For years, women have dominated the public discourse about relationships, self-worth, and empowerment. From the rise of feminism to the explosion of social media influencers teaching women how to “secure the bag” or “never settle,” the narrative has largely been female-driven. But now, there is a shift. The boys have arrived on the scene. And they’re loud.
Enter Emmanuel Obruste, better known as Geh Geh, a 29-year-old Nigerian who has styled himself “Africa’s most experienced financial coach” and the founder of the Geh Geh University of Wisdom and Understanding.
He is not just dishing out investment tips; he is packaging an entire philosophy of masculinity dressed up in cash, dominance, and detachment. With over 2.4 million followers on TikTok and more than a million on Instagram, Geh Geh has become a kind of Nigerian Andrew Tate, except with more pidgin, more swagger, and the same appetite for controversy.
On the surface, this looks like balance. For years, figures like Saidaboj, who once infamously declared that a man needs to give her ₦20 million before she can consider him, monopolised relationship chatter online. The loud message to women was: know your worth, raise your standards, and let men pay the price.
Now, Geh Geh comes swinging from the other corner, telling men: stop being “mumus,” stop spending recklessly on women, and for heaven’s sake, don’t repair her father’s leaking roof if she’s not investing back in you. In short, he says, treat women as disposable.
But here is the real question: Is any of this helping anybody?
The truth is, this tug-of-war, Saidaboj screaming from one end, Geh Geh barking from the other, is less about empowerment and more about spectacle.
It is a new theatre of the absurd where both genders are reduced to caricatures: women as gold-diggers who see men as ATMs, men as stone-hearted hustlers who must avoid being scammed by love. And somewhere in the middle, real human relationships, built on trust, sacrifice, and vulnerability, are dying a slow death.
What makes this more dangerous is the audience. It is not the seasoned 40-year-old married man with four children scrolling for entertainment. It is the 17-year-old boy in secondary school who has barely started shaving, hanging on Geh Geh’s every word.
It is the 19-year-old girl in her first year of university who believes her worth is tied to how much a man deposits in her account. These young people are growing up with warped expectations: men thinking affection is weakness, women thinking affection is a transaction.
To be clear, Geh Geh is not wrong about everything. There is sense in telling men to have self-worth, to avoid being financially exploited, and to focus on building wealth instead of squandering it to impress. But the problem is in the delivery. Wrapped in vulgar language, spiced with disdain for women, and presented as a gospel of ruthlessness, the message gets muddied. What could have been advice on self-respect becomes an anthem for bitterness.
And bitterness sells. Geh Geh’s recent TikTok live reportedly raked in over $30,000 in viewer gifts, with more than 170,000 people tuned in. That is not just influence, which is currency. The more outrageous he gets, the more men cheer, the more women clap back, the more his brand grows. Social media thrives on conflict, and Geh Geh has mastered how to feed the beast.
But let’s pause and think. Where does this road lead? Andrew Tate’s rise in the West has shown us one possible trajectory. He went from flashy influencer to global misogynist-in-chief, now battling legal troubles while millions of boys idolise him as their role model. Nigeria may now be nurturing its own version.
The tragedy is that instead of raising healthier men, we may just be raising angrier men —men who see women as enemies rather than partners.
On the flip side, the Saidaboj model isn’t doing women any favours either. When young women are told that love is measured in millions, not character, they, too, fall into the same trap of shallowness. The result is a generation of young people who can talk endlessly about gender “value” but cannot sustain a healthy relationship beyond Instagram reels.
The thing is that relationships have always been messy, requiring compromise, patience, and sometimes sacrifice. Our parents and grandparents, without all these TED Talk-style influencers, managed to raise families, weather poverty, and build lasting unions. Of course, not every marriage was perfect, but the fabric of society was held together by something deeper than clout and cash. Today, that fabric is torn, replaced by soundbites and toxic quotes.
The uncomfortable truth is that neither Saidaboj’s transactional feminism nor Geh Geh’s cutthroat masculinity is a solution. Both are distractions. They keep us locked in a pointless gender war, while the real issues, unemployment, poor education, crumbling values, and broken family systems, go unaddressed.
And so, while Geh Geh’s university of “wisdom and understanding” may be trending, what our society really needs is not another internet prophet with millions of followers. What we need is a return to balance, where self-worth is not tied to bank transfers, where masculinity is not defined by cold detachment, and where femininity is not reduced to entitlement.
Until then, we will keep raising young men who think love is weakness, and young women who think love must be bought. And in the end, everyone loses.
