The silent strain of Nigerian masculinity

It’s a Sunday afternoon in Ikeja. A group of men gather under a zinc-roofed kiosk, playing draughts and sipping sachets of gin as Afrobeats pulses from a nearby loudspeaker. Laughter erupts often, loud and rowdy, but beneath the noise is a quiet agreement: emotions don’t belong here. There are stories, sure, of jobs lost, children sick, debts looming, but they’re folded into jokes, buried beneath banter. Nobody names their sadness. Nobody cries out for help. “E go better” is the cover story, and sayo is the coping mechanism. The table shakes with laughter, but the pain never leaves. The game continues.

In boardrooms, mechanic shops, and WhatsApp groups, a similar pattern emerges: Nigerian men, from the polished elite to the gritty streetwise, learn early that silence is safer than vulnerability. Strength, men have been taught, is measured not in emotional honesty, but in how long you can pretend nothing touches you. Consequently, beneath the sharp tailoring or oil-stained overalls, many are unravelling quietly.

But unravelling, all the same.

The Unspoken Epidemic

Nigeria has one of the highest suicide rates in Africa, and men account for the overwhelming majority of completed suicides. In cities like Lagos, Kano, or Port Harcourt, the pressures of providing in a volatile economy combine with cultural expectations of stoicism. The result?A mental health crisis that goes largely undiagnosed, untreated, and buried under bravado.

According to a WHO report, over 60 million Nigerians suffer from mental health conditions, yet less than 10% receive any formal care. The system is patchy at best. For men, the barriers aren’t just structural; they’re deeply psychological. To seek help is to admit weakness, and for many, their conditioning doesn’t just frown on that, it forbids it.

In Nigeria, manhood is often a performance, the appearance of holding things together, no matter how heavy they get. You don’t speak of vulnerable issues in real time; you narrate it later, if at all, once you’ve made it out the other side. Preferably with a laugh, Preferably, in retrospect.

Hustle as Hiding Place

In Nigeria’s hustle economy, the male identity is stitched into productivity. From the roadside tailor in Yaba to the startup founder in Lekki, worth is measured in motion: what you’re chasing, what you’re building, what you’re putting on the table.

So men keep going. The mechanic in Mushin who jokes through a cough that won’t go away, because illness is a luxury he can’t afford. The bolt driver who drives 14 hours a day on energy drinks and paracetamol, saying ‘man must hustle’ even when his hands shake on the steering wheel. It’s also the banker in Victoria Island who downs painkillers between meetings, performing competence with tired eyes. Across classes, the script is the same: don’t break. Don’t stop.

They overwork, overdrink, overspend: not always to impress, but often to escape. From the weight of expectations. From the quiet ache of inadequacy.

There’s no space for fragility, not at home, not among friends, not even in religious circles, where male centred prayers are for open doors and financial favour, not for peace of mind or rest. It’s always breakthrough over breakdown.

Society applauds this. As, the man who ‘holds it down’ while breaking internally is lauded as a pillar, while the one who dares to reach out for help is often pitied, whispered about, or worse, openly mocked. Emotional language is feminized. Sensitivity is scorned. Even in elite circles, where therapy is trendier, many men treat mental health like PR, something to signal but never really sit with.

Patriarchy’s Prisoners

The irony is glaring: the same patriarchal system that gives men dominance in public life often robs them of inner life. While men are handed authority, they are denied the emotional tools to wield it healthily. They become fathers who cannot listen, bosses who cannot apologize, partners who cannot be vulnerable. Power becomes a shell.

And the damage spreads, to wives, to children, to workplaces, to our streets.

Because when emotionally stunted men are tasked with leading families, firms, or nations, the result is not stability. It’s volatility with a loud voice. It’s unprocessed trauma turned into policy. It’s the mental health crisis we don’t name until it spills into violence, addiction, or collapse.

What Healing Might Look Like

The encouragement is that it doesn’t have to stay this way. Across Nigeria, signs of change flicker.

Somewhere in Abuja, a group of men gather weekly for unrecorded conversations about grief, pressure, and self-worth. No preaching, no posturing, just presence. In Lagos, young therapists are building clinics and content for black men, using pidgin, humour, and honesty to make vulnerable expressions less alien. Online, anonymous pages give men space to vent without judgement.

For me, my lifeline encounter came just after university, fresh-faced, working in Yaba, trying to find my way in the chaos of Lagos life. It wasn’t therapy in the technical sense, but it felt close. I got introduced to a mens group. A handful of us, mostly strangers back then, would gather outside Ozone Cinemas. We were a Christian fellowship on paper, but those meetings became something else entirely. In that unlikely corner of Lagos, I spoke honestly for the first time, not just faithfully. We shared what we couldn’t say elsewhere: stress, shame, family expectations, the fear of not measuring up. It was clumsy sometimes, but it was real. And in a society where men are taught to bottle everything, even that imperfect space felt like freedom.

These are not mainstream yet, but they are crucial. The path to healing, for Nigerian men, won’t begin with lectures or imported language. It will begin with listening. With reframing strength as self-awareness. With building spaces, real and virtual, where men can be whole, not just heroic.

Conclusion: From Silence to Structure

This isn’t just a personal problem. It’s structural. A country that does not give its men permission to feel cannot expect them to lead with clarity or love. A culture that punishes softness will keep breeding hardness: in homes, in politics, in hearts.

Mental health for Nigerian men is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. For families. For futures. For peace.

The task before us is not just to medicate, but to re educate. To dismantle the myths of masculinity that turn boys into bottlers and men into martyrs. To teach, through language, through policy, through community, that prioritizing your mental well being is not weakness. It is work.

And it is overdue.

Eyesan Toritseju is a Lagos-based strategist and cultural commentator. In his writing, especially through his column, Cosmopolitan Nigeria, he examines how African societies confront the legacies of their past while reimagining identity, influence, and progress in the present.