December is still a month away, but for many people the phone already knows.
A message arrives on a Tuesday afternoon. It begins with a greeting, moves gently through the health of everyone at home, and lands where you knew it would land. School fees. A hospital bill. Rent that is two months late. Sometimes it is not even a crisis, just the small, familiar "urgent 2k" that arrives so often it no longer feels like a request. It feels like weather.
There is a name for this now. People call it black tax: the regular money that working people send to parents, siblings, cousins and the wider family. The phrase came from South Africa, but the practice has lived in Nigerian homes for as long as anyone can remember. According to PiggyVest's 2023 Savings Report, as cited by the data publication Dataphyte, 83% of the income earners it surveyed said they pay it in some form.
In a BusinessDay essay on the subject, Oluyemi Adeosun put it in one sentence that many readers will feel in their chest: "The payslip belongs to one person; the obligations belong to a village."
Most conversations about black tax quickly split into two camps. One says: family is everything, and a good child does not count the cost. The other says: cut them off, protect your peace, you are not a bank. Both camps are arguing about money. I want to suggest that money is not the real subject. The real subject is design.
The One Who Made It
Every family has a story about who will rescue it. Often the story is told before the child is old enough to understand it. "This one is brilliant." "This one will take care of us." "When you finish school, our suffering will end." They say it with love, and often with sacrifice behind it. Parents skipped meals, sold land, borrowed from the cooperative, so that one child could go further than they did.
Then the child grows up, gets the job, and discovers that the story has quietly become a job description.
Nobody sat down and drew it. Nobody voted. But somewhere along the way, a family arrived at a structure in which one person carries most of the weight. And because it was built from love and need rather than from a plan, nobody thinks of it as a structure at all. It is just "how things are".
That is exactly what makes it dangerous. The most important structures in our lives are often the invisible ones.
What Architects Know About Single Columns
In building design, every load has to go somewhere. The weight of a roof, a floor, the people and furniture on it all of it travels down through beams and columns until it reaches the foundation and the ground. Engineers call this the load path.
A well-designed building spreads that load. Several columns share it. If one is damaged, the others can hold for a while, long enough for someone to notice and repair it.
A badly designed building puts too much on one point. It may stand for years. It may even look impressive. But it has no margin. When that one column fails, it does not fail alone. Everything it was holding comes down with it.
Now look again at the family where one son or one daughter is the column.
The arrangement can work for a long time, until the job ends, or the salary stops keeping up with prices, or illness arrives, or that person simply runs out of strength. Then the school fees stop, the rent goes unpaid, the hospital bill sits unsettled, and the whole household discovers that it was standing on a single point.
This is the reframe I think matters most. When the one who gives everything quietly burns out, it is not only a personal tragedy. It is a structural failure that hurts the very people they were trying to protect. Looking after yourself, in that light, is not selfishness. It is protecting the load-bearing wall of the family.
The Crack Nobody Is Allowed to Mention
Good engineers do something families rarely do. They listen for cracks.
A hairline crack in a column is information. It says: this element is under more stress than it was designed for. Ignore it, and it widens. Report it early, and it can be relieved.
In many families, the crack is not allowed to speak. The giver who says, "I am struggling this month," is heard as saying, "I have changed," or worse, "I no longer love you." So the giver learns to stay silent. They borrow to send money. They skip their own savings, their own medical check-up, their own rest. They smile on the phone and lie awake afterwards.
A column that cracks quietly is far more dangerous than one that says it is overloaded.
If you are the giver, ask yourself honestly:
"Have I ever told my family the real state of my finances?"
"Do they know what I am giving up to give?"
"Or have I protected them from the truth so well that they think the column is made of steel?"
You cannot ask people to share a load they do not know exists.
The Proverb We Only Read Halfway
Among the Igbo there is a saying, Onye aghala nwanne ya: let no one abandon their kin. It is one of the most beautiful ideas our culture carries. It says that we rise together, that no one should be left behind on the road.
