What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is 脡n脿re Abang Gideon, a growth strategist and founder in her twenties, originally from Cross River State, Nigeria, now based in Luxembourg. She talks about selling everything she owned to chase a visa-sponsored job in Estonia, surviving three rejections in Egypt with an empty wallet, and how the worst period of her life became the foundation of everything she has built.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is 脡n脿re Abang Gideon. I am from Cross River State, Nigeria, and I am currently based in Luxembourg. I am a growth strategist and the founder of InstaGo Travels, a global travel agency providing tailored mobility solutions, and Giena Consulting Group, a business development and marketing firm. I also founded a rapidly growing community for women founders in Luxembourg, dedicated to empowering and connecting ambitious women worldwide.

Can you tell me about the family you grew up in? What kind of child were you?

I grew up in a household where both my parents were educated, yet they placed an immense value on hard work. Some of my earliest memories involve planting cocoa seedlings on my father’s farm, where I was always eager to take on more seeds, not just for the work itself, but because I saw it as a path to earning enough to buy my own treats. That early exposure to industry and the desire to build my own capital shaped me into a curious, driven child, always looking for the next challenge or opportunity to create something of my own.

What did success look like to you growing up? Did you always imagine you would build a life outside Nigeria?

Growing up, success was about independence and the ability to build from the ground up. I did not necessarily have a fixed vision of leaving, but I always possessed an expansive view of what was possible, knowing I wanted to operate on a global stage even if the path was not yet written.

What was your life like before everything changed?

I had just completed my National Service in Abuja and was deeply involved in community services while learning about finance and investment in the stock market. I enrolled in an academy that shaped my mindset on success and the financial markets. I was browsing the internet one day when I received a job opportunity notification in Estonia. I applied, went through three interview rounds, and they gave me the offer. There was, however, one huge problem: I had to apply for the visa from Egypt, as there is no Estonian embassy in Nigeria.

What exactly was the opportunity?

It was a role as a business support associate with a fintech company in Estonia. The interview sessions were held over Zoom, and I got to ask questions and clarify my doubts with all the hiring managers. After the interview rounds, I was offered the position, and I believed it was worth the risk because I saw it as the beginning of a new chapter and the answer to my desire for a life that felt big enough for everything I carried inside me.

So you decided to travel to Egypt for the Visa. What did that decision to go all in actually look like?

I was convinced that I was meant for more than the life I was living. I had received confirmation from people who had already arrived in Estonia that the contracts and paperwork were legitimate, so I decided to move everything at once to avoid making the trip twice and to minimise the financial risk of multiple international journeys. I believed in that opportunity with everything in me because it was the proof I needed that my potential was not limited by my environment.

What did moving everything at once actually mean? What did you have to let go of?

I let go of my apartment and sold all my properties, including downsizing from my two-bedroom apartment in Kubwa to a self-contained apartment a month before my trip. Saying goodbye to my life also meant saying goodbye to my pet. The closest company I had then was my cat, whom I gave away to the Uber driver who took me to the airport. It was very painful, but it had to happen. I was mentally done with my life in Nigeria and was looking forward to a fresh start.

How did your family react when they found out?

My family was excited for me because they have always wanted the best for me. There was some scepticism until they saw proof of others who had successfully received the visa, which is natural, but as I have always been someone who follows a conviction once I am sure of it, they were not surprised at all.

What was life like in Egypt while you waited?

Egypt was intended to be a brief stop, so initially it was fun and less heavy. When you are living in a new country as a tourist with a timeline, things feel different. But it soon became a space of waiting, torture, and eventually, a profound curriculum. My expectations were high, and I spent that period in a state of bracing for the future. My life in Egypt was sustained only by the grace of God. My visa application was rejected 3 times, but people kept showing up for me in ways that defied logic. 

The first wait was short and less painful, and I was less anxious because I was almost 100% certain of approval. But the second and third waits tested me in more ways than I could have imagined. It forced me to stop seeing myself as a victim and start seeing myself as a strategist navigating life. Because that period contained so many lessons I could never fit into a single interview, I am currently writing a book about that journey, with an expected release next year.

Tell me about receiving the first rejection. What did that moment feel like?

That morning, I was excited and just a little anxious. I was looking forward to my next flight out of Egypt, but could not see what lay ahead. Upon arriving at the embassy, I saw many people who had already been rejected, as well as others whose visas had been approved. I was hoping to be among the latter, but I had no idea that I was holding a rejection letter until I opened it. Looking at that paper for the first time was heavy and sobering. It was one of the most confusing and loneliest moments of my life.

What She Said: I Lost My Sight at 11 and Refused to Lose Anything Else

What made you decide to apply again?

After the first rejection, the company itself was confused. They had seen many other candidates receive approvals, so they reached out and strongly encouraged me to apply again. That external validation gave me the glimmer of hope I desperately needed, but ultimately, I kept going because the “why” behind my journey remained true. Even when the evidence was thin, I clung to the belief that it would work out. At the time, I seemed to forget that we make plans and God laughs, and God must have laughed quite hard at my plans, because clearly that specific path was not mine to follow. I simply needed the lessons that period of waiting contained, and I was not finished learning them yet.

By the third rejection, what was going through your mind?

That moment made me question my judgment and my direction. I had to face the difficult truth that my savings were entirely finished, and I had no backup plan before leaving Nigeria, so going back home would mean hitting rock bottom all over again. By the third rejection, I reached a profound self-realisation about life’s survival limit. I knew I had to act immediately, so I began job hunting in Egypt. 

A Good Samaritan I met at an African restaurant eventually referred me to a job as an animator at a resort in Sharm el-Sheikh. Working long, gruelling hours, dealing with frustrated guests while carrying the heavy mental weight of my own failed relocation was intensely humbling. It stripped away every ounce of ego I had left, but it provided the bridge I needed to sustain myself until I could finally return to Nigeria.

When you got back to your hotel room after each rejection, what was actually happening inside you?

When I got back to my hotel room from the embassy, sitting there with an empty wallet and a rejected stamp was the moment I genuinely asked God what he was doing with my life. I cried my eyes out and prayed more times than I can remember, asking for a miracle. Eventually, I learned to treat those doubts as temporary visitors rather than permanent residents.

What did coming home feel like after all of that?

It was a humbling return, but I realised that I was not the same woman who had left. I discovered that even without resources, I was still standing and formidable. It was a hard and heavy experience, and because I could not explain to everyone what had happened, only a few close friends even knew I was back. I refused to let the setback define me, so I applied for an MBA upon my return and secured a visa to study in Paris a few months later. It was not easy, but I am deeply grateful to my family, who never gave up on me.

Financially, emotionally and mentally, what did starting over actually look like?

It looked like extreme discipline and the realisation that I could not do it alone. I had to move past the pride of being the one who figures it out and learn to accept help when it is offered. I was drained and wanted it to end. I spent most of my time at a friend’s place until I was stable enough to stand on my own feet. I learned the necessary survival skills to move forward, and when my flight out of Nigeria finally left, I was determined to make it, and I never looked back.

At what point did you decide that the rejection would not be the end of your story?

The moment I realised that my ability to build and my mental grit were not tied to a visa or a geographical location. I decided that if I could build a business once, I could build it again and again.

How did InstaGo Travels come to life?

