Despite What an Ignorant, Privileged Foreign Woman Thinks
This American woman who moved to Nigeria shared how life has become amazing for her as a stay-at-home mother. She said she’s able to afford a house manager and a cleaner. Which is all good and well, because honestly, we love to hear such stories and know that despite all the ills, foreigners can be comfortable in our country. No foul, no shame.
But then she captioned her video, “Say what you want, but they love women here.” That single line changed everything. Nigerian women, including myself, pushed back, and rightly so. Yet she kept doubling down, pretending not to understand the criticism. At first, I thought she was being deliberately obtuse. Then I looked through her page and realized she wasn’t pretending afterall.
Despite the generous advice others gave her, she kept insisting she “said what she said.”
Without mincing words, I have to say, I have nothing but disdain for these kinds of visitors who land in countries plagued by human rights abuses, then have the audacity to romanticize their privilege as cultural insight. They underplay local suffering with stories funded by the small pocket change that buys them temporary royalty.
As I mentioned, the issue is not about her enjoying comfort or domestic help, but her caption, which wasn’t just about her personal experience. It’s her framing, the arrogance of universalizing a privilege-based experience and presenting it as cultural truth. When she wrote “Nigeria has turned me into the stress-free Black woman I deserve to be. Say what you want but they love women here,” she misrepresented social reality in one swoop..
The truth is what she’s experiencing is not gender equality but socioeconomic privilege. The “stress-free” life she’s describing is built on domestic labor that is cheap and abundant in Nigeria because of poverty and inequality. She, like many in Nigeria can afford staff because millions of Nigerian women cannot afford rest. The same women cleaning her home are the ones society neither protects nor values.
Her statement erases systemic misogyny in Nigeria. The country ranks extremely low on the Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum, 2024). Nigerian women continue to face gender-based violence, wage inequality, limited reproductive rights, and severe cultural restrictions. To claim “they love women in Nigeria” is not just tone-deaf, it is false.
What she calls freedom is simply insulation. She benefits from the same social inequalities that oppress the majority of local women, which makes her message feel deeply insulting to those of us who live that reality daily.
Her ignorance also perpetuates a distorted narrative for her Western audience. Many of her followers don’t understand the local context and will take her post at face value, that Nigeria has become a land that cherishes women. That is simply false. Personal freedom does not equal societal progress.
Her life may have improved, but that improvement rests on class advantage, not gender equality.
If Nigeria truly “loved women,” it would show in its leadership and laws. In sixty-five years of independence, not one woman has been elected governor. The only woman to hold the office, Virginia Etiaba, served just three months in 2006 after her boss was impeached.
Representation tells the same story. The National Assembly currently has 20 women out of 469 members just 4.2 percent. The highest number in history was 36 women in 2007. (Sources: National Assembly of Nigeria, NILDS Report 2024).
And beyond politics, the evidence of misogyny is everywhere. In parts of the South-East and Middle Belt, widows are still accused of killing their husbands through witchcraft or “spiritual” means. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the National Human Rights Commission have documented these abuses. Some widows face forced evictions, public humiliation, violence, and sometimes death.
I have lived this reality myself. I’ve been refused entry into multiple lounges and restaurants in Lagos and Abuja simply because I wasn’t accompanied by a man. I’ve travelled to 34 countries, and only in Nigeria have I ever been denied entry into a public space for being female. Many clubs in Abuja and Lagos still enforce “male accompaniment” policies till date, barring single women unless they arrive with a man. This isn’t speculation; it’s been reported by many Nigerian women, and of course BBC Africa and Premium Times.
Last year in Lagos, I was denied entry at a club until the bouncer overheard me speaking on the phone. The moment he caught a hint of an accent, his tone changed completely. Suddenly, I was welcome. That moment said everything about Nigeria’s obsession with foreignness and accents, the same classism that glorifies outsiders while degrading its own women.
Patriarchy is not a glitch in Nigeria, it is institutionalized in it’s laws, culture, and religion. According to the WEF Global Gender Gap Report (2024), Nigeria’s gender parity score remains among the lowest in the world, with vast gaps in political empowerment, economic participation, and health outcomes.
Nigerian society still normalizes misogyny and routinely blames women for men’s actions or misfortunes. The idea that “they love women here” collapses under hard data.
In the North, girls are still married off as minors under religious and customary laws, despite the Child Rights Act of 2003. Nationwide, over 30 percent of women have experienced physical violence since age 15 (Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, 2018). More than 40 percent never seek help due to stigma or lack of institutional support.
Even in professional spaces, harassment remains rampant. Every time I visit home, I test the system by pretending to job-hunt. Last year, I applied to five positions. Every single one ignored my qualifications and instead invited me to meet at a hotel. That is what women in Nigeria still face daily.
Of course, no one expects foreigners to know all of this or to bear our burdens. But the inequality, oppression, and injustice in Nigeria are so severe that ignorance becomes complicity. To live in Nigeria and claim not to see what is happening is not innocence, but plain moral blindness.
So yes, enjoy your stay, but don’t spread ignorance and call it experience. Don’t take a reality built on other women’s exhaustion, silence, and pain and romanticize it as freedom. Because the peace her and other foreign women enjoy in Nigeria exists because millions of Nigerian women have been taught to live without it.
After leaving the above comment, this Nigeria lady had this to say. The irony is loud on this one. She’s a supposed realtor selling billion-naira homes, yet trying to lecture people about how “Nigeria doesn’t revolve around poor people.” She’s literally making her living off the same inequality she’s denying exists.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) 2023 Multidimensional Poverty Index, 63 percent of Nigerians, 133 million people, live in multidimensional poverty. (Source: NBS, UNDP Nigeria, 2023).
Mind you, Nigeria hasn’t had a credible national census since the 1950s. Every attempt since then has been disputed or politically manipulated. So when the National Bureau of Statistics says 63 percent of Nigerians live in poverty, that figure is already a conservative estimate, the real number is likely even higher.
Lagos and Abuja together represent less than ten percent of Nigeria’s population. The “comfort” many flaunt online is a fragile illusion sustained by the labor of those who have none.
Her response, that Nigeria doesn’t revolve around poor peopl, perfectly illustrates how many Nigerians, once they manage to cross into the other side of privilege, become blind to structural inequality. It exposes how detached the small middle class and upper class have become from the country’s socioeconomic truth. They are blind to the structural rot that keeps them comfortable.
The cheapest property she advertises costs around ₦100 million, in a country where the new minimum wage is ₦70,000, and as of October 2025, many workers are still being paid ₦50,000 or less because their employers refuse to comply (Labour Ministry, October 2025). The homes she sells, priced between ₦100 million and ₦1.2 billion, are out of reach for over 99 percent of Nigerians, where the average annual income remains below ₦2 million.
And that’s the tragedy of it all. A foreign woman romanticizes her privilege and calls it love, while the local elite, cocooned in comfort, defends the illusion she created. Together, they erase the struggles of millions of women whose sweat oils the system that keeps them “stress-free.”
Nigeria does not love women. It loves what women endure. It loves their silence, their unpaid labor, their survival against all odds, and then uses their strength as proof that all is well. And those of us who have lived the truth will never let pretty lies, no matter who tells them, go unchallenged.
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