The Desk — Finance, Policy & the View from the Street By Kemi Adeosun
Every language has words that travel. Wahala needed no translation when it crossed from Yoruba into Nigerian English and then into global consciousness. Everyone knows what wahala is. You need no dictionary. You need only to have lived.
Bukata is wahala’s quieter cousin. Less dramatic, more structural. Where wahala announces itself — the crashed deal, the relative who arrives unannounced with six children and no plan — bukata simply sits down at the table and eats. Every day. Without apology.
The word comes from the Hausa bùƙātā: personal business, obligation. It crossed into and somewhere in that crossing it acquired depth. In everyday Nigerian speech, bukata is the thing that has a claim on you before you have a claim on yourself. The school fees that land before the salary. The hospital bill for a family member that was not in any budget. The younger brother whose JAMB fees you did not plan for but will pay, because you are the one who made it. Bukata is not an emergency. It is a condition.
I want to talk about bukata today not as a cultural burden or a moral virtue, but as an economic indicator. A number. Economists call it the dependency ratio. I have decided it should simply be renamed: the bukata index. Because that is what it measures — not abstractly, not in a textbook, but in the lived mathematics of Nigerian life.
