In Nigeria, there is no such thing as “soft” power. Here, power is kick-the-door-down loud and hypervisible. It is shouted from pulpits, trumpeted through sirens, paraded in convoys with tinted glass or dangled by police officers asking, searching, begging, threatening — always with a gun in hand. But there’s another kind of power, too — quieter, subtler, yet no less ruthless. The kind that hides behind zipped pants and crooked grins. The kind that doesn’t need a gun to bring a young man into line.
This power is not measured in votes or vigils, but in seconds, in thrusts, in the stiffness of a veiny erection and in the sonorous chorus of pleasure. It is the power boys are taught to covet long before they understand their own bodies. In time it becomes a curriculum, not spoken but absorbed, not taught but felt — somewhere between bluff and bravado, between a hard-on and a heartbeat. This story lives there, in the marrow of that inheritance.
In this culture, where manhood is often measured not by wisdom or restraint but by stamina behind closed doors, an unspoken crisis simmers just beneath the surface. The use of bottled aphrodisiacs — unregulated herbal tinctures laced with dangerous compounds, which claim to enhance performance in the bedroom — has exploded in recent years, among men as well as boys. These concoctions aren’t marketed across billboards but through word of mouth, around street corners and in viral Instagram reels portraying them as cures for male inadequacy. But dangerous side effects — ranging from short-term headaches to long-term organ damage — are brushed off by those desperate to perform, whether for themselves, their partners or their peers.
Beneath their bitter taste lies a deeper hunger: to outrun shame, to mask insecurity, to perform at all costs. It’s a hunger stoked by cultural scripts and private anxieties, where gendered expectation and unregulated chemistry converge — reshaping how a generation of Nigerian boys is coming to understand manhood: not as a role with responsibilities, but as performance.
Long before Pfizer stumbled upon Viagra in 1998 — and before it crossed borders into pharmacies, bedroom nightstands and pop culture — a different kind of medicine was already making the rounds in Nigeria. Thick, bitter and brewed in battered aluminum pots by the roadside, it didn’t come in blister packs or pill jars but in small opaque nylon bags for those in a hurry, or in disposable plastic cups for those with time to spare. Whispered about in salons and on slang-laced street corners, these weren’t pills. They were potions; traditional medicinal brews designed to get you hard and keep you that way.
“I use dried plantain, the testicles of both a horse and a he-goat, and I blend them together,” says Funmilayo, an herb seller with 31 years under her belt, reaching into her hawking basin of bottled herbs and granular substances for three repurposed Coca-Cola bottles. Inside are pink, black and off-white powders — the raw ingredients of her so-called “Manpower” elixir. She pours the powders into a rubber cup, splashes in local gin and stirs until it forms a murky, brownish mix, not even half a beer pong cup in volume. This penile power-up, bitter and burning, promises fortified stamina and renewed energy to anyone bold enough to swallow it. A shot costs anywhere between 19 and 32 cents, depending on the location.
At a stall nearby, Kunle, 35, a “keke” or tricycle driver with the weariness of someone twice his age, lifts to his lips a plastic cup of Agbo Jedi — a traditional Yoruba herbal remedy used across Nigeria for everything from back pain to libido. He drinks slowly, hoping it soothes the daily pain of his work: hours hunched over, navigating the tight, dusty arteries of Ikorodu, a suburb on the edge of Lagos, where red earth clings to tires and time feels a step behind the city.
Around him, the herbal stall is hushed, except for the dry scrapes of lizards darting inside their sun-warmed cage, their claws whispering across wood and rusted sheet metal. The air simmers with the acrid tang of steeped roots and overboiled bark. These concoctions are not drunk for pleasure, not really. They are taken like oaths, worn like armor, as though each bitter gulp could shield a man from the quiet humiliations of which he cannot speak aloud: fatigue, depression, performance anxiety, impotence, premature ejaculation.