But notice something about it. It does not say "let one person carry everyone". It says let no one be abandoned. And the person carrying everyone is also somebody's nwanne, somebody's brother or sister.
When a family drains one member until there is nothing left, it is not living the proverb. It is breaking it, just from the other direction. The giver has been left behind too. Not on the road to success, but on the road to rest, to savings, to a family of their own, to a life that is more than a channel for other people's needs.
Inherited wisdom is not wrong because it is old. But it can be read halfway. Part of growing up is going back to the stories we were given and reading them to the end.
Renovation, Not Demolition
The internet's favourite answer to black tax is demolition. Block the numbers. Stop answering. Disappear.
I understand why people reach for it. When a structure has hurt you, tearing it down feels like freedom. But for most of us, family is not a building we can simply walk out of. It holds our history, our names, the people who carried us first. And many of the people asking for help are not villains. They are parents who worked for decades without a pension, siblings in an economy that has not been kind to them, relatives who also inherited a design in which children are the retirement plan.
The better answer is the one architects use for old buildings that still matter: renovation. You keep what is sound. You strengthen what is weak. You redistribute the load.
In practice, that might look like this:
Decide your giving before the requests decide it for you. A fixed amount each month, set calmly, is a beam. A response to every message, set by guilt, is a crack waiting to spread.
Separate emergencies from patterns. A sudden hospital bill is an emergency. The same "urgent" request every month is a pattern, and patterns need a conversation, not another transfer.
Add more columns. Talk to siblings, cousins, and other earners. Can the load be shared, even unequally? Many families have never had this conversation simply because one person always said yes.
Build capacity, not just relief. Sometimes the most loving thing is to help a relative build a source of income rather than to fund the gap forever. That is harder, slower, and less immediately rewarding. It is also how a structure stops depending on a single point.
Tell the truth about your limits. Not with anger, and not with a lecture. Simply: "This is what I can carry. This is what I cannot."
None of this is a formula, and every family is different. But each step moves the weight off one point and spreads it across the structure, where it belongs.
Giving From Strength, Not From Fear
There is a difference between generosity and obligation, and it is not the amount. It is the place the giving comes from.
Some giving comes from fear. Fear of being called stingy. Fear of being the one who "changed" after making it. Fear that if you stop, you will discover you were loved only for what you sent.
Other giving comes from strength. You give because you choose to, from a life that is stable enough to sustain it, in a way you could keep up for years without breaking.
The first kind feels like a tax. The second feels like love. Often the money is the same. The structure underneath it is completely different.
Map Your Load Path
Here is an exercise worth doing before December's requests arrive. Take a sheet of paper and draw your family as a simple building.
- Draw a column for every person who earns money. Write their name beside it. Be honest about whose column is thick and whose is thin.
- Draw the loads above them: school fees, rent, medical costs, celebrations, the monthly small requests. Draw an arrow from each load to the column that actually carries it.
- Count the arrows. Is the weight shared, or does most of it travel down one column?
- Ask the hard question: if that column failed for three months, what would fall?
- Finally, mark one load you could move. Not remove, just move: to a sibling, to a plan, to a conversation you have been avoiding.
Then sit with these questions:
What story was I told about my role in this family?
Have I ever chosen that role, or did I simply inherit it?
What would it look like to love my family and still protect the column?
The Blueprint Can Change
Families are not buildings. They breathe, argue, forgive, and change. But like buildings, they rest on designs that someone, at some point, put in place. Many of those designs were made in hardship, by people doing their best with very little. They deserve our respect.
They do not deserve to stay unexamined.
If you are the one carrying the weight, you are allowed to look at the blueprint again. You are allowed to ask where the load is going and whether it can be shared. You are allowed to stay kind and still say "not this month".
The strongest family is not the one with a single heroic pillar. It is the one where the weight is shared, so that no one has to break to keep everyone else standing.
