Nigeria, April 30 -- I have seen professors whose children never made it into the university or could not pass their O-levels. I have seen devoted teachers who poured their entire existence into shaping other people's children, yet somehow could not replicate that same success at home. I have seen pastors and clerics preach modesty, discipline, and moral restraint, only for their own lives, or those of their families to unfold in ways that sharply contradict the very doctrines they defend. In moments like these, one is forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: life resists neat formulas. It refuses to behave like a predictable equation where one plus one must always equal two.

As a child, I remember an uncle whose confidence in the fut...