Kunle sips slowly, then rests the cup back on the wooden bench beside him, eyes drifting to the keke that fuels his survival. “I drink it as often as possible — just to keep up with the strain of this job. Luckily, I don’t need ‘Manpower’ to perform, this is the only thing I drink and it works for me,” Kunle says.
Next to him sits another man, Soji — casual, familiar. From their easy banter, this isn’t their first time sharing a brew here, in this cramped roadside shrine of herbal remedies run by a mother-daughter duo. Around them are calabashes, bark, bone and bitter leaves — medicine for blood pressure and bellyaches, fevers, bad luck and the kind of manhood that splinters in silence. Mide, the daughter, speaks to New Lines on behalf of her mother, who, wary of giving away the knowledge she has carried for decades, keeps her answers clipped. The stall was a place of remedies, yes — but also a confessional, where men unburdened themselves to the apothecary softly.
Mide’s mother — or Mamè, as her daughter called her, using the Pidgin word for “mom” — is dark-skinned and small-framed, wrapped in a faded floral frock. She hovers just outside the conversation, busying herself with taking inventory, moving between shelves with the ease of muscle memory. Inside, Mide, who has offered to translate, lets Kunle and his friend do most of the talking. After all, they are the regulars — the ones who return, cup after cup.
Soji notes that while he doesn’t drink Agbo Ale — the stand-alone Manpower broth — the one in his hand, Agbo Jedi, comes close. “Just a few ingredients away,” he says. “It detoxifies, yes. It strengthens. And yes, it helps blood flow to the right place.” Perhaps that explains why Kunle can’t stay away.
Sexual performance is a fundamental burden in Nigeria, second only to financial responsibility. Men drink the potions not just to perform but to shield themselves from shame; to avoid becoming a punch line, to buy — if only for one night — the illusion of control. Most importantly, they do it so as not to leave their wives or girlfriends unsatisfied or, worse, lose them to those who fortify themselves with these strengthening serums.
With little in the way of formal sex education, but ample misinformation, disinformation and regular old information about sex circulating in the digital age, these potions have also begun insinuating themselves into the dorm rooms and back seats of the lives of Nigeria’s boys and young men — often with devastating results. Cultural pressure around performance has stripped away any vulnerability, any impulse to learn or discover, and replaced these with expectations of delivery.
The first time New Lines meets him, Segun is seated on the frayed edge of a faux-leather couch in a dim, air-conditioned room that smells of testosterone, pretense and local marijuana. He’s 19, in his second year at the University of Lagos, in an off-campus flat belonging to Blaze — the department’s resident bad boy — whose name alone carries mythic weight: part seducer, part supplier, rarely present at lectures, yet always present in reputation. The walls are streaked with ash and cluttered with posters — curvy sirens like Tiwa Savage, Nicki Minaj and Kim Kardashian, shoulder to shoulder with gold-grilled rappers: Lil Wayne, Schoolboy Q, Migos. A red LED light strip around the corners of the ceiling casts everything in the tint of sin.
Flanking him, the older boys laugh and light up, their voices rising with the beat thudding from a nearby speaker, each bass drop syncing with the unease tightening in Segun’s chest. He doesn’t smoke. He’s never had more than a sip of alcohol. But tonight, that doesn’t matter. He’s willing to pay the toll of peer pressure. What matters is passing this test.
The young woman he likes is coming over. Or, at least, she said she was. This is his moment.
They mock his eagerness. “You go just pour like tap wey dem no tighten well,” one snorts — you’ll come like a leaky faucet. “One-minute man,” another adds, laughing with the cruelty of someone who’s been mocked.
Blaze swings open the minifridge tucked into the corner of the apartment and pulls out a bottle with a green cap. It is short, dark and stamped with the image of a muscular man flexing, midroar. Its name, loosely translated, means “let them know.” It is a mass-produced version of what Mamè sells — except this one hits at 100 mph. It costs just 32 cents. “Take this,” Blaze says. “You go knack like horse” — you’ll fuck like a horse. He paused. “But wait till you see her before you —”
Before Blaze can warn Segun, he anxiously slushes it down his throat. He winces at the taste — it smacks, it lingers, its dirt-brown color stains his teeth instantly — but he swallows.