InstaGo was born from the intersection of my personal experience navigating complex travel systems and the academic rigour of my MBA programme. During my time in Egypt, the travel agent who planned my trip showed no sympathy, support or transparency, which became incredibly draining. Once I returned to Nigeria, friends and contacts began asking for my support with their own trips. When we were tasked with a mini-project in business school, I chose to develop a concept to solve the very problems I had faced. InstaGo became that project, and I eventually brought it to life outside the classroom because I realised there was a better, more sustainable way to serve travellers. I have trained my team to treat every client’s application as a strategic project because I know they are really buying their future in a new environment, not just a service.

How has the journey with InstaGo been?

It feels surreal, especially when I recall where and how InstaGo started. It was not a smooth path, but I am grateful for the vision. It feels like a blessing to give back in a way that makes people feel seen, heard and supported.

You also founded The Fem Founders. Where did that come from?

I wanted to create the space I needed when I was starting out, to surround myself with women who are building and pushing boundaries. Most of the women in our community are expats and career-driven professionals looking to navigate life or business in a new environment, and my goal is to ensure that no female founder feels she has to face that loneliness alone. The growth has been beyond what I imagined. In just two months, we have welcomed over 200 members from around the world. I believe that when you pool collective intelligence, you reduce the time it takes for every woman in the room to reach her goal.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

Looking back, do you think you would have built the life you have today if that visa had been approved the first time?

No. Never. I believe the rejection timeline was the best professional development I ever had, and I never looked at life the same way again.

What is the biggest lesson rejection has taught you?

Rejection has taught me countless times that a NO from a system is not a NO to your potential. It is simply an invitation to innovate. If you can survive the process of building from nothing, you can lead in any market or environment.

What do people misunderstand about starting over from scratch?

People think you lose your progress, but you do not. You lose your things, but you keep your experience, your network and your capacity to solve problems, which is the only real currency you ever need in life.

If another woman is reading this while navigating a major setback, what would you want her to know?

I want her to know that this, too, shall pass. Giving up should never be an option, and asking for help when you need it is not a sign of weakness. It is actually the first step toward understanding the true power of community. While you are in the thick of it, never give up and do not stop praying, because I truly believe God has a better plan for you than what you can see right now.

What are you most proud of, not because the world celebrates it, but because you know what it cost you?

I am most proud of my mental agility. I honestly did not think I had it in me until life showed me that I did. You never really know how strong you are until the only choice you have left is to survive, and in that space, you realise you are far more capable than you ever imagined.

When people remember your story years from now, what do you hope they remember most?

I stood in the middle of my own fire and built a path out of it despite the challenges life threw at me. I hope my story serves as a reminder to everyone, especially women, that if I could do it, so can they.

罢丑别听聽is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria.聽Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together.聽.

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Ejiro Sharon Okotie, a 42-year-old Gender, Disability and Social Inclusion expert, trained counsellor, founder of Hope Inspired Foundation for Women and Youth with Disabilities, and author of Beyond the Darkness: A Journey from Loss to Purpose. She talks about going blind due to meningitis at 11 years old, the family that refused to give up on her, and why she is living proof that disability is not a death sentence.

Can you tell me about yourself and the family you grew up in?

My name is Ejiro Sharon Okotie. I’m 42, from Okpara Island in Delta State, and I currently split my time between Lagos and Abuja. I’m a development professional specialising in Gender, Disability and Social Inclusion; a trained counsellor running my own private practice, LRS Therapy Hub; founder and Executive Director of Hope Inspired Foundation for Women and Youth with Disabilities; a published researcher; and now an author. I am also a woman with a disability; I became permanently blind in both eyes at 11. I am a happy soul who loves the soft life, gospel music, laughter, love and humanity.

I am a twin, the second twin they call Kehinde in Yoruba, and I have an older sister. So that鈥檚 three girls from my mother, Elder Caroline Amujiane, who is the most selfless human being I have ever known. Though my mother found herself in a polygamous marriage that eventually ended in divorce, this means I have other half-sisters and brothers I do not really know from my father. My mother had my twin and me as a single parent because she divorced my father before we were born. We grew up with only her our entire lives. 

As a child, I was very reserved, quiet and gentle. My twin was fiercer and more stubborn, and she would fight for me in primary school. The first six years of my twin’s and my life, we stayed with our maternal grandmother in Sapele, Delta State, because my Mum had moved to Kaduna in Northern Nigeria in search of better opportunities with her eldest sister, Mummy Rebecca. Eventually, she brought us back to Kaduna with her, and after about a year, she also brought in our oldest sister, Joy, who had been living with our father. My twin would also fight our older sister and fight my battles, too. I was just noticeably quiet, but over time, with different experiences, I became more outspoken and learned how to fight for myself. Because at some point, my mum’s younger sister took my twin to live with her family in Maiduguri, and she didn’t return until we were 18, like 10 years later.

What are your earliest memories before losing your sight?

Running errands for my mum. She was in the sanitation department at our church, and when she couldn’t get there on time, she would send me to sweep, mop the floor and clean the seats. She also used to send me to the market with a written list and money for food items. As small as I was, I already knew how to price things, collect change, and then I would use whatever was left of my transport fare to buy every sweet thing in that market and trek home with everything balanced on my head.

I was a lively, active child. I had church friends, and we played ten-ten and suwe together. We didn’t have luxury, but I never felt like I lacked anything. Life felt very full.

Can you walk me through how you lost your sight at 11?

It was 1995. My mum had decided to put my older sister and me in boarding school that September. My sister went to Federal Government College, Kuje in Abuja, and I got admission into Christ Ambassador College in Sabo, Kaduna. I stayed only three months, September to December, before I started feeling sick.

Within a few days, it had gotten so bad that I couldn’t walk. I was too weak. They sent for my mum, and she had to carry me because I couldn’t manage on my own. She took me first to my aunt’s family hospital, but the admission fee was two thousand naira, and she didn’t have it. So she took me to another private hospital near where she worked. I was admitted, treated for malaria and typhoid, and kept for five days.

On the fifth day, I woke up to full darkness.

I couldn’t see anything. When I told my mum, she went to get the doctor, and they found a thick, dark, reddish coating over both my eyeballs. They said this was not what they had been treating and immediately referred us to the National Eye Hospital. By the next morning, my joints had started swelling. The eye doctors there told my mum something bigger was happening inside my body and referred us to Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital. That is where they took a sample of my spinal fluid and found the Cerebrospinal Meningitis. But the damage to my eyes had already been done.

I spent six weeks in that hospital. Over 154 injections, including two directly into my eyes. And at the end of it all, the doctor at Guinness Eye Hospital told my mum plainly: “Your daughter will never see again. I advise you to get her into a blind school so she can continue with her life.”

That was how our journey into blindness began.

I immediately decided I wasn’t going to let it break me. Or maybe my infant mind just couldn’t fully grasp what I had lost. Either way, I started pretending it wasn’t affecting me as much as it was, because I could see how the news was destroying my mum.

I remember asking her then, “Mummy, whose report will you believe? I choose to believe the report of the Lord!”

I was forming strong for her. And somehow that helped both of us.

What was the hardest part of adjusting?

Returning to church. My friends were young, and they just didn’t understand what had happened. We would go to our usual playground, and once everyone was done playing, they would forget that I was now blind and run off, leaving me behind. I would just sit there crying, waiting for my mum to start looking for me and send someone to come and get me. The same thing happened at my aunt’s house. My cousins and their friends would run off to play, and nobody thought to take me along. I remember sitting in my aunt’s kitchen on one of those days, feeling terrible about being left behind.

