, collectively giving him the opportunity he had spent years working towards. A dream that had once been part of a family conversation, having to survive the collapse of the very financial security that was supposed to make it possible.
Another consequence affected me much more directly. For years, I watched the parking lot of our house filled with cars, seven or eight of them at different points. Whenever my friends visited, they would inevitably ask the same question: Why don’t you drive any of these cars? I never really had an answer. So I continued taking public transportation and using Bolt to get to work. Eventually, I decided that if I did not ask, I would never know. I asked if I could drive one of the cars and the answer was an emphatic no.
The reason, as it was explained to me, was that as an unmarried woman, driving a car was not appropriate. Somehow, this was where the boundary of acceptable independence had been drawn. I could graduate from university, I could build a career, I could earn an income and pay taxes, I could navigate the city on my own, but driving a car—something so ordinary and fundamental—was apparently a step too far. I remember the absurdity of that distinction because the cars were sitting right there, yet they were not mine to use. In the aftermath of everything that happened, those same cars were sold. One by one, assets that had once filled our parking lot were converted into money and handed over in an attempt to recover or release money that was tied up in a scheme.
“I could graduate from university, I could build a career, I could earn an income and pay taxes, I could navigate the city on my own, but driving a car—something so ordinary and fundamental—was apparently a step too far.”
Looking back, these memories come together in a way that makes me believe in karma. Not because I ever wished hardship on my father, but because there is something painfully circular about what happened to our family.
For years, my father had seen himself as the unquestionable authority in our home, but as the situation unfolded, many of us began to sense that something was wrong. We questioned the people involved; we questioned the endless requests for money; we questioned how the process could require one payment after another. We tried to express our concerns, but our warnings were repeatedly dismissed. We were often reminded that we did not understand what was happening. We are too young. We did not know enough. He knew best.
Even as I find myself at what feels like the peak of my career, the reality of Nigeria’s economy means I cannot comfortably carry the weight of everyone who now needs me. I am trying to take care of myself, support my mother, and help seven younger siblings at the same time. I was once the child who was called useless and I have spent years proving that I was never useless. I am the person whose stubbornness and refusal to collapse in the face of intimidation have helped hold parts of the family together.
Staying strong, however, does not make the pain disappear. Sometimes, when I try to help, I find myself confronting years of insecurity and the persistent feeling that I am not enough and it is not enough. It creates an internal chaos that is difficult to explain because the person I am trying to help is also someone whose actions have shaped some of my deepest wounds.
That is the contradiction I now live with.
There is a constant push and pull between wanting to distance myself from him completely and feeling that I should empathise with him in this moment of profound difficulty. As we explore every possible avenue to address what has happened and hold the people responsible to account, albeit secretly and without his knowledge, I find myself moving between anger, compassion, resentment and guilt. Some days, I wonder if I am being cruel for thinking he deserves it. Other days, I wonder if I am betraying myself by helping. Sometimes I feel evil. Sometimes I feel justified.
Perhaps the hardest part is accepting that both feelings can exist at the same time. I can recognise his vulnerability without forgetting what I have endured. I can care about what happens to him without pretending that the past did not happen. I can help my family without being responsible for carrying everyone at the expense of myself.
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