The crowd breaks into laughter — sharp, savage. “Wahala!” — “Oh shit!” — someone snorts and, just like that, the rest follow, erupting like thunder on a tin roof, wild, loud, hungry to humiliate.
Blaze is laughing too, half-amused, half-annoyed. “Omo, why you rush am?”
Segun wasn’t even supposed to drink it yet — not until she rang the doorbell, until her presence, standing by the door, proved that her “I’m coming today” wasn’t a hoax. Otherwise, he’d be stuck with a pounding headache and a concealed weapon he couldn’t disarm. But how was he supposed to know? Blaze should’ve led with that.
“She said she was coming after her classes today,” he mutters, his voice stumbling over each word like it too is trying to find its footing. He clings to the hope that saying it out loud will make it true; that his mistake will not exile him from this makeshift brotherhood of cool boys and fake confidence.
But the room offers no grace. One of the boys plays “Amaka” by Tuface on the speaker — a Nigerian pop anthem whose chorus has become cultural shorthand for being let down. The song blares like a taunt and the others join in, voices rising in mock harmony on the chorus.
Segun doesn’t sing. He sits there, the walls of humiliation closing in on him.
This bottled substitute has fast become the go-to for young men, replacing the drawn-out ritual of sitting in herbal stalls with tricycle riders like Kunle or loquacious regulars like Soji. It fits the times — cheap, potent, slower to take effect than Viagra and, ironically, easier to conceal than explain. But in that dim room thick with bravado, only Segun was naive enough to swallow it without a plan.
“Ahh, he go need find woman relieve am,” says Funmilayo the herbalist, when I recount the story to her. She shakes her head with the slow, knowing calm of someone who has seen boys panic and sweat through this before. “No other way. If not, e no go come down.”
She claims her own blend didn’t hit the body like that. “Even if the girl doesn’t come, your body go balance,” she adds, eyeing the bottled version with suspicion.
From behind the shelves, Mamè finally chimes in, her voice low but certain, without looking up from her ledger. “All those bottled Manpower drinks,” she mutters, “they add other things, chemicals, medicine that has no business inside the body.” The two men — veterans of the game — nod in unison.
Dr. Sharon Bola-Lawal, a final-year medical student at Lagos State University, says the violent reactions aren’t accidental. “Most of these bottled concoctions are made with unregulated ingredients,” she explains. While various plants, extracts, stimulants, anabolic agents and synthetic hormones are marketed as aphrodisiacs, there’s little high-quality clinical evidence supporting their effectiveness — or their long-term safety. “There’s growing concern around these drugs,” she adds, “not just for their links to early mortality, but for how they can unmask or accelerate hidden illnesses and wreak havoc across multiple systems in the body.”
The label on the green-capped bottle lists its star ingredient: burantashi — a popular herbal aphrodisiac in northern Nigeria, especially among the Hausa, widely believed to enhance performance, boost libido and delay ejaculation. There’s also Curculigo pilosa, a tropical plant found across West Africa, often added to Manpower mixtures for its supposed effects on virility, stamina and fertility. And then there’s Aristolochia, a genus of flowering plants used for centuries in traditional medicine across many cultures, but now flagged for its high toxicity and well-documented links to kidney failure and cancer. Together, they form a potent promise — power in a bottle — with consequences no one talks about.
These ingredients follow the pattern of others like yohimbe, maritime pine bark, horny goat weed and red ginseng — compounds long touted for their performance-enhancing properties, but which carry a host of medical risks when consumed without regulation or supervision. Though often marketed as “natural,” their effects on the body can be anything but gentle, especially when mixed with other unlabeled or synthetic agents.
