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