By Bagudu Mohammed
I have seen professors whose children never made it into the university or could not pass their O-levels. I have seen devoted teachers who poured their entire existence into shaping other people’s children, yet somehow could not replicate that same success at home. I have seen pastors and clerics preach modesty, discipline, and moral restraint, only for their own lives, or those of their families to unfold in ways that sharply contradict the very doctrines they defend. In moments like these, one is forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: life resists neat formulas. It refuses to behave like a predictable equation where one plus one must always equal two.
As a child, I remember an uncle whose confidence in the future of one of my friends felt almost prophetic. He spoke of this boy, Usman, with admiration that bordered on certainty. His reasoning seemed logical, even compelling: both parents were seasoned educationists; surely, their son would inherit not just their knowledge but their discipline, their values, their advantage. It was a clean, rational expectation, almost textbook. And for a while, I believed it without question.
But time, as it often does, complicated that narrative. What I began to observe instead was something scholars in sociology might describe as the failure of deterministic assumptions, the belief that outcomes can be reliably predicted from given conditions. Life, it turns out, is less like arithmetic and more like probability. Research in social mobility and education has long challenged the idea that parental status guarantees children’s success. Scholars like Pierre Bourdieu argued that while cultural and social capital matter, they do not operate in isolation; individual agency, environment, chance, and even resistance play powerful roles. This explains why many highly successful individuals emerge from backgrounds where there was little formal education, and why, conversely, privilege does not always reproduce itself.
Yet perhaps even more puzzling is not the unpredictability of outcomes, but the paradox of the advisor who cannot embody his own advice. There is something almost theatrical about it, the relationship expert with a failed marriage, the financial guru drowning in debt, the moral teacher entangled in scandal. It challenges our instinctive belief that authority must come from lived success. I have followed figures like Blessing Okoro, who have faced criticism rooted precisely in this contradiction, the idea that one must first succeed before one can teach. Her response, like many others in similar positions, leans on experience not as proof of mastery, but as evidence of exposure, arguing that failure itself can be instructive, even authoritative.
Psychology offers an intriguing lens here. The concept of cognitive dissonance, introduced by Leon Festinger, explains how individuals can hold conflicting beliefs and behaviors simultaneously, often rationalizing the gap between them. Similarly, the Dunning–Kruger effect, identified by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, reveals how people may overestimate their competence in areas where they lack true expertise. But perhaps more relevant is a quieter, less discussed phenomenon: that understanding a principle intellectually is far easier than living it consistently. Knowledge does not automatically translate into discipline; awareness does not guarantee application.
This is why society often leans heavily on optics, on what is seen, not just what is said. Influence, as history repeatedly shows, flows as much from character as from content. The enduring impact of figures like Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ is tied not merely to their teachings, but to the trust their lives inspired. Their message and their method were inseparable. In contrast, when the messenger fractures, the message, though it may remain logically sound, begins to lose its emotional authority. This tension brings us to a difficult but necessary question: must a message be discarded because its messenger fails? Or can truth exist independently of the one who speaks it?
The story of a pastor arrested for bigamy after authoring a book on how to love one’s spouse forces this question into sharp focus. His words advocated depth, commitment, and a “never-failing” love modeled after divine sacrifice. Yet his actions told a different story, one that unraveled publicly and dramatically. The irony is not subtle; it is almost surgical in its precision. A man who taught fidelity stands accused of multiplying commitments he could not sustain.
From a theoretical standpoint, this reflects what organizational theorists call the credibility gap, the distance between stated values and observable behavior. Research consistently shows that when leaders violate their own standards, trust erodes faster than if they had never claimed those standards at all. As James Kouzes and Barry Posner argue in their work on leadership credibility, people “first follow the person, then the plan.” When the person collapses, the plan, no matter how sound, struggles to stand on its own.
And yet, the deeper irony remains: the collapse of the messenger does not automatically invalidate the message. A broken signpost can still point in the right direction. The principle of sacrificial love does not cease to exist because one man failed to embody it. But something else changes, something more subtle and perhaps more damaging. The message loses its innocence. It is no longer received as testimony, but as theory; no longer as lived truth, but as abstract instruction.
There is an old story of a man dismissed as mad who shouted “fire” when a car began to burn. Because of who he was, no one listened, until the flames consumed everything. The tragedy was not the absence of truth, but the rejection of it because of its source. In the same way, wisdom can emerge from unlikely, even flawed vessels. The danger lies in assuming that imperfection disqualifies insight entirely.
Still, there is a thin line between human weakness and deliberate contradiction. To struggle with one’s own teachings is human; to systematically violate them while presenting oneself as their embodiment is something else entirely. It is here that the disappointment deepens, not just because of failure, but because of perceived deception.
Ultimately, life tests everyone. It is easy to speak about discipline without wealth, about humility without power, about fidelity without temptation. The real examination begins when conditions change, when influence expands, when desires intensify, when opportunities to deviate multiply. In that sense, the true curriculum of life is not theory, but circumstance.So, can good advice come from a flawed individual? Undeniably, yes. But should that individual be trusted as the standard of that advice? That is a far more complicated question.
The pastor’s arrest does not erase the words he wrote. But it alters how those words are heard. It shifts them from conviction to caution, from inspiration to interrogation. And perhaps that is the enduring lesson in all of this: that truth, while independent, is never untouched by the hands that carry it. Because in the end, the tragedy is not simply that a tutor failed his own test, it is that, in failing, he changed the meaning of the lesson for everyone who was watching.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