Bola-Lawal warns that many routine supplements — often marketed as natural or herbal — are far from benign. “It’s in the public interest to know that some of these have been adulterated,” she tells New Lines, citing data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which found that 41.6% of seized supplements contained undeclared sex stimulants. While the short-term effects — improved blood flow, confidence and reduced performance anxiety — may seem appealing, they often mask deeper medical issues such as hormonal imbalances or cardiovascular disease. “These substances don’t address the underlying pathology,” she explains. “They simply hide it — until it’s too late.”
The risks are anything but superficial. Beneath the garish promises lie pharmacological landmines laid by unvetted compounds linked to everything from anaphylaxis to the slow ruin of organs: blurred vision, ringing ears, cardiac arrhythmia, renal collapse, even hemorrhagic strokes. In the most harrowing cases, there is priapism: erections so prolonged and excruciating that they collapse not just the body but the very idea of manhood they were meant to uphold.
“When are you coming?”
Gift glanced away from the lecturer, at the WhatsApp notification lighting up her home screen. Without unlocking the phone, she could already see it was Segun. She swiped up. Same message. She could’ve sworn she’d already told him — she was coming over, to his place, same building as Blaze.
She first noticed him at a poetry night on campus. He wasn’t the loudest or the finest, but he looked like he thought deeply about things. And when he laughed at the obscure cartoon reference she made, she tilted her head and really looked at him.
He wasn’t trying too hard — just honest. They liked the same authors, rolled their eyes at the same lecturers and both agreed the bathrooms at the faculty of arts deserved a protest. Then came the sexting. It wasn’t crude. It was curious, layered — like they were asking each other for permission to want. Gift had had sex before but it had felt transactional, like she was handing over her body to someone who barely knew what to do with it. Segun wasn’t like that. He listened. He asked questions. He made her feel like a person, not a conquest.
She gave him her number before the night ended, not because he asked, but because it felt like he’d get her. Not for what he could do or what he had — but just for being Segun. At the time, that was enough.
“Once I’m done with my class,” she replied with a smiley face.
Back at Blaze’s testosterone-fueled den, Segun flashed Gift’s response and the room erupted. But the louder the cheers, the heavier the pressure. Performance anxiety isn’t just emotional — it’s physiological. Studies show that up to 25% of men experience it, often leading to erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation. Anxiety releases cortisol, restricting blood flow to the penis and triggering the very failure men fear. By celebrating, his friends unknowingly raised the stakes. Segun was no longer performing for himself — he was performing for the room.
Yet pressure doesn’t only come from boys. In her Ikorodu salon, Arin, 25, adjusting a client’s wig, said, “I don’t like men who take aphrodisiacs,” then laughed. “But I can’t be with a one-minute man either.” Her grandmother, an “alagbo” — or herbalist — used to treat sexual problems, so Arin is sympathetic. “If he can’t last, we’ll find a solution together.” What puzzles her, though, are men who can perform, but won’t have sex without a premixed bottle of agbo beside them, like a crutch.
Across the road, Fathia, 20, a bread seller, echoed the contradiction. She, too, disliked aphrodisiacs but wouldn’t date a “one-minute man” either. When asked how she would know — considering some herbal effects can last hours or days — she hesitated.
That is the cruel paradox. In a culture where masculinity is not measured by meaning but by the metronome, the shame of falling short metastasizes into silence. Vulnerability is taboo; a softened erection feels tantamount to a forfeited self. So men reach, compulsively, for talismans of control: elixirs, decoctions, anything to stave off collapse. And everyone colludes in the charade — men feigning invincibility, women feigning oblivion, both complicit in the fiction that this is intimacy. The performance bleeds beyond the bedroom, migrating to the digital stage, where virility becomes vaudeville. On TikTok and Instagram, sexual stamina is flattened into spectacle — fodder for comedians and currency for vendors. The green-capped flacons of Manpower potions appear in hundreds of clips, their promises of puissance and perpetuity delivered with a wink, but never irony.
