“JUST BORN PIKIN, THIS MARRIAGE THING NO DEY WORK” — TIMAYA DON TALK HIS OWN, BUT IS HE WRONG?

“JUST BORN PIKIN, THIS MARRIAGE THING NO DEY WORK” — TIMAYA DON TALK HIS OWN, BUT IS HE WRONG? Timaya has entered the chat, and as usual, he did not come to whisper. The self-proclaimed Dem Mama crooner, one of Nigeria’s most unapologetically outspoken entertainers, has once again set the internet ablaze with the kind of raw, unfiltered commentary that only a man who has lived, loved, and lost can deliver with that level of conviction. His message to single men was simple, direct, and delivered with the confidence of someone who has clearly done the maths: forget marriage, just have your children, because this marriage thing — in his own words — no dey work.

Now before the married Twitter fingers begin to fly and the relationship counsellors start warming up their LinkedIn posts, let us pause and actually engage with what Timaya is saying, because beneath the Pidgin bravado and the provocateur packaging is a conversation Nigeria has been quietly having for years, just not loudly enough.Marriage in Nigeria is under pressure. Real, crushing, documented pressure. The divorce rates that elders swore could never happen here are happening. The domestic violence statistics that used to be swept under the rug are now spilling onto the streets, into the courts, and across social media timelines with heartbreaking regularity. Young men are watching their fathers’ generation — men who stayed, men who endured, men who were told that suffering in silence was strength — and many of them are quietly deciding they want no part of that script.

Timaya is not the first man to feel this way. He is just one of the few with a big enough platform and small enough filter to say it out loud.But here is where it gets complicated.The same man advising other men to skip marriage and just have children is himself a father who has spoken openly and emotionally about his love for his daughters. He has posted about them, celebrated them, wept for them publicly. And those children have a mother. Which raises the question that nobody in the comment section seems to want to ask: what about the woman in this equation? What about the mother of the “pikin” you are supposed to just born and move on from? Does she not deserve the stability, the legal protection, the dignity that a committed union — however imperfect — is supposed to provide?

Because here is the truth that Timaya’s soundbite conveniently skips over: children do not raise themselves in a vacuum. They grow up in environments shaped by the choices adults make about commitment, responsibility, and presence. A child born outside of a stable structure is not automatically free — in many cases, that child inherits the instability that the parents were too proud or too wounded to resolve. That said, Timaya is not entirely wrong when he points at the institution itself and raises an eyebrow. Marriage in Nigeria has become, for many, less a union of love and partnership and more a performance of social expectation — a ceremony you throw for other people’s Instagram, a certificate you acquire because your mother said so, a contract entered without honest conversation about money, fidelity, ambition, or incompatibility. Men and women are walking into marriages completely unprepared, sustained by nothing but hope and jollof rice, and then acting surprised when the whole thing collapses three years later in bitterness and legal fees. So is the problem marriage itself? Or is the problem how Nigerians approach it?

Timaya chose chaos when he could have chosen nuance. But in a country where the nuanced voices are drowned out by noise, sometimes it takes a Port Harcourt boy with a microphone and zero apologies to crack the conversation open.Whether you agree with him or not, one thing is certain — the conversation he started is one Nigeria needed to have. The institution of marriage is not above scrutiny. And any society too fragile to examine its own traditions is a society that has confused culture with truth.

Just do not take relationship advice from a man in a music video without asking yourself first what he left out.