But this didn’t last long. A few months later, we moved from Kaduna back to Sapele in Delta State, and the change of environment made things much easier. These new people only knew this version of me, and they engaged with me as such from the very beginning. Moving to Delta was advantageous because it led me to experience empathy. My grandma’s neighbours showed me kindness; they always wanted to help in any way and at every chance they got. So I really did not feel different.

My grandma also often spoke about my future whenever her friends or others came to greet her, and the topic came up. “So what will happen to her now that she is blind?” My grandma would say, “God that created her will see to it that she becomes something in life. God will not leave her.”

I remember two distinct incidents. The first: a drunkard from the neighbourhood came to my grandma with a proposition. I was sitting in the living room that day. He walked in, greeted my grandma, and began speaking to her in Itsekiri. I understood because I grew up with my grandma. He told her that he had heard she had a blind child and had come to ask if she would be willing to give him as a wife. At least he would feed me and take that burden from her, and I could bear children for him. I remember how furious my grandmother was. She walked him out of the house and asked him never to return, shouting after him, “Did I tell you I cannot feed my granddaughter?” And in that moment, she said, “This my granddaughter, go be a big woman for life.”

The second incident was a young boy from the compound who used to come to our house to play with me. My grandmother’s rule was that I must never enter any neighbour’s house, as there was a possibility they would take advantage and try to rape me since I would not see them close the door, take off their clothes or do something they shouldn’t. So anyone who wanted to play with me had to come to our house, where she could keep her eyes on them. This young boy’s visits had become too frequent for my grandma, and after a while, I noticed he was no longer coming. When I eventually ran into him and asked why, he told me my grandma had told him to get his eyes off me, that she had noticed the way he was looking at me, that I was not his spec, that “it’s an Engineer her granddaughter will marry and not a meat seller like him.” I was shocked and apologised on my grandma’s behalf, saying I didn’t know this had happened. I think people around us just took their cue from my family and treated me accordingly. Everyone was hopeful about what I would become. So though adjusting was difficult, at least I had my family.

How else did your family carry you through all of this?

I always say I am one of the most blessed individuals on the planet when it comes to family. I jokingly tell my cousins that the man who marries me will have a lot of people to pay bride price to because I am a living example of what it means to say it takes a village to raise a child.

Starting with my mother. Her sacrifices for me are immeasurable. When I was at UNIBEN, she would come to school on weekends just to help me dictate my notes so I could braille them, or to help me record textbooks onto tape. She gave everything she had.

My older sister Joy taught me how to carry myself as a woman, even with blindness. Around the time I was 21 or 23, she sat me down and said, “Ejiro, as a woman, you must be known for something. Pick something about yourself and focus on it, your skin, your hair, your dressing, or a combination.” Because of Sister Joy, I take very good care of my appearance.

And my twin sister, Sherida. I call her my Angel because that is the only word that comes close to describing what she means to me. At one point, we were literally living each other’s lives. Her classes were in the mornings and mine in the evenings, and she didn’t want to leave me home alone, so we just went everywhere together. Her classes, my classes, all of it. Until she was travelling to Lagos to help fix my laptop for me, and got into an accident that broke her hand and kept her home for over a month of her final year. That season was one of the hardest of our lives, but it was also when I found my independence. Before that accident, my twin did everything for me.

What was it like going back to school after the doctors confirmed you would never regain your sight?

One of my mum’s greatest worries was education. Our family holds it very dear. The first person she spoke to when she visited a blind school in Kaduna was a blind teacher there, who told her, “Don’t waste time looking for a miracle. Let her continue her life. God can do it while she’s rebuilding her life.”

So my mum found Pacelli School for the Blind in Surulere and registered me in 1997. The principal, Rev. Sister Justina Obiangulu, created a special rehabilitation class just for me so I could learn Braille and typewriting without having to go back to primary school. My teacher was Mr Tunde Mohammed, Uncle Tunde, as I called him. He was also blind, and he was so patient with me. He taught me braille, how to type, how to walk independently, how to find things when they fell to the floor, and the doggedness that life required.

I used to cry constantly because I was desperate to get back to where I had left off, and braille felt like my only way there. Whenever the contractions weren’t coming to me, I would break down, and Uncle Tunde would say, “Ejiro, be patient with yourself; you will get it.” And one day, Sister Justina found me crying in the corridor, held me to herself and said, “Ejiro, always remember that whenever a door closes, God opens a window somewhere.”

Those words carried me for years.

I spent eight months at Pacelli. By July 1998, I had fully learned Braille and typing. By October 1998, I had gained admission into Queen’s College to JSS2, exactly where I had left off. I didn’t repeat a single class.

How did you manage through university without the resources available to you today?

Queen’s College was manageable because the school had always had blind students and had basic provisions in place. Resource teachers, extra time for exams, and brailed scripts. I was also lucky that older blind students passed their Braille notes down to me, so I had two classes’ worth of notes ahead of me at all times.

University was a completely different battle. At UNIBEN, I was the first blind student in my department for the International Studies and Diplomacy diploma. I had to go around and introduce myself to every lecturer at the start of the term. I had no screen reader then, just a braille machine and a manual typewriter. With a typewriter, if you make a mistake, you cannot go back and correct it. I had to memorise each exam question, arrange my full answer in my head, and then begin typing, because once you started, you carried on no matter what.

Despite all that, I completed my two-year diploma with Distinction, then gained direct entry to the 200-level and finished with a Second Class Upper in International Studies and Diplomacy.

By the time I was doing my first master’s at UNILAG, I had learned to use a computer with the JAWS screen reader software and everything transformed. I could scan notes, get soft copies of textbooks, search the internet, type and correct mistakes, and print my exam scripts. What had been grinding and exhausting became something I could actually navigate with confidence.

That was the first of three master’s degrees. Public and International Affairs from UNILAG, Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex on a Chevening Scholarship, where I graduated with a Distinction, and Marriage and Family Therapy from Triune Biblical University in the US, alongside other certifications and short courses.

Even with those provisions in place, were there moments when you felt excluded because of your disability?

Sure, there are several moments when one is excluded, deliberately or unintentionally, due to ignorance. Often, when people see me, because my disability is visible, people are quick to begin putting me in different CANNOT boxes. “Oh, she cannot do X, cannot do Y,” but they never think about what I CAN do. It’s sometimes from ignorance. But I have felt that way at work, at events, and even at church.

Was there ever a time you wanted to give up? What kept you going?

I do not think giving up was ever an option for me. Do I have low moments where I feel overwhelmed? Yes. But giving up, no! I love life too much. My mantra is that there is always a way out. Whenever I have cried, maybe slept a lot, or just engaged in the things I use to cope, I start thinking about the different possible solutions or ways out. I always believe that too many people have invested in my life at different points for me to just give up. Plus, God has surrounded me with great people; I always say I have the gift of people, and I do not take it for granted. During low moments, I always have someone to call, and often I get the right prayer or just the direction to move forward.

