Once upon a time in the Nigerian entertainment jungle, long before social media turned everyone into part-time investigative journalists, the idea of a “baby mama” was a scandal so hot it could fry plantain on its own. In those days, if an artist got entangled in such a situation, the entire PR team would assemble like the Avengers to ensure not even a whisper slipped into the press. It was damage control on steroids.
Then came the era of Innocent Idibia, popularly known as Tuface, our industry’s unofficial chairman of “population expansion.” The moment people began counting his baby mamas, society gasped collectively. It was fresh. It was shocking. It was gist and, quite frankly, it was the beginning of a cultural shift nobody saw coming.
Fast-forward to today, and oh, how the tables have not just turned, they’ve spun, flipped, and broken their legs. The modern entertainer doesn’t need a diamond-certified album or a global tour to attract the “baby mama ministries.” Just a sprinkle of social media fame, a few thousand streams on digital platforms, one or two viral clips, and boom, applications start rolling in from interested “female stakeholders” ready to contribute to the artiste’s family tree. Some even wear it like a badge of honor: “Yes, I am carrying the child of a star. Please clap.”
Now, before you ask for statistics, let’s be guided. There’s no official census telling us how many entertainers have contributed generously to the baby mama economy in the last decade. No neat pie chart. No percentages. No infographic with smiling emojis, but anecdotally? Let’s just say if you remove Burna Boy, one of the few who has escaped that particular narrative, the list of Nigerian male artists with children from different women reads longer than a Lagos traffic report.
It’s a trend the entertainment media has followed with the devotion of a telenovela audience. Every new revelation is treated like a season premiere. Every child’s dedication is breaking news, and somehow, in the midst of it all, society adjusted. What used to be scandal has now become a genre, part drama, part comedy, part everyday reality.