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What Does It Mean To Be A TRUE Man?
by
Obianuju Nwokoye
Minute read
6 Mins
Published Date
On his birthday, Adekunle, founder of the Protect The Boy Child Initiative, opens MENtion with a question the internet keeps shouting past: if men have become the problem, who was ever raising them in the first place?
At 32, Adekunle arrives at a question that stops you in your tracks. When you look at his journey, it all makes sense. He turns a year older today, and a year bolder. But instead of throwing a party, he’s launching a magazine.
“I didn’t want just another birthday post,” he says. “I wanted a birthday statement.”
That statement is MENtion. And its very first cover line hits with quiet precision:
What Does It Mean To Be A Man?
Do you have to be the loudest in the room? The richest? The most followed? What actually makes a man… a man?
In 2026, it’s a question that feels almost dangerous to ask. "Who is raising these men?" is no longer just a joke women trade in comment sections or over cocktails. It has become the consensus. You hear it in therapy sessions, at family dinners, and across every group chat on the continent.
The Question
Adekunle doesn’t flinch when he hears it. If anything, he leans right into it.
“I’m not here to argue with the question,” he says quietly. “Too many men have earned it. I’ve watched friends earn it. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve had seasons in my own life where I could have earned it too.”
He pauses, letting the weight of that sink in.
“What I care about is the part nobody wants to hold. We keep telling men to be better. But who is actually showing them how? Who is going to teach a man how to be a man when nobody ever taught him?”
“Every man needs a guiding light when things go dark. But so many boys grew up in complete darkness, without a single figure to show them the way. The verdict is simple: a man left in the dark will get lost.”
This is the bedrock of everything he has built over the past year; the Protect The Boy Child Initiative, the Close the Gap documentary, the visits to correctional centers, the outreach, and his own personal transformation. It all condenses down into this one cover line.
Society has become expert at pointing out broken men, but completely blind to the fact that nobody ever raised them.
The Reality
Ask any real man what "the systemic neglect of the boy child" looks like, and he won't give you statistics. He’ll give you a memory.
He’ll tell you about boys mentored by nobody except internet noise and the fastest talker on the street corner. Boys whose only blueprint for manhood was silence, money, or anger, because those were the only three things ever modeled for them.
"Don’t talk too much. Make money. Be a man."
We demand that boys "be men" long before anyone bothers to explain what that actually means.
“We ask boys to step up as men with zero rehearsal, zero template, and no guide,” Adekunle says. “Then we act shocked when the result is broken.”
That is why PTBCI is a work of repair.
Mentor. Educate. Nurture.
Three simple words, in that exact order. Because sequence matters: you cannot educate a boy who has never been mentored, and you cannot nurture what you never took the time to educate.
The Ideal Man, as Adekunle defines him: Not flawless. Formed. A man who was shown - by someone, anyone - how to carry responsibility without carrying resentment. How to be soft without being weak. How to fail a woman, a friend, or a son, and fix it instead of repeating it.
Why a Magazine? Why Now?
MENtion didn’t happen overnight. It was built quietly over months: an editorial library of tough questions, a distinct visual identity, and a name built on a bit of wordplay that lets everyone be heard ("I just got mentioned").
Launching today too is intentional.
The birthday shoot itself, styled by TRUEMAN_NG, serves as the issue’s launch cover. It is a visual answer to the exact question inside the pages: What does a real man look like when he stops performing for the world?
“I’m not trying to stand here as an example because I’ve figured it all out,” Adekunle says. “I’m doing this because I remember what it felt like to grow up without a roadmap. I remember what it took to raise myself. And if there’s any chance we can save another boy from going through that alone, it’s worth everything.”
It’s an unusually candid admission for someone who has spent years in the public eye being pushed to be everything to everyone - the host, the actor, the influencer, the bad boy. MENtion is where all those pieces finally stop pulling in different directions and unite around one purpose.
The Call
Adekunle is careful not to let this turn into another empty slogan. Pointing out a problem only matters if you intend to fix it.
Every story MENtion tells this year will come back to one heavy, foundational question: Who is in the room with the boy child?
Is it a mentor? A teacher? An uncle? A coach? A stranger who decides to show up more than once?
“You don’t fix ‘who’s raising these men’ with a hashtag,” he says. “You fix it eighteen years from now, one boy at a time. That’s the whole magazine. That’s the whole movement.”
Mentor. Educate. Nurture.
