By ADESOLA AYO-ADERELE
‘Black Tax’ is trending on X [formerly Twitter], with Nigerian footballer Mikel Obi dissing his relations, and other people, mostly Africans, sharing their experiences in that regard.
The narrations are better imagined than experienced.
I’ll be forever grateful to our parents. Despite their modest means, they were 100% responsible for our upkeep until we each graduated from universities.
I’m the fourth of six kids. By the time I was studying for my ‘A’ Levels at The Poly Ibadan, my parents’ first child was already a chartered accountant with a good job.
By the time I entered the uni, the second child already had a Master’s and was a lecturer.
My older sister had just finished her OND and was on a year-long internship at First Bank.
Together or individually, they could afford my N107 annual tuition, and my N100 monthly allowance, but our parents never saddled them with it.
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Indeed, all of us six kids lived with them until we mostly left home on account of marriage, eating free food and living rent-free, even after we had started working.
Yes, siblings can help one another, but it becomes an aberration for parents to breed irresponsibly and then transfer their gross irresponsibility to their own children or anyone whosoever.
As I mingled with people later in life and started seeing how unconscionable parents make their kids to be responsible for the upkeep of siblings, cousins, etc., I marvelled.
A friend told me how she and her husband were responsible for the upkeep of 24 persons in their extended families.
A colleague’s dad was a polygamist with four wives and numerous kids. The colleague told me that, as the first child or first male, he was responsible for educating all his dad’s kids.
Sometimes, it’s the son in-law that becomes his wife’s family ATM, all in the name of proving some puerile point that he is a man!
Of course, my conversations with such people always end up in disagreement because it is the most senseless obligation anyone can accept from any wayward parent and I can never see reason with it, no matter how hard anyone tries to convince me.
I’ve seen young ladies sell their bodies for money all because they’re responsible (that bastardised word!) for so-called training of their own siblings.
Many of these overly materialistic young men who go into money rituals and fraud are driven by rapacious parents who expect their sons to not only train the siblings but to also build houses for them, buy cars for them, pay for chieftaincy titles, send them on ‘holy’ pilgrimages, and more.
Ironically, black tax doesn’t end. When you finish doing it for your siblings, the same set of people would position their own kids to either get same from your own kids or, if they consider you rich enough, you should also continue the servitude to their own kids. After all, you’re the first born or the first male or the only male!
As far as I’m concerned, self-preservation is the first law of life. No one should subscribe to any such demand from any parent.
Yes, siblings can help one another, but it becomes an aberration for parents to breed irresponsibly and then transfer their gross irresponsibility to their own children or anyone whosoever.
I never ever can grasp what such relationship is all about, sorry.