My mother is one of my biggest motivations to keep pushing in life. Whenever I think about everything she has done and been through, I always want her to look at me and be glad that her sacrifice was worth it. And it paid off after all! My purpose and all the destinies I now know are tied to mine, which is also what propels me to keep moving. When I think about all the hurdles I have surmounted in life and tell myself, if I lived through that, then I’ll survive this. What does not kill you makes you stronger. The difficulties I have faced at different stages of my life have made me stronger and often served as preparation for the next hurdle. I also thank God for the gift of salvation; I am a believer, and the word of God is where I draw the most strength. There is always the right word tailored for that particular situation, and the Holy Spirit is right there encouraging me, directing me to scriptures, or simply leading me to a story on YouTube or a WhatsApp status that answers the situation. God is my foundation and remains the rock that keeps me standing in any storm or blow that life may deal me.

What She Said: The Clinic Paid More For My Eggs Because I鈥檓 Light-Skinned

Looking back now, what do you wish people had understood about you during those years?

I wish people understood that the loss of a part of a person is not a death sentence. You do not have to write people off because they acquired or were born with an impairment. We are unique, and people live differently. Disability is just one of the diversities of life, and the fact that I am blind doesn’t mean I’m no longer a human being. I have breath in my nostrils, and like everyone else, I have desires; to be somebody in life, to marry, to love and be loved, to have my own children and my home, to have my money, and to have a voice that should be heard in society. I’m just like everyone else, a human being with dreams, hopes, aspirations and everything else that keeps and drives any human being.

I mean, look at me now. I became the founder of Hope Inspired Foundation for Women and Youth with Disabilities, a Lead Counsellor, Gender and Inclusion Specialist, Chevening Scholar, Mandela Washington Fellow and author.

Walk us through your journey to each of these milestones. Which achievement feels the most meaningful to you, and why?

My mum has a common expression: “Life is in phases and men are in sizes.” One phase of my life opened me up to the next, and like an onion, I have just continued to peel back old skin, diving into opportunities by seizing them and sometimes by just showing up, speaking up, or asking a question.

In October 2011, I began my NYSC, and six months in, someone told me about a job opening at the Nigeria Association of the Blind for an HIV project for blind adolescents. In camp, I had joined the UNICEF Peer Educator Trainer programme on preventing HIV/AIDS and Sexual Reproductive Health for adolescents, and I was the only blind person there. As we did the training, I kept thinking to myself: as important as this information is, how come none of these programmes targeted people like me? In addition to my CDS at a secondary school near my house, I started visiting two blind schools: the School for the Blind Vocational Training Centre in Cappa, Oshodi, and the School for the Blind Nigeria Farm Craft Centre at Isere Olofin, Igando.

When I heard about the opening at NAB, where the African Union for the Blind was coming to implement a project, I applied as a fresh corps member. Long story short, I was employed as a Project Coordinator. The project was implemented across three south-western states, Lagos, Ogun and Oyo, and at the end of the first year, it was extended to the remaining three, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti. Over the two years of the project, I trained 50 blind youths as peer educators, and we reached over 4,000 blind adolescents and youths with information and HIV testing across the six states.

But as I moved from state to state, I noticed a troubling trend. The male peer educators were adventurous, outspoken and daring, while the female blind peer educators were often passive, wanting to stay in the background, sometimes too afraid to speak. I remember one lady from Oyo who was so frightened, so I went to her, and she told me her spoken English wasn’t good enough. I encouraged her to speak in Yoruba, noting that there would be people in the room who needed the information in Yoruba and that she was the one who could give it to them. She came forward and delivered beautifully.

This discovery really bothered me. I began asking questions: Why are girls with disabilities so passive? The answer was always the same: low self-esteem. So I decided to do something about it. As UNICEF peer educators, a key part of our curriculum was building life skills, such as self-esteem, assertiveness, confidence-building, negotiation and refusal skills. I started at my alma mater, Queen’s College, got approval from the school authorities, and began coaching the blind students there. After some time, I spoke with my mentor about my vision, and he advised me to build a proper structure to track progress and impact. I got into a conversation with a classmate while doing my master’s at UNILAG. She told me about her lawyer who helped register her organisation. I approached him, and in 2015, I officially registered the Hope Inspired Foundation for Women and Youth (HIFWYD). After eight years, in 2023, we metamorphosed into a full Organisation of Persons with Disabilities, promoting and protecting the rights of women and youth with disabilities through policy advocacy, programme implementation and self-actualisation efforts. Over the last eleven years, we have supported over 22,000 women and youth, building their capacity as self-advocates for rights and inclusion across education, economic empowerment, and leadership.

Establishing HIFWYD has been my most meaningful achievement because it embodies the core of my purpose: to inspire others to succeed. Seeing our beneficiaries speak up for themselves and their rights, pursue their goals and dreams, and aspire to be more is more rewarding than anything else in this world. I remember in the early days of HIFWYD, before we began attracting grants, I would use all the salary I made from my nine-to-five to implement our small projects, the InspireLife project, our annual Girls’ Camp in December, and how rewarding it was to see students in QC stepping into leadership opportunities in school, handling peer pressure efficiently, speaking confidently and boldly for themselves; young women with disabilities becoming more aware of their bodies, their sexuality, their sexual rights, able to make informed choices; women with disabilities now leading policy advocacy for the enactment of disability law in Ebonyi. HIFWYD stands as the bedrock on which everything I have done is built.

That鈥檚 truly amazing. How did the Mandela Washington Fellowship happen?

I first applied in 2014 but was rejected. In my mind, I said, “No be people like me them dey find,” but I was wrong. When it opened again in 2015, my lecturer called me and encouraged me to apply again. This time, I was more intentional. I downloaded the form, but because I didn’t have full faith in what I had, I submitted it at eleven-something pm on the night of the deadline. To my greatest shock, I got an email inviting me to an interview.

At the interview, when they asked why I should be selected, I said, “If you don’t believe in your own dream and cannot invest in it, why should you expect someone else to invest in it? I don’t have many resources, but from what I have, I have started to address the challenges I observed in my peers, one life at a time, slow but surely.” I remember the coordinator, Rodah, as I later found out her name was, repeating those lines back to me, and I knew I had struck a chord. Still, I did not believe I was what they were looking for.

On a certain day in March, my twin Sherida called to say she had received a congratulations email from something called IREX. She said it seemed those people had taken me. I ran to check my email, and there it was. Not only had I been selected for the seven-week Fellowship at Arizona State University, but I had also been accepted for the six-week Professional Development Experience, an internship with a US-based organisation. I was going to be in the US for thirteen weeks.

My cohort included 25 Fellows from 20 Sub-Saharan African countries. We all prepared presentations for the Ignite Talk to be delivered at the Presidential Summit in Washington DC, and the cohort voted for the best one to represent ASU. Everyone voted for mine. Our coordinator, Dana, said my presentation always moved her to tears because of its content and the passion with which I delivered it. That was how I represented Arizona State University in Washington DC. I also shook hands with President Barack Obama at the Presidential Summit. I presented at the Sixth Africa Forum in Uganda, attended a Disability Rights Monitoring training in Pretoria, South Africa, and received a scholarship to a rehabilitation conference in Edinburgh.

In that same period, I won two grants totalling $14,000 for Hope Inspired, which dramatically scaled our work. Over 7,000 applications in Nigeria, only 40 Fellows selected. Across Africa, over 50,000 applications, only 500 Fellows. I was among the 40 from Nigeria and the 500 from Africa. From that point on, I stopped doubting what I can do.

Let鈥檚 get into you becoming a Chevening Scholar.

