What Kind of Africa Are We Leaving Our Children? The Moral Crisis Beneath Our Crisis of Governance
Sunward: Essays on Coherence, Meaning, and Human Flourishing
There is a particular sadness in returning to a family house after many years away.
The mango tree is taller than you remember. The rooms seem smaller. A window no longer closes properly. Rain has found its way through one corner of the roof. There is a crack running down a wall that everyone has learned to walk past.
And then you notice the children.
They are running through the same rooms where you once played. They know nothing about who built the house, which repairs were postponed, what money was spent elsewhere, or which quarrels prevented something from being fixed when it still could have been.
They simply live there.
When it rains, they get wet.
That is the innocence-and vulnerability-of inheritance.
Children do not choose the world they inherit. They simply wake up inside whatever the adults before them have built, repaired-or neglected.
This is true of houses. It is also true of countries.
A child born in Nigeria today did not create the national debt. She did not weaken the schools, neglect the hospitals or make entire communities afraid of nightfall. She did not steal public money or create the political culture into which she was born.
Yet she will live inside its consequences.
This is the part of Africa’s governance crisis we have not named clearly enough.
Nigeria offers one especially revealing case.
It is not only political or economic.
It is an intergenerational moral crisis.
Pope Francis describes intergenerational solidarity as a basic question of justice and asks what kind of world we want to leave to those who come after us, “to children who are now growing up” (Laudato si’, 159–160). For Africa, that question is not abstract.
We are deciding, by what we repair and what we tolerate, what kind of house our children will inherit.
What Children Cannot Fix
It would be unfair to blame parents for every hardship their family experiences.
Good people fall upon difficult times. Jobs disappear. Illness comes. Economies fail. Parents sometimes work themselves to exhaustion and still cannot give their children what they had hoped to provide.
Poverty itself is not a moral failure.
But imagine that the roof is leaking. The parent knows it. There is money for the repair, but the money is repeatedly spent elsewhere while the children continue sleeping beneath the leak.
Now the question has changed.
The problem is no longer simply hardship.
Responsibility has been abandoned.
That distinction matters in public life.
Children cannot vote themselves into better schools. They cannot build functioning hospitals, secure their communities, provide electricity or decide that public money should serve the public good.
Adults must do these things.
That is the burden of adulthood and the moral weight of leadership.
A budget eventually becomes a classroom. A government contract becomes a road. Healthcare spending becomes medicine in someone’s hand. Security policy becomes a farmer returning safely from his field.
Or none of these things happens.
Every serious decision made in the rooms of power eventually arrives at somebody’s kitchen table.
And so does every serious failure.
The Fracture Beneath the Politics
There is a name for what happens when those who possess power today repeatedly consume, weaken or neglect what those coming after them will need in order to live.
Intergenerational moral fracture.
It is the breaking of responsibility between those who make today’s decisions and those who must inhabit tomorrow’s consequences.
It is not the same as policy failure. Governments make mistakes. Leaders miscalculate. Necessary reforms can be painful.
The deeper fracture begins when suffering has lasted so long that people begin adjusting themselves to what should never have become normal.
Another killing becomes another headline. Corruption becomes something people joke about because outrage itself is exhausting. Young people stop asking how they might help build their country and begin asking how quickly they can leave it.
But we should be careful about calling this apathy.
A mother who has worried for years about feeding her children is not apathetic.
The graduate who has submitted application after application is not apathetic.
The family that has endured insecurity, inflation, broken promises and failing public services has not necessarily stopped caring.
Sometimes people stop expecting.
There is a difference.
Perhaps the deeper wound comes when suffering has lasted so long that decent people begin protecting themselves by no longer expecting anything to change.
Hope can become tired.
Plans grow smaller. Trust retreats. People learn not to expect institutions to work. Parents stop promising children things they are no longer sure they can provide. A young person learns that ambition without connections may lead nowhere.
Eventually, an entire society can begin lowering its expectations simply to protect itself from disappointment.
That is not indifference.
It is exhausted hope.
And a nation should be deeply troubled when its people begin to lose the ability to imagine a shared tomorrow.
When Numbers Reach the Dinner Table
Nigeria makes this painfully visible.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration has undertaken major economic reforms. In June 2026, the International Monetary Fund reported that reforms over the preceding three years had improved macroeconomic outcomes and strengthened resilience. That progress should be acknowledged.
But there is another place from which to measure a country.
The dinner table.
The same IMF assessment reported that poverty had reached 63 percent under the national poverty line and estimated that 27 million Nigerians faced food insecurity in the second half of 2025. It also warned that conditions remained difficult for many Nigerians. Insecurity remains part of ordinary life in many communities.
These realities do not live primarily in reports.
They live in houses.
A mother reduces her own portion so the children can eat.
A father waits until everyone has gone to bed before deciding which bill will not be paid this month.
A graduate watches another friend leave the country.
A farmer wonders whether returning to his field is worth the possibility of not returning home.
And somewhere a child learns to study her mother’s face before asking for something that costs money.
This is what statistics can conceal.
Economic hardship enters relationships. It changes conversations around the table. It postpones weddings, education and medical care. It turns ordinary decisions into sources of anxiety.
