My father was once a military man. Principled, egalitarian, disciplined in a way that was not optional for anyone living under his roof. Growing up, my siblings and I received what I can only describe as military-level training at home. House chores were not negotiable. Standards were not flexible. The alarm clock of his expectations went off whether we liked it or not.
He never said, “I love you.”
Not once that I can remember. Not in those words, with that phrasing, in that soft way you see in foreign films and hear in American songs. That was not his language. It was not the language of his generation, his culture, or his experience.
You may also like:
- If You Grew Up in a Nigerian Neighbourhood, These 15 Memories Will Hit Differently
- Condemned at 19, Freed at 57: The Price of a Wrongful Conviction
- You Can Leave Nigeria, But Nigeria Never Leaves You: The Diaspora’s Political Fixation
But here is what he did instead.
He toiled. Night and day. He carried the weight of a family on his back the way a man who has been trained to carry weight carries it — without complaint, without drama, without asking for applause. He made sure we had food on the table, clothes on our bodies, a roof over our heads, and education in our hands. Every single day. Rain or no rain. Economy good or bad. Every day.
That was his “I love you.”
And every Nigerian child who grew up in a home like mine knows exactly what I am talking about.
The Nigerian Father’s Love Language
Somewhere between Owerri and Kano, between Lagos and Kaduna, between the face-me-I-face-you compounds and the quiet estates, there is a particular kind of father that Nigeria produces in abundance.
He does not hug easily. He does not always know your friends’ names or remember your favourite colour. His tone of voice can be stern even when his intentions are tender. He communicates love not through words but through action, through sacrifice, through the relentless daily work of providing for people he would die for without hesitation.
He wakes before the house stirs and comes home after the children are already in bed. He eats last. He worries in silence. He prays quietly where nobody can hear him. And when something threatens his family, something in him shifts that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the deepest kind of devotion.
This is the Nigerian father’s love language. Service. Sacrifice. Presence, even when he seems distant.
What Nigerian Fathers Do Instead of Saying It
They pay the school fees. Even when they have to borrow, renegotiate, or go without something themselves — the school fees get paid. Because education is not optional in a Nigerian father’s vocabulary. It is the inheritance he is determined to pass on regardless of what else he cannot afford.
They fix things. The leaking roof. The broken fan. The car that should have been retired three years ago but cannot be retired because there is still a child in university and priorities are clear. Nigerian fathers fix things. It is their way of saying: I am still here. I am still holding this together.
They show up. To the graduation even if they never asked about the coursework. To the wedding even if they never discussed the relationship. To the hospital bed when everything else has failed. Nigerian fathers show up when it counts, sometimes without warning, sometimes without words, but there.
They discipline hard because they love harder. The strictness that frustrated us as children, that made us compare our fathers to our friends’ seemingly relaxed dads, was not cruelty. It was terror. The terror of a man who knows what an undisciplined life costs and refuses to let that cost land on his children if he can prevent it.
They carry the worry alone. Ask a Nigerian father how he is and he will say fine. Ask him again, and he will say fine again. What he will not tell you is that he has been doing calculations in his head since 4 am, moving money that does not yet exist from one column to another, trying to make the mathematics of a family work in an economy that is not cooperating. He carries this alone. Because that is what he was taught a man does.
The Generation That Did Not Know How to Say It
Our fathers grew up in a Nigeria where emotional expression was not a cultural priority. Their own fathers did not say it to them. The language of feelings was considered soft in environments that demanded hardness. Men who survived poverty, military governance, structural adjustment programmes, and the daily grind of providing in difficult conditions were not formed by a world that encouraged them to sit with their emotions and express them.
What they learned to do instead was work. And they worked. God knows they worked.
My father’s military discipline was not separated from his love. It was the shape his love took. The early morning wake-up calls, the strict standards for how chores were done, the non-negotiable expectations around behaviour and performance — all of it came from the same place. A man determined that his children would be equipped for a world he knew was unforgiving.
He was preparing us. That is what love looked like in that house.
What We Owe Them
This Father’s Day, perhaps what Nigerian children who grew up in homes like ours owe our fathers is not just gratitude but understanding.
Understanding that a man can be full of love and have no words for it. That discipline and devotion can live in the same body. That the father who never said the words but showed up every single day, paid every bill he could find a way to pay, and refused to let his family go without the things that mattered most, loved us with everything he had.
He just loved us in a language we had to grow up to learn to read.
And now that we can read it, the message is unmistakable.
It was always love. Every single day of it was love.
Happy Father’s Day to every Nigerian dad who showed up quietly, toiled without recognition, and built something worth building with his hands, his back, and his silence.
You are seen. You are honoured. And you are loved right back.