I applied once and was rejected. Same feeling as before: no be person like me them dey find. But my colleague Michael, who had gotten in on his own application, kept pushing me to try again and offered to help review my essays. I applied a second time, got invited for an interview, and when I arrived, it felt like a walk in the park. That year, I had been so intentional that sourcing and applying for scholarships had practically become my full-time work. I applied for the Australia-Africa Award, Chevening, and the IDS Scholarship, among others, and received two scholarships at once: Chevening and the Australia-Africa Award. I chose Chevening and IDS because at the time, IDS had been ranked first globally in Development Studies for six consecutive years. If someone was paying the bills, why not choose the best?

IDS challenged everything about me. I was intimidated daily, surrounded by brilliant professionals from all over the world. I doubted myself, my knowledge, everything. But I was being stretched. I heard that only one Nigerian had ever graduated from IDS with a Distinction, and I said quietly to myself, if one person made it, I would be the next.

At the end of my programme, I received a Distinction in my dissertation and an overall Distinction. I was one of five Nigerians to graduate with a Distinction from IDS in 2020.

And you also became a counsellor and an author. How did both of those happen?

Both came from the same season of deep intentionality. In 2024, as I planned my 40th birthday, I took March to pray and reflect seriously on what the next decade should look like. Then in May, a cousin called, and we spoke for two hours. At the end of that call, he was lighter and clearer. After I hung up, a thought came to me: why are you not doing this as a profession?

Counselling. It felt surprising and completely obvious at the same time. My older sister had told me when I was thirteen to open a problem clinic. From as far back as I could remember, I had always had the right words for people. The next day, I found a training institute, enrolled, and by December 2025, I had completed a master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy and set up LRS Therapy Hub.

The book came from the same season. Having lived with blindness for thirty-one years and gone through a particularly difficult stretch in 2025, something in me said it was time to put it all down. In April 2025, I was featured on the podcast Through It All by Dr Kola Alexandra Olugbodi, and for the first time, I narrated my full story out loud. Something moved inside me. I started writing.

Eight months later, on my birthday, 21 April 2026, Beyond the Darkness: A Journey from Loss to Purpose was in my hands as a hard copy. I launched it with my friends and loved ones on that same day.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What is the book about, and what do you want people to take from it?

It is a memoir. My life from age eleven, losing my sight to Cerebrospinal Meningitis, through every phase that followed, the lessons, the storms, the wins. But I didn’t want it to be only about disability. I wanted people to see the endless possibilities the human spirit carries.

What drove me most was wanting to honour my mother. When a disability occurs, everyone focuses on the child’s needs. But the day I lost my sight, my mother also lost something. She lost her hope for my future, asking God what would become of me and whether I would ever live a normal life. She revealed later how she lost parts of herself, her own dreams, her own life, just to be there for me emotionally, spiritually and physically. Those sacrifices go unnoticed. Beyond the Darkness is for her and for every parent, sibling and caregiver who has ever done the same in silence.

The key message is this: we all go through darkness. Mine was the loss of physical sight. Yours may be the loss of a loved one, a job, an addiction, or a dream. But in every darkness there is a hidden light waiting to be found. The darkness is not the end. It is the shadow that leads you to your inner light. Do not wait for the light. Shine, and light will find you.

You can get the book here on or Amazon ( or ).

What are the biggest misconceptions people still have about blind women?

The CANNOT box. Before asking a single question, people assume I cannot cook, care for a home, or raise children. Someone I knew from university had secretly been considering marrying me years before I knew anything about it. Years later, he came to visit me in Lagos and sat watching as I made eba from scratch, warmed soup and dished out his food. The next day I came back, peeled a yam, cooked it and fried eggs. After eating, he told me about the secret intentions he had once had and how he had talked himself out of it because he didn’t think he could afford all the help I would need to function as his wife.

I simply said: “Your loss.”

The second misconception is that I should not have preferences or standards, that I should be grateful for any attention and not exercise any judgment about what I want. A man from my church once told me that what I needed was just a husband. When he eventually asked me out, and I said no, he was genuinely shocked. Then came the insults. “Too proud. What do you think you are?”

I have a spec. I am educated, beautiful, bold and a Jesus baby. You think I don’t know I deserve the best, and that I have worked far too hard on myself to settle for someone I don’t want?

The third misconception is that confidence in a blind woman reads as pride. Because many women with disabilities struggle with low self-esteem and stay quiet and in the background, when you show up blind and bold and with a voice, people read it as arrogance. It is not. It is just a woman who knows what she carries.

What do you wish people would stop doing, even with good intentions?

Moving my things without telling me. When friends visit and rearrange my space in the name of helping, they complicate my life. I already have a full mental map of where everything is. When you move something, and you’re no longer around, I spend time searching for it, which leaves me frustrated and sometimes unable to function. If you must move something, tell me the new location.

The other thing is speaking to my assistant instead of speaking to me directly. When people meet me with someone helping me, they will ask my assistant what my name is, what I would like, and how I should be guided. Speak to me. I am right there. I have a voice and all the information about myself.

If you meet a person with a disability and you’re unsure what to do, there are only two questions you need to ask: “How would you like me to help you?” and “What do you need?” Ask those, and you will always have a great start.

What would you say to parents who have just found out their child has a disability?

First, I want them to process what has happened, not only to the child but to themselves and to the family. Because it is not only the child who has lost something. Then I want them to know there is hope. The journey may be tough, but with the right support and information, you can begin to take action early, and that matters enormously.

Give your child independence. From early on, begin teaching them to do things for themselves, with you guiding them along the way. Over-protecting them and doing everything for them is a disservice to their long-term life. Set structures in place for them to thrive, and then let them learn, make mistakes and grow.

And do not lose yourself in the process. Process your own emotions. Build with your child, but do not leave yourself behind. You deserve to live, too.

If you could speak to the 11-year-old girl who had just woken up in the dark, what would you say to her?

I would tell her everything is possible. Dreams come true; you just have to keep holding on to them and keep moving through every difficulty.

I would tell her the storms will come, but those storms will make her stronger, and in her growth, her wings carry opportunities for others to fly. Under her shade, others will find comfort from the scorching sun of life.

I would tell her that life is beautiful and worth living. So live your best.

And I would tell her this: you may have lost your physical sight, but the sight within is stronger than any external light outside. Do not wait for light. Shine, and light will find you.

罢丑别听聽is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria.聽Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together.聽.

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

Today’s #WhatSheSaid is a little different. We spoke to two women who donated eggs at the same private clinic in Lagos. Yasmine* (27) is mixed race and light-skinned, and Kemi* (30) is fully Nigerian. Though it was the same procedure and the same hospital, they had two completely different experiences in pay, care, pain, and in what the clinic decided each of their bodies deserved to feel.

Can you tell me about your life before the egg donation? 

Yasmine: This was around 2023. I was about 24-years-old, living with my best friend somewhere past Sangotedo in Lagos. We could barely afford it, but we were making do. I had a job in Lekki that paid me 50k and expected me to come in every day, so it was very temporary. My parents did not care. They felt like, okay, you’ve finished university, time to stand on your own. For context, I did not come from a poor family. We have always been comfortable, so this felt unfair to me, and I was resentful. I know some people will call me ungrateful. It is what it is. Anyways, this meant more often than not, I didn’t have much. Of course, I had a few other friends who pulled me into modelling gigs here and there, but those were not sustainable and modelling never really interested me. 

My roommate had a job that didn’t pay much, but it was enough to keep us afloat, and she also had people she was seeing who helped fund our lifestyle and survival. I was dating someone too, who helped out often. I was taking courses, trying to find better jobs, just trying to figure myself out while surviving in an economy that was not making it easy.

