Big Brother Naija Is Revealing Nigeria’s Sex Education Problem 

Big Brother Naija Season 11 is well underway with the usual drama, alliances, arguments, and romantic entanglements that have made the show a reliable mirror of Nigerian social life. This month, however, one conversation stood out for a reason that had very little to do with the usual reality TV drama.

One of the male housemates, Gerald, was talking with Kamsy when their conversation shifted to reproduction. Kamsy said that women’s eggs have DNA, but Gerald disagreed. 

“No, only sperm has DNA,” he said. “Those are the children. You women are the containers. You don’t have life in you, we’re the life. We give you that life until it is ready to be born.”

The instinctive reaction might be disbelief. How does a grown man not understand the basic biology of reproduction? Or perhaps it is outrage at hearing a woman reduced to a “container” for a man’s life. But the more uncomfortable question is what Gerald’s comments say about the society that produced him. How many Nigerian adults have grown up with just as little understanding of their own bodies, reproduction and sex? How many have been taught enough to know the difference between fact and fiction, but never enough to question the myths they were raised with? Gerald’s comments are not simply the ignorance of one man. They are a reflection of a much wider problem with how Nigeria teaches, discusses and understands sex.

Nigerian society has long struggled to teach people about sex, their bodies, or reproduction. Nigeria is a deeply conservative society where conversations about sex are often seen as inappropriate until people are old enough to make consequential decisions about it. Children are expected to somehow understand their bodies without anyone actually explaining it to them. Teenagers are warned against sex without necessarily being taught what sex involves. Adults, many of whom grew up under the same restrictions, are then left to piece together whatever information they can find about sex.

Gerald’s comment is a particularly extreme example of what that ignorance can produce. On national television, a full grown man referred to women as “containers”, apparently without understanding that this was an insult or even a particularly controversial position. He genuinely believes that women contribute nothing biologically to the creation of life. 

This conversation is bigger than Gerald. Ignorance is a significant part of misogyny. It is difficult to separate the belief that women are naturally inferior from the systems that teach people very little about women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive health, while also spreading cultural messages about women’s supposed inferiority.

Nigeria remains a deeply patriarchal society, and the rules of that patriarchy are taught from childhood. Women are expected to act in certain ways, take on specific roles and submit to male authority. Their bodies are simultaneously controlled and sexualised. While women’s sexuality is closely policed, male sexuality is often treated as inevitable, natural. These contradictions have real consequences.

They show up in the way people talk about women, discuss sexual violence, and even understand relationships. Big Brother Naija has repeatedly provided an accidental case study. 

In Season 6, housemates Sammie and Angel’s volatile relationship became one of the season’s major storylines. Full of arguments, jealousy, and emotional abuse, it became a source of entertainment for millions of viewers. In Season 5, Uzo’s interactions with Nengi raised questions around consent and disregard for boundaries. When Hermes revealed during Season 7 that he was polyamorous and had two girlfriends outside the house, the reaction from several corners of the Nigerian audience was scandalised shock.

These moments show what Nigerian audiences are willing to watch but not discuss. There is enormous interest in sexual behaviour, but palpable discomfort with actually talking about the concepts that should govern it: consent, boundaries, contraception, reproductive health, sexual orientation, pleasure, and bodily autonomy. That discomfort is fostered from the earliest stages of socialisation.

Nigeria has historically struggled to provide comprehensive sexuality education in schools. The goal of such education is to give young people the information they need to make informed decisions about their bodies and their health, yet conversations around sex education in Nigeria have repeatedly been met with suspicion from parents, religious groups, and policymakers. The argument is often that teaching children about sex will encourage them to become sexually active.

In 2022, the Federal Government directed the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council to remove sex education from the Basic Education Curriculum. That decision is a striking example of the country’s discomfort with confronting the subject directly. This creates a strange contradiction. Nigerian children are expected to grow to become sexually responsible adults, but they get very little structured information about sex. As they grow up, they learn from the internet, popular culture, religion, friends, and rumours instead.

The Nigerian media does little to resolve this problem. Our discomfort with sex is reflected in the way sexual relationships are represented on screen. Sex is often either treated as something scandalous or used as a device for titillation. Even Nollywood, which has become more willing to depict sexual relationships over time, has historically operated within the limits of a highly conservative audience.

For decades, Nigerian films largely avoided explicit depictions of sex. When sex did appear, women were frequently positioned as objects of desire: the seductress, the prostitute, the “bad girl”. The problem with these representations is not that women are portrayed as sexual beings. It is that sexuality is often stripped of the layers that make a person human. Women simply become bodies, temptations or moral lessons. Their sexuality is something to be consumed, condemned or controlled.

That kind of thinking makes Gerald’s description of women as “containers” less surprising. The language may be crude, but the underlying idea is familiar: that a woman’s body exists primarily in relation to what a man wants from it. 

When formal education and popular culture leave those gaps, religion often becomes one of the other places Nigerians turn to for explanations about sex, gender, and the family. Christianity and Islam are largely central to how people understand morality and gender, but the issue with this is that some interpretations of religious doctrine have reinforced rigid ideas about male authority and female submission.

Christian teachings around male headship, for example, are often distorted into the idea that men possess a natural authority over women simply because they are men. Even the creation story is sometimes invoked to support this hierarchy. According to Genesis, God put Adam into a deep sleep, took a part of his side, traditionally translated as a rib, and used it to create Eve. When Adam saw her, he described her as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” These teachings have contributed to a larger worldview in which women are understood as secondary.

Biology, of course, tells a very different story. An egg is a reproductive cell containing genetic material. A sperm cell is also a reproductive cell containing genetic material. Human reproduction involves genetic contributions from both the egg and sperm. Gerald’s understanding of reproduction is not merely inaccurate; it is a reflection of what happens when a society spends years telling people that sex is too shameful to discuss, that children should not be given information about their bodies, that women should be submissive, and that sexuality is primarily a moral issue rather than a subject that requires knowledge. 

Eventually, ignorance follows an individual into adulthood and, sometimes, it gets a microphone and a big screen. There is nothing particularly amusing about this.

Nigeria needs to become much more comfortable with teaching people the facts about their bodies. Children need age-appropriate information and adults need to be able to have conversations about sex without treating every discussion as an invitation to immorality. Because when society refuses to inform, other channels will. People grow up to construct their understanding of sex from whatever fragments of culture, religion, pornography, gossip and misinformation they happen to encounter. And when those fragments are misogynistic, ignorance becomes particularly dangerous.

Gerald’s comments may have been made in the Big Brother Naija house, but the conviction behind them did not begin there. Nigerian society produced the environment in which a man could arrive at that conclusion and be surprised that anyone thought it was absurd. 

This is the part worth paying attention to: the problem is not that one man on a reality show got basic biology wrong. It is that Nigeria has spent so much time refusing to have honest conversations about sex that ignorance can still pass for knowledge, even when it is being broadcast to millions of people.