The License to Hate

There is a reason the children of the powerful occupy such a central place in our moral imagination. They represent continuity in a society defined by rupture. When Nigerians debate, once again, whether it is justified to resent them, the argument is not about manners or cruelty. It is about whether inherited advantage, especially when produced by public harm, can ever be separated from the conditions that made it possible.

Is it justified to hate the children of politicians and billionaires?

The respectable answer is supposed to be no.

Children did not choose their parents. They did not loot the treasury. They did not rig elections. They did not sign the contracts. To resent them is to commit a moral error. Guilt by association. A failure of empathy. An indulgence in envy.

This answer is neat, comforting, and insufficient.

It assumes that resentment is always about individual moral guilt. It assumes that injustice is only ever perpetrated by conscious actors making discrete decisions. It assumes that power does not reproduce itself socially, culturally, and psychologically. It assumes that beneficiaries of injustice can remain morally untouched by the systems that enrich them.

Those assumptions do not survive contact with reality.

Hannah Arendt, writing about collective responsibility, made a careful distinction that feels relevant here. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Her warning was not against holding everyone responsible, but against reducing political evil to individual intention alone. Some people commit crimes. Others inherit worlds shaped by those crimes. The inheritance does not make them criminals, but it does place them inside a moral structure they did not build and do not escape.

Resentment, in this sense, is not a courtroom verdict. It is a political emotion.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who distrusted resentment deeply, nonetheless understood it as a response to power asymmetry. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he describes resentment not as childish envy, but as the moral language of the powerless. It emerges when domination is stable, normalized, and unreachable by direct confrontation. The oppressed cannot strike the system, so the emotion latches onto symbols of the system.

In Nigeria, few symbols are more potent than the children of the powerful.

They attend foreign schools paid for with stolen futures. They speak casually about “leaving the country” as an option, not an escape. They inherit networks, confidence, accents, and access. They fail upward. They are insulated not only from poverty, but from the consequences of the decisions that created it.

This is not their fault. But it is their position.

Being born into power is not an achievement, but societies, especially the Nigerian one, often treat it as such. It is closer to a lottery win, except that no one actually buys the tickets. Advantage arrives early, compounds quietly, and hardens into destiny long before merit is even possible. When inherited position determines who is safe, who is mobile, and who is heard, resentment stops being a moral failure and starts to function as a diagnosis. It tells us that the structure itself is misaligned.

Seen this way, the argument does not collapse once we move from public corruption to private wealth. Resentment remains justified there too. This is because extreme private wealth in a deeply unequal society is never merely private. It relies on legal systems, labor markets, tax regimes, and state protections that distribute advantage unevenly and often violently. The child of a billionaire who made money outside public office may not be implicated in corruption, but they are still insulated by structures that extract value from others at scale.

What compounds across generations, then, is not simply money, but access, security, and immunity from consequence. Inherited advantage becomes a durable claim on social resources that others are systematically denied. Resentment, in this context, is not a moral confusion. It is the recognition that inequality is being treated as natural rather than constructed. To demand that those excluded from these claims suspend resentment is to ask them to accept a social order that presents its outcomes as inevitable and its privileges as innocent.

James Baldwin was less patient with moral abstractions. “It is not permissible,” he wrote, “to be neutral about the suffering of others.” Baldwin’s anger was not directed only at overt racists, but at those who benefited from racial hierarchies while insisting on their personal innocence. Innocence, he suggested, can be a luxury purchased with other people’s pain.

The children of power often insist on innocence.

They did not steal. They did not vote. They did not order the soldiers. They did not design the economy. All true. But they live inside the benefits of those acts. They enjoy a continuity that others are violently denied. Their very normalcy is subsidized by abnormal suffering.

This is where the respectable argument breaks down.

To say “do not resent them” without also demanding that they interrogate their advantage is to ask the oppressed to perform moral labor alone. It places the burden of ethical cleanliness on those already paying the highest price. It asks Nigerians struggling under inflation, insecurity, and collapse to purify their emotions before their material conditions improve.

Anger is often dismissed as excess, but that dismissal itself is revealing. By disciplining anger, we ignore the information and energy within it. We shift attention away from structure and toward sentiment, away from outcomes and toward propriety. When resentment is curtailed too quickly, the appeal is not to morality so much as to comfort, particularly the comfort of those most insulated from the harm.

None of this means that hating the children of the powerful is morally pure or politically sufficient. It can rot into cruelty. It can become lazy. It can mistake proximity for responsibility. It can flatten complex individuals into symbols and forget that systems are harder to dismantle than families.

But it is not irrational.

It is not merely envy.

It is not a failure of education.

It is a response to a society where accountability is hereditary in practice but forbidden in theory.

Power reproduces itself quietly. Not only through money, but through ease, expectation, and confidence. The children of elites move through the world as though it were responsive by default. Doors open. Errors are forgiven. When the world meets this expectation, it is described as merit rather than inheritance. Resentment forms where this misrecognition becomes impossible to ignore.

A society that wants less resentment must do more than police emotions. It must interrupt inheritance. It must tax wealth, prosecute corruption, dismantle patronage, and make privilege answerable. Until then, asking the dispossessed to love the beneficiaries of dispossession is not moral wisdom. It is emotional austerity.

Resentment is not justice. But neither is silence.

And in a country where justice is routinely postponed, emotions become one of the few remaining languages of truth.