Kemi: Mine happened in 2021, I believe? Or early 2022. I had just lost my job, and your girl was really going through it. I had been there nearly four years; I was due for a promotion. But my superior was making advances, and I couldn’t keep putting myself in a compromising position. I knew if I said anything, nobody would believe me, so I left. My family comes from very little, and I was the one sending money home. My mother was sick at the time, and I needed to keep those transfers going, and I couldn’t anymore. Still, I couldn鈥檛 stay at the job. It had gotten to a point where I could genuinely see him raping me. 

So, I needed a significant amount of money quickly, and egg donation felt like the most viable option. I spoke to people from my university and people I trusted from my former office who had been through it. I asked a lot of questions before I went anywhere.

Had you thought about egg donation before? What were your feelings going in?

Yasmine: I had strong feelings that were mostly less than positive ones. I’ve always been the type to say that if I got accidentally pregnant, I could never abort. I judge absolutely nobody who does. Genuinely, if you cannot keep it, please do what you have to do and don’t let anyone make you feel a type of way. But for me, it always felt like I couldn’t, and egg donation felt similar. I used to think it was like giving a part of yourself away. It was like giving a child away almost. I know it’s not the same thing, but that’s how it sat with me.

I think part of it comes from the fact that my parents were absent in a lot of ways when I was growing up. So I take the found family I have very seriously: my siblings, my close friends, the people who really show up. The idea of giving something away that could become a life just felt heavy. That’s where I was.

Kemi: I have never had any strong thoughts or opinions about it. I have always known that in this life you must hustle to survive, and I have never judged another woman鈥檚 hustle. I needed the money. That was the main thing. The fact that I was helping a couple have a baby was a good thought alongside it, but the financial need was the driver. I had done my research, I had asked around, I went in with my eyes open.

How did you find the clinic and what was that first conversation like?

Yasmine: My best friend and housemate was already in conversation with them. They had reached out to her, and she was going to speak to the doctor about donating. She asked me to come for moral support; I was just there for her, that was the plan. But when we arrived, they were so warm, so open, so patient. Any question you had, they answered fully; nothing was rushed. And somewhere in that conversation, they started talking to me too, encouraging me to consider it. They said just come for a scan first, just see. So we both had a transvaginal ultrasound right there, and everything checked out. By the end of that visit, I was in.

Kemi: Through a friend. She told me the clinic was offering more than others I had heard about. Most places were paying less, and these ones were offering one hundred and seventy thousand naira. I was going to be able to send seventy thousand home and keep the rest. That felt like a lifeline. She also mentioned that she had gone through the process and it wasn鈥檛 bad. That they were better than other hospitals she had tried. The conversation with the doctors was straightforward. I asked what I needed to ask, they told me the full process, and I said yes. 

Yasmine, what happened to feeling like it was giving a part of yourself away? 

I had that thought mostly during my teenage years and very early twenties. At this time, I had been through enough that I was a bit, should I say, swayable? And I was with my friend, with whom I had done everything. My friend who has always been there for me. I felt comfortable. They told me I would be helping a couple who had been trying really, really hard to have kids and that the 鈥榚ggs are there, I am not using them anyway鈥�. I thought really hard, and what mostly sold it was clinging to what I know was the manipulative point that I would be helping a couple out; I was on the precipice of deciding to be child-free and the money. I really needed the money.聽

Kemi, did you have second thoughts at any point? No worries about where your eggs would end up?

Genuinely, no. I really didn鈥檛 care. That wasn鈥檛 my thought process at all. I was thinking about the money at the end and the pain I was enduring for it. I was thinking, 鈥淚t鈥檒l all be worth it in the end鈥�. You will not understand. I have seen suffering in this life. This was nothing. 

What She Said: The Clinic Paid More For My Eggs Because I鈥檓 Light-Skinned

When they told you what you’d be paid, what was your reaction?

Yasmine: They said full Nigerians get paid 170,000 naira. While mixed-race and white donors get four hundred and fifty thousand. Some people have negotiated more. When I asked why, they said, ” You know, mixed-race and white eggs are rare here. If you go there, black eggs will be more expensive.

I hate discrimination of any and every kind. I see the privilege that comes with looking the way I look in Nigeria, and it is something I am very conscious of. So this disgusted me. It irritated me to my bones. But I also had nothing. No money, no job. And they were offering me almost three times what they were offering fully Nigerian women for the same procedure on the same body. So as much as it annoyed me, I took what was being offered. I needed it.

Kemi: They told me one hundred and seventy thousand, and I said okay. They were offering more than most other places I had heard about, so it felt like the right choice. I didn’t ask many questions about the number. I just needed it to work.

Walk me through the process. 

Yasmine: So, after the transvaginal ultrasound confirmed everything was fine with my follicles, they explained what the next two weeks would look like. The stimulation phase is basically you injecting yourself daily with hormones that tell your ovaries to produce more eggs than they naturally would in a cycle. Normally, your body matures one egg per month. The injections push your ovaries to mature multiple eggs at once, which is what makes retrieval possible and also why you feel so rough by the end of it.

They gave us a Gonal-F pen each; it looks exactly like an EpiPen. You click a tiny disposable needle tip onto the end, dial the dose, inject it into the fatty part of your belly, and remove and throw the tip away afterwards. That’s it. They also gave us a tracker sheet to log each injection so we wouldn’t lose count or miss a day. We only needed to come back to the clinic after five to seven days for monitoring appointments, transvaginal ultrasounds to check how the follicles were developing, and to adjust the dosage if needed. They covered transportation to and from those visits.

For most of the two weeks, I barely felt the injections. The needle is genuinely tiny. I remember the first time, being absolutely terrified, looking at it from every angle, and then putting it in and thinking, oh. That was nothing. I was alternating sides of my belly each day, so it never got too sore in one spot. I had maybe two or three clinic visits during the entire stimulation phase. It was very manageable for most of it.

Then, about thirty-six hours before retrieval, they give you what they call a trigger shot, an hCG injection that tells your body the eggs are ready and triggers the final maturation. That’s when the real discomfort kicks in because your ovaries are now full and heavy with multiple mature follicles. After that, it’s just a matter of waiting for retrieval day.

Kemi: Mine was nothing like that. I had to go into the clinic every single day for the full two weeks, and getting there wasn’t cheap. I was calculating transport costs against what I had saved and what I could still afford to lose before the payment came through. It was tight, but I made it work because I had no choice.

The injections were done by the nurses, not by me at home. It was regular needles, the kind they use to draw blood or give you a drip. Definitely much bigger than what Yasmine is describing. They were painful, not unbearable, but consistently uncomfortable, and that felt unnecessary, but it’s needles, so of course. And the nurses were efficient, fast and got it done. But the coldness is what I remember most. Nobody was outwardly rude, but I could feel it: that energy of I don’t particularly want you here; let me just get through this. It was like I was a task to be completed rather than a person to be treated. You could feel it in the room among the other women, too. We were all just moving through the same thing together, quietly, with the same indifference pointed at all of us. Nobody checked in, nobody asked how you were doing beyond the clinical minimum. You came, you got your injection, you left.

What happened physically as the retrieval day got closer?

