18/10/2025
Do you know why some men are afraid to empower their wives?
Tunde wore his pride like armor. He would rather starve on principle than see his wife, Amina, count her own money. “If you start to earn, you go become big woman,” he would sneer, voice low and dangerous, as if a little success could poison a marriage. He forbade her from taking a sewing course, from selling akara at the weekend market, from joining the small traders’ WhatsApp group where women traded ideas and capital. He told her that a woman with money was a woman with no respect — his respect. That fragile ego of his felt safer when she was dependent, silent, small.
Amina endured. She bore the jibes and the clipped edges of his laugh when she mentioned a plan. She woke before dawn, cooked, washed, and mended clothes for neighbours to keep the lights on. When she placed a few naira in a hidden tin, he found ways to “borrow” it and never returned. He drank it away or spent it on pride: a new shirt to impress colleagues, a quick trip to the bar to remind himself he was still the man in the room. Sometimes he would take her small gains and throw them back at her like a lesson: “I will finish every kobo you keep,” he bragged. Some nights she swallowed the humiliation and slept with her back to him, counting not blessings but the cracks in a life she had stitched together.
But Amina had planted something that neither his rage nor his theft could uproot: she raised her children to value learning. She poured her last strength into ensuring one child, Temi, finished secondary school and found a scholarship abroad. Years later, when Temi sent plane tickets and an envelope of surprise cash, Amina stepped into an airport with a quiet, terrible dignity the world could not take away. Abroad, she learned, traded, built a small business, and sent money home — not to prove him wrong, but to keep a promise she had made to herself: that her toil would breathe.
Tunde watched her leave and, for the first time, saw clearly the ruin his ego had made. He sat alone in a house that still smelled of her soap and felt the hollow of choices. The villagers, who once pitied Amina, now pitied him, not because she had failed, but because he had failed her. In that emptiness he learned humility, the bitter teacher his pride would never teach. He came to regret every stolen coin, every insult. He learned, too late, that empowering a woman was not a threat but an investment.
Let me be clear and emphatic: when I say men should empower their wives — let them work, learn a trade, start buying-and-selling — I am not saying this so any man can exploit that labor. Empowering your wife is not permission to finish her money, to steal from her, or to use her earnings as proof of control. Unfortunately, some men do that — they drain, belittle, and take. That is not empowerment. True empowerment is generous, protective of dignity, and built to lift the whole family. Empower her because when she rises, the home rises too and not because you want to dominate her freedom.
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-Chat With VA
