Lagos · Friday 11 September 2026
Adekunle Gold has said on the One54 Podcast that genotype was decisive when he was choosing who to marry. He is SS, and said he would not have married Simi if she were SS or AS. Reaction online divided immediately.
The arithmetic he is describing
| Parents | Chance of a child with sickle cell (SS) |
|---|---|
| AA and anything | None |
| SS and AA | None, all children carry the trait |
| SS and AS | One in two |
| AS and AS | One in four |
| SS and SS | All children |
Standard inheritance. Not contested by anybody.
So the statement is medically straightforward. A man with SS marrying an AA partner has no children with sickle cell disease. The same man marrying an AS partner has a one in two chance with every pregnancy.
Why Nigeria specifically
Where the disagreement actually is
Not on the numbers. On what a person should do with them. One view holds that genotype-compatible marriage is basic responsibility to a child who cannot consent to a one in two risk. The other holds that reducing a partner to a laboratory result is a cold way to think about love, and that people with SS already face enough exclusion without being told their own genotype makes them a poor bet.
He is SS. He is describing a rule he applied to himself, which is a different thing from a rule applied to somebody else.
The part worth saying plainly
Testing is cheap, quick and available, and the majority of Nigerian couples still find out their genotypes late, sometimes after a child is born. Whatever a couple then decides is theirs to decide. Deciding without the information is the only option that is clearly worse than the alternatives.
Why this lands harder than a normal celebrity opinion
Because he is not speculating. He has lived with the condition, and the people arguing with him mostly have not. That does not make him automatically right about what others should do. It does mean he is the rare person in this argument talking about his own life rather than somebody else's.
Reporting: Daily Post, Legit.ng and TheCable Lifestyle.
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