It also changes how people imagine the future.
Serious governments sometimes have to make painful decisions, and leadership cannot be judged by immediate comfort alone. But reform must eventually arrive somewhere human-in the cost of food, the safety of a journey, medicine when someone is sick, work that restores dignity, and the possibility of imagining next year without fear.
Economic recovery is not complete when the numbers improve. It becomes credible when people can begin to imagine a life again.
Policy must eventually become human.
Otherwise, the roof may look excellent on paper while rain is still falling on the children’s beds.
But the Politicians Came From Somewhere
It would be comforting to stop here and blame Abuja.
Presidents, governors, legislators and public officials deserve rigorous scrutiny. Power carries responsibility because decisions made by a few can shape the lives of millions.
But politicians come from among us.
They learn from what our families, schools, churches and communities praise. They also notice what we are willing to excuse.
A politician who steals public money has failed morally. But something has also gone wrong when his community welcomes him home with music because he returned with a portion of what he stole.
We see the same fracture when ethnic loyalty matters more than competence, when we condemn corruption in our opponents but explain it away in our friends, or when religious leaders become too dependent upon political access to say what truth requires.
The leaking roof is not always somebody else’s roof.
Elections matter enormously. But elections alone cannot heal Africa.
We also have to ask what kind of people we are becoming.
Then Jesus Called a Child
The disciples once came to Jesus with a very adult question:
Who is the greatest?
Human beings have never stopped asking it.
Jesus does something unexpected.
He calls a child and places the child among them.
Suddenly the argument about greatness has a face.
The child says nothing. The child does not need to.
Jesus has taken someone with almost no social power and placed that person at the centre of a conversation about power.
When Jesus wants to teach adults what power is for, he places someone vulnerable in the middle.
That is a difficult Gospel for any society.
What happens to the person who cannot repay us, promote us, make a political donation or protect our position?
The child cannot lobby.
Generations not yet born cannot protest.
The Nigerian child of 2046 cannot appear before today’s National Assembly and plead, “Please do not leave this for us.”
Future Africans cannot demand that we stop handing them damaged institutions.
They must depend upon something they cannot enforce.
Our conscience.
Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ makes the matter more demanding still: what is done to “the least of these” is received as something done to him (Mt 25:40).
The hungry child is therefore never merely somebody else’s child. The frightened family is not simply a statistic. The poor are not an unfortunate side effect of policy.
Christ has placed himself among them.
The Christian question cannot therefore be only: Does this policy work?
We must also ask:
Whom does it leave beneath the leaking roof?
A Church Free Enough to Speak
This is why Africa needs the prophetic voice of the Church.
Not a Church belonging to a political party, nor clergy whose access to power makes truth difficult to speak. And not a Christianity so preoccupied with individual breakthroughs that it fails to hear communities breaking apart.
Africa needs a Church close enough to suffering to recognize it and free enough to name it.
But the Church must ask the same questions of herself.
Do our schools form conscience as well as ambition? Do our parishes connect faith with citizenship? Can we speak as clearly to politicians we know as to those we oppose? Do our own institutions practise the accountability we demand from government?
Prophetic witness loses its power when we demand from others what we excuse in ourselves.
The Christian claim is remarkably simple.
The hungry child, the frightened farmer, the unemployed graduate and the forgotten widow possess dignity not because government grants it, but because God has already given it.
Christian faith asks us to build a society in which the dignity God has given people is not contradicted every morning by the conditions we ask them to endure.
The Inheritance Test
Perhaps there is one question worth carrying from this essay.
Before approving a policy, spending public money, accepting a bribe, excusing incompetence, remaining silent before wrongdoing-or simply deciding what kind of success we teach our children to admire-ask:
If our children must inherit the consequences of this decision, will we still call it good?
Call it the Inheritance Test.
It will not settle every disagreement about economics, security or development.
It does something simpler.
It puts the child back into the room.
And once the child is there, certain questions become harder to avoid.
What are we handing on?
What have we repaired?
What have we simply learned to walk past?
The true measure of a generation is not simply the country it inherited, but the country it makes possible for people it will never live to meet.
When the Rains Come
I do not believe Africa is doomed.
I have seen too much ordinary goodness to believe that.
It is there in the teacher who keeps showing up, the nurse who stays a little longer, the honest civil servant nobody celebrates, the priest who refuses the envelope, the parent who still teaches a child that character matters.
Africa does not lack good people.
Our harder task is to build institutions in which goodness does not have to be heroic.
The work of a healthy society is to turn private goodness into public habit.
Schools should still work after a good headmaster retires. Hospitals should care for people who know nobody important. Courts should allow the poor to stand before the powerful without already knowing the verdict. Churches should remain truthful when truth becomes inconvenient.
That work will take longer than one election.
Perhaps longer than one generation.
Parents understand this.
You repair what you can. Replace the window. Strengthen the beam. Patch the roof.
Sometimes you plant a tree knowing you will never sit beneath its shade.
And then, one day, the children come home.
They are no longer children.
They walk through rooms we once occupied.
They notice what we repaired.
They notice what we left broken.
And when the rains come, may they discover that the generation before them loved them enough to mend the roof.