Yasmine: The last three or four days were rough. My belly was already sore from the repeated injections, and the bloating or what felt like it, was 10 times worse. It wasn’t normal bloating; it was like my stomach was on fire from the inside and heavy. I could barely walk properly. Any bump in the car, any sudden movement, was agony. I couldn’t bend. I felt constantly like I wanted to vomit. I called the doctor, and she answered, talked me through it, reassured me it was normal and that it would be over soon. That helped.

Kemi: I had all the same symptoms, but I didn鈥檛 call anyone. I just handled it and went about looking for money still. I did call my friend because this was the first time I had gone through this. I needed to be sure the pain was normal. It was deeply uncomfortable. By retrieval day, you are already at your worst. Your body is in so much pain, you’re bloated in a way that makes every movement difficult, and you can barely think straight. You just want it to be over.

Tell me about the retrieval itself.

Yasmine: I lay almost upside down, my knees bent and ankles strapped down to the bed, uncomfortably wide open, and they asked the standard questions: do you drink, do you smoke, do you do hard drugs, and while they were talking, they injected the cannula they had put in earlier with, I guess, anaesthesia because I was just gone. I don’t remember anything from the procedure itself. There鈥檚 some foggy memory of feeling like something was being pulled out of me, but it鈥檚 barely there.聽

I woke up to discomfort and real pain. It was difficult to walk; there was a deep, sharp pain in my belly. My friend was there, and she helped me get ready to leave. They had given me painkillers while I was still under, so I woke up to the tail end of that wearing off. But the procedure itself, I mostly felt nothing. I was completely under.

Kemi: Before they even started, the nurse tried to put the cannula in my hand, and she missed. Over and over again. Kept stabbing the same hand, trying to find the vein. I was already in so much discomfort, and now this. By the time she got it in, I was exhausted before the procedure had even begun.

Then I was supposed to be sedated, but I am guessing they didn鈥檛 use as much as they should have, or I just needed more because I was lying there and I was aware. I could talk, and I could feel everything that was happening to me, but I couldn鈥檛 move, or I was too sluggish to move.聽

I saw the big needle before it went in. I felt it go in. I felt them working, pulling the entire thing. Even when they were cleaning me beforehand, it was so rough, like sandpaper. But the worst was the needle and the extraction, over and over, each time they went back in for another egg. It was so painful. I kept saying so. I kept telling them it was hurting, that I could feel it, that they needed to stop.

They didn’t stop until they were done.

What were they saying back to you while you were telling them to stop?

Yasmine: I was unconscious. I didn’t know anything was wrong until much later.

Kemi: Nothing. They just kept going.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

When did it become clear that your experiences had been different?

Yasmine: When you reached out, and we started talking. From the pricing, I already knew something wasn’t right. There was also something else: they mentioned that if you refer a surrogate to the clinic, you get two thousand dollars. That was already strange to me. But when you described what happened to Kemi during retrieval, that’s when I understood that we hadn’t just been paid differently. We had been treated differently in the most fundamental way possible. What happened to her during that retrieval should not have happened to anyone.

Kemi: I’m the type of person who talks to people. Even in that recovery room, there was a woman who was alone and clearly uncomfortable, and I just offered to help. We started talking the way you do when you’re both in a situation like that. And I asked her what she was receiving. That was the first time I heard a number that wasn’t my number. She told me, and I just thought, oh. Oh.

I’ve spoken to others since. Fully Nigerian women who went through the same clinic and mixed-race women who did as well. The experience is consistent. The coldness, the daily visits and the retrieval for full Nigerians and mostly warmth, tiny needles and Gonal-F pens they get to take home for days for the mixed-race women. 

What do you want someone reading this to do with it?

Yasmine: I want them to understand that this isn’t abstract. This is a clinic in Lagos making decisions about how much pain a woman’s body deserves to feel based on how she looks. It is happening right now, and the fact that I benefited from it makes me sick.

Kemi: I’m just telling you what’s going down. I thought it was important that someone know. This is what’s happening. Now you know.

Have you considered reporting this to the authorities?

Kemi: What exactly am I reporting? That I consented to a procedure that was performed on me? If it’s the retrieval process, some other mixed-race women have mentioned feeling some of it as well. I think everybody’s body just responds differently to it, and that is probably what they will say. I have no case. Besides, they tell you everything before you start. No one lies or takes your choice away.

Jasmine: No, I haven’t. I also do not think this will be taken seriously. And truthfully, a part of me is scared.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said聽will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.聽

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Nengi*, a woman in her late forties based in Port Harcourt. She talks about losing her husband suddenly in 2010, enduring a full year of Igbo widowhood rites in silence, and the decade-long legal battle she fought alone to keep everything he built for their children.

Can you tell me about your life before everything changed?

I had a good life, a genuinely full one. I’m Port Harcourt-born and raised; I grew up here, had my first job here, fell in love here. My husband and I met in this city and built everything we had right here. He started in trading, moving goods, grinding, and learning how money moves. From there, he moved into shipping, then real estate, then manufacturing. By the time he died, he had shares in oil and gas, energy, telecoms, and car dealerships. He was very serious about his money in the truest sense of the word. A builder who genuinely enjoyed building. And he loved his family with everything he had: our three children and me.

Our oldest was seven when he died. The middle one was five. Our lastborn had just turned one year old.

How did he die?

He collapsed at an industry dinner. He was seated at the table, laughing at something someone had said, and then he was on the floor. By the time the ambulance came, he was already gone. It was a massive cardiac arrest. He was in his early fifties and had never been seriously ill, so nobody saw it coming, least of all me. We had spoken on the phone that afternoon about something completely ordinary; I can’t even remember what now, and that was the last conversation we ever had. You never think the last ordinary conversation is the last one. You just don’t think that way when life is good, and your husband is healthy, and you have a one-year-old at home. You simply don’t think that way.

It鈥檚 worse to stomach the reality and actually say out loud that the worst part wasn鈥檛 him dying but what came after. 

What do you mean?

There are certain rites a woman must endure after her husband dies. Many cultures have their own; I do not know all of them, but because of what I have endured, I would say marrying into a deeply traditional Igbo family is the worst thing a woman can do to herself, whether she herself is Igbo or not. Especially if there鈥檚 nothing in place to preserve her dignity after her husband dies.  

So how did you navigate the mourning process?

I may not be Igbo, but I grew up in Port Harcourt, surrounded by Igbo traditions; I knew what I was marrying into. When you marry an Igbo man of his standing, you understand that certain things come with it. I had seen enough, heard enough. I wasn’t completely unprepared in theory. But theory and reality are very different things.

I made a decision very early. I was going to do everything they asked of me. Everything. Not because I believed in all of it, but because I knew what was at stake. My children. Their inheritance. Their future. The life their father had built for them. I was not going to give anyone a single reason to say I killed him or that I didn’t respect him or his people. Not one reason.

Walk me through what those first days looked like.

They took me to his family compound. That is where the rites happen, not in the city where we lived, but in his hometown, with his people, on their terms. They shaved my head. All of it, completely gone. They put me in a room, and that room became my entire world. I slept on a mat on the bare floor. I couldn’t cook, couldn’t leave, couldn’t do anything for myself. I had to eat from broken plates; I could only wear black clothing. I was given a stick to scratch my own body because I was considered spiritually unclean, like the death had contaminated me.

At dawn and at dusk every single day, I had to wail loudly. It had to be a sustained and demonstrable grief. I was genuinely grieving. I had lost my husband, the man I loved, my protector, the father of my babies. But I also had to perform that grief on a schedule for people who were watching me for any sign of insufficient mourning that they could use against me.