None of this, truthfully, bore any existential weight. When Segun went back downstairs to his own dorm room, he wasn’t seeking meaning. Like the boys in Blaze’s room upstairs, he wore blinders. Once sex entered, introspection fled. And with the haze particular to boys reared on digital lust — pixelated bodies, choreographed gasps — his aim was crude but clear: that Gift’s moans would pierce the ceiling like proof. It was his first time — though he lied — and so the act became a spectacle, not intimacy. The urgency to impress eclipsed any instinct to connect.
Gift knocked, and Segun nearly tripped over himself getting to the door. He opened it to find her standing there, quiet but familiar, like someone from a dream he’d been rehearsing for weeks. She stepped inside. Neither of them knew what to say.
Later, New Lines spoke with them separately — Gift in a quiet corner of a campus cafe, Segun over a tense WhatsApp call that dropped more than once. Their versions of what happened that night didn’t align perfectly. But between the silences, the flinches and what they chose not to say, a picture began to form.
The room was bare — just a mattress on the floor, a rotating fan and music thumping faintly from upstairs. The air between them was stiff. She caught sight of the bulge in his jeans and made a teasing comment, the kind meant to dissolve tension. It didn’t. It only confirmed what he’d been hoping: that this was really about to happen.
They lay back without much talk. The sex was fast, breathless, performative — Segun chasing rhythm, sound, the imagined applause of boys overhead. He didn’t notice when she flinched.
Gift moaned, but only out of habit and reflex. The ache wasn’t new, but the disappointment was. She’d thought he might be different; that he would look at her, stay with her, move with her. But he was elsewhere — somewhere loud, somewhere male.
Afterward, she went quiet and still; a silence that said everything.
Segun’s body didn’t soften. If anything, it turned on him. What began as hunger now throbbed like punishment. He stumbled into the bathroom, teeth clenched, splashing water, hoping it would all go away. Despite ejaculating, it didn’t slump tiredly between his thighs.
Gift sat on the mattress, unsure. The roughness, the urgency, the way he never really looked at her — it all made a kind of twisted sense now. She’d mistaken obsession for attraction. He hadn’t been present. He hadn’t been gentle. He’d been chasing something else entirely.
Sexual performance challenges aren’t always a question of masculinity — they’re often physiological, and treatable. “Most men think it’s virility they lack,” says Rume Mikoyo, a Nigerian pelvic floor physiotherapist in Australia. “But often it’s weak pelvic muscles, poor diet and stress.” He says, “Kegels, clean eating, less porn, and exercise can help — without risking liver damage or a heart attack. But the first step is men realizing they’re allowed to ask for help.”
“I need to go to the hospital,” Segun whispered, half to himself, doubled over in pain. His jeans were soaked from the water he kept splashing between his legs, hoping — begging — for relief. Nothing worked.
“I need to go to the hospital!” he shouted, louder this time, panic rising in his throat.
Then, as if surrendering to the dread finally catching up to him: “I NEED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL!”
That’s what brought the boys from upstairs — the noise, the panic, Segun hunched over, clutching himself, too ashamed to speak.
At the hospital, the diagnosis was priapism — an erection prolonged by cheap, unregulated aphrodisiacs. Gift stood in the hallway, arms folded. She didn’t cry or comfort him. She just listened, and understood. He had taken something. He didn’t trust himself. Not with her. Maybe not even with his own body.
They never spoke again — not from anger but from clarity. She muted his number and archived their chats. He had seemed soft, different, safe. But in that quiet room, he vanished — replaced by the same armor she thought he didn’t wear: the bottle, the bluff, the frantic need to perform instead of connect.
The worst part wasn’t the sex. It was the silence — how he never asked what she liked, never noticed when she flinched. The boy who once listened to her poems couldn’t hear her body go still.
She thought about texting, just once: “I hope you’re OK.” But it felt dishonest. The boy she liked didn’t drink that bottle. And the one who did never really saw her.
In the end, the performance — so loud, so sure — left no applause, only silence. What remained of Segun was not power, but the hollowness where it had once been rehearsed.
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