A Marxist Critique of Chief Daddy

 Chief Daddy is a film deeply embedded in the spectacle of wealth and privilege, making it a ripe text for Marxist analysis. The narrative revolves around the sudden death of a wealthy patriarch and the chaos that erupts among his family and dependents who hope to inherit his fortune. From a Marxist perspective, this setup immediately foregrounds the central role of class, ownership, and material inheritance in determining personal worth and power. The film’s visual landscape is drenched in symbols of luxury mansions, private cars, designer clothes, and excessive food, which all serve to glorify the upper class. These images are not just background details; they function ideologically to normalize wealth as a standard for success and moral superiority. The elite characters, despite their various flaws, are treated as the main subjects of the story, while the working-class characters, such as the chef and housekeeper, remain largely peripheral and voiceless.

Additionally, Chief Daddy’s death symbolizes not the end of authority, but its redistribution among a select few who were close to him. The capitalist structure is thus upheld even in his absence, as the battle for control over his estate mimics the larger economic struggle in society where capital is concentrated among elites and passed through family lines. From a Marxist standpoint, the film fails to critique this concentration of power; rather, it reinforces it by presenting inheritance as a legitimate and even noble means of wealth transfer. The poor are not invited to question this structure but are expected to serve, obey, and remain loyal. In this way, the film constructs a clear hierarchy between those who own the means of production, or in this case, wealth, and those whose lives are defined by service to that class.

Building upon this, another core Marxist concept reflected in Chief Daddy is commodification, the process by which human relationships, values, and even identities are reduced to economic terms. In the film, virtually every character’s relationship with the deceased Chief revolves around what they hope to gain financially. Daughters, mistresses, and extended family members all fight to prove their closeness to him, not out of love, but to secure a piece of his estate. This portrayal turns familial ties into a marketplace, where emotions are transactional and loyalty is evaluated based on profitability. Marxist theory argues that under capitalism, social relations are mediated by capital; people are valued for what they own or what they can offer materially. This idea is vividly demonstrated in how Chief Daddy’s will becomes the central object of desire, reducing the characters’ identities to legal categories of entitlement.

Moreover, the film satirizes this commodification but does not escape it. The humor drawn from the characters’ greed and desperation may appear as a critique on the surface, yet the film never proposes an alternative value system. Instead, it revels in the drama of wealth, often rewarding the most cunning and manipulative characters with access to the inheritance. Even acts of kindness or moral high ground are eventually tied to financial outcomes. There is little exploration of work, labor, or struggle; wealth is not earned, but inherited or gifted, making meritocracy irrelevant. From a Marxist perspective, this serves to mystify the capitalist system by making the unequal distribution of wealth appear natural, inevitable, and even entertaining. It reflects a capitalist society where relationships are filtered through wealth, and where morality is subordinate to material gain.

Moving on, Chief Daddy offers a shallow illusion of class mobility that deserves critical scrutiny. Marxism holds that under capitalism, the promise of moving between classes is largely mythical and designed to maintain the status quo. In the film, while certain characters appear to move “up” socially or financially, such as those who marry into wealth or discover their blood ties to the Chief, the narrative still restricts true mobility to those already within the elite’s reach. The working-class characters do not become central players; they remain in service roles, reacting to the wealth-driven drama rather than participating in it. This reflects how class systems perpetuate themselves by allowing minimal movement at the edges while keeping the core structure intact.

In addition, cultural capital, an idea developed by Marxist theorist Pierre Bourdieu, plays a significant role in the film. Characters are judged not only by their wealth but also by their ability to perform elite identity through language, dress, and behavior. Those who lack the “refined” mannerisms of the upper class are ridiculed or excluded, even if they are biologically related to the Chief. This reveals how economic inequality is sustained not only through material possession but also through symbolic markers of class. Even within the elite, there are hierarchies based on how convincingly one can adopt the culture of the rich. Rather than challenging this hierarchy, Chief Daddy reinforces it through humor and spectacle. The poor are not empowered; they are laughed at. The middle class is not uplifted; it is portrayed as desperate. Thus, the film offers a fantasy of social mobility without a structural critique, thereby participating in the ideological maintenance of class divisions.

Furthermore, a glaring absence in Chief Daddy is any serious engagement with the source of the Chief’s wealth or the labor that sustains his empire. Marxist critique insists on analyzing who produces value and who extracts it. In the film, Chief Daddy is revered for his generosity and success, but the actual nature of his business dealings is kept vague. This mystification of capital disconnects wealth from labor and ethics, promoting the dangerous myth of the benevolent capitalist, someone who acquires great riches and then distributes them as a form of charity or inheritance. The working class in the film, drivers, chefs, maids, exist in the background, crucial to the smooth running of the household yet never acknowledged as contributors to the wealth being contested. They are structurally invisible, symbolizing how labor is erased in bourgeois narratives of success.

Additionally, the film flirts with the idea of moral redistribution but never fully embraces it. While some characters suggest that Chief Daddy helped “everyone” during his life, this is portrayed as an individual virtue, not a systemic obligation. From a Marxist point of view, this reinforces the ideology that the rich should be thanked for their generosity, rather than challenged for structural inequality. It presents charity as a solution to poverty, rather than social justice or economic reform. The family’s eventual sharing of the inheritance among themselves continues the cycle of elite consolidation, leaving the class structure intact. The laborers return to their roles, and the viewers are invited to laugh and move on. In doing so, Chief Daddy becomes a cinematic example of how capitalism absorbs critique through comedy, sentimentality, and surface-level resolution without addressing deeper systemic exploitation.

In conclusion, "Chief Daddy" shows the problems with how class is shown in Nigerian movies today. From a Marxist point of view, the film celebrates the rich and ignores the inequality that makes their wealth possible. The characters are greedy, relationships are transactional, and moving up in class is seen as luck instead of a right. Even with some satire, the film supports capitalist ideas by rewarding the elite and ignoring the working class, making it more of a fantasy for the rich than a real critique of society.