I鈥檓 so sorry. 

That was even okay. As painful as it was, it was okay. What wasn鈥檛 was asking me to prove I had no hand in his death by making me drink the water they used to wash his corpse.

I could not fight or argue. I also did not have my family people with me. I only had his people. They were avidly watching me, like a hawk. Even though every part of me recoiled, I thought of my children, and I did it. 

I drank it. I was not going to let them win because of this. I was not going to give them anything.

Who was watching you most closely during this period?

The Umuada, the daughters of his lineage. It is difficult to explain, if you haven鈥檛 seen it, but they are powerful. They enforced everything. They were the ones who would inspect you, question you, report back. And his family was watching too. His brother especially.

What She Said: My Dad Spent My Mum鈥檚 Pension. Now I鈥檓 Stranded in Canada

Tell me about the brother.

He had come for me when my husband was alive. He was persistent and ugly about it. I didn’t tell my husband at first because I didn’t want trouble, but eventually I had no choice. He became too bold. My husband believed me immediately because this brother had done the same thing before, to someone else, and it had worked. He was furious. He told me directly, ” Look at me, Nkwuchi(a traditional inheritance practice in some Igbo communities where a widow is permanently integrated into her late husband’s immediate family by marrying his brother or a close male relative) will never happen to you. I will make sure of it.鈥� He said he would put it in writing, get it all properly documented. But he died suddenly, and none of that had been done yet.

So the man who had tried to sleep with me while my husband was alive was now the one at the centre of a plan to inherit me like property after his death.

When did they tell you?

After a full year. I had completed every single mourning rite without complaint. Twenty-eight days of intensive confinement, then sixty more days of semi-seclusion, then the remaining months of public mourning in black clothing, no socialising, no freedom of any kind. A full year.

The Agba Okwo, the liberation ceremony, was supposed to mark the end. My mourning clothes were meant to be burned; I was meant to be given new colourful clothes and declared free. Instead, that is when they told me what they expected next.

I know people will say this is old-fashioned, that modern Igbo families don’t do Nkuchi anymore. But when there is this much money at stake, tradition becomes very convenient, very quickly.

What was your reaction?

I was appalled. I want to use a stronger word, but appalled will do for now. This man, of all men. This specific man. After everything I had endured, after proving myself at every single stage of their process, this was their expectation.

I said no. Clearly and without room for misinterpretation. That was the beginning of a war that lasted over a decade.

What did they do when you refused?

Everything. The question should be what didn鈥檛 they do. The estate, his accounts, his properties, all of it was locked away from me and my children almost immediately. The first thing they did was move to obtain Letters of Administration over his estate before I could, effectively cutting the children and me out of everything while the courts processed it. His brother, supported by other family members, led the charge. They challenged the validity of our marriage even though we had a traditional ceremony, a white wedding, and a court marriage. He paid my bride price in full. There was nothing to challenge, but they challenged it anyway, which forced us into proving what should have already been obvious.

Then they filed paternity disputes. Claiming my children were not his.

How did you respond to that?

I did not let that go on for long. I pushed for a court-ordered DNA test immediately. The courts processed it, but these things take time in Nigeria. It was months of waiting, chain of custody arguments, every delay they could manufacture. But it came back definitive. They could not disprove the paternity because the children were his, obviously. They could not disprove the marriage because it was documented three different ways. But in Nigeria, being right and being protected are not the same thing. They had money, and they had time, and they were willing to use both.

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You mentioned being alone. What did that period look like?

I had my own businesses, my own cars, things in my own name. But I did not come from a wealthy family, and what I had was not enough to sustain my children at the level their father had provided for them and fight a legal battle against a very resourceful family simultaneously. And I was isolated in ways that went beyond money. The mourning period had cut me off from the world for a full year, and when I came out, I was already depleted. My friends eventually rallied, but the early period of the legal battle was genuinely lonely.

My family came eventually. My siblings ride hard for me; they always have. But none of them were in Nigeria at the time. It took time for the situation to reach the level where my sister came back first. Then years later, my brother followed. By then things were already deep.

What was the lowest point?

There was a period, a few years into the legal battle, where I genuinely did not know if I was going to win. The courts were slow. The in-laws were filing objection after objection, dragging every stage out deliberately. My lawyers were citing everything available: the constitutional provisions, the Mojekwu v. Mojekwu ruling from 1997, which had already declared customs that denied widows and women inheritance rights to be repugnant to natural justice. The Ukeje v. Ukeje Supreme Court ruling in 2014 added more weight; it reinforced the constitutional argument against discriminatory customary law and helped shift things further in my favour.

The VAPP Act came in 2015. But here is the truth: Rivers State never properly domesticated it. So what it did for me practically, in Port Harcourt, was limited. What actually moved my case was the constitutional argument, the case law that had been building for years, and the fact that some of his most significant assets were in Lagos, where the legal environment had more teeth and where VAPP had actual enforcement. My lawyers were smart enough to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously. We weren’t putting everything in one jurisdiction.

I had three young children, and I was fighting to make sure they could keep their father’s name and their father’s legacy. There were days when I sat in my house and could not see the end of it.

What happened? Did you win?

Strategically and stubbornly. My lawyers were good. Once the 2014 Supreme Court ruling came down and then VAPP in 2015, the legal landscape shifted in my favour. The paternity dispute had already been dismissed years earlier. The marriage validity argument had gone nowhere. What remained was the estate, and by then the courts had enough precedent to move.

I won full access to my husband’s estate. His shipping company, his real estate holdings, his manufacturing interests, his stakes in oil and gas, energy, telecoms. Everything he built. It went to his children where it belonged. I have been managing it.

Where are you now?

I鈥檓 still here in Port Harcourt.  I run my businesses, and I run what he built, and I travel when I want to because I have earned every single trip. My two older children started university in Nigeria, and when things finally resolved properly a few years ago, they moved abroad to continue. My youngest is still in secondary school here with me.

It took more than ten years. My children grew up watching me fight. I hope that is not the worst thing I have passed on to them. I also hope it is the reason none of them will ever accept less than they deserve.

What do you want women to know?

That you are allowed to fight. Enduring something is not the same as accepting it. I endured an entire year of rites that stripped me of my dignity because I understood the game I was in. But enduring it never meant I was not going to fight what came after.

Know your rights. Find your documentation. A court marriage matters. A registered will matters. A lawyer who understands both statutory and customary law matters. These are not romantic things to think about when you are happy and in love, but they are the things that protect you when the unthinkable happens.

He told me Nkuchi would never happen to me, and I swear, I believe that he meant it. He just didn’t update the paperwork in time. Don’t let your protection depend entirely on someone else’s intentions, no matter how much they love you. Put it in writing. Make it legal. Make it unbreakable.

I had to spend ten years making it unbreakable after the fact. You deserve not to go through that.

罢丑别听聽is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria.聽Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together.聽.

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Amina*, a 28-year-old woman who moved to Canada at 16 for university. She talks about the pension her father spent, the decade of crisis that followed, and why the road back to Nigeria keeps closing in front of her, no matter how hard she tries to take it.

Can you tell me about yourself and how this whole journey started?

I’m Amina, and I’m 28. I moved to Canada when I was 16, straight out of secondary school, to start university. I was doing a double major, Communications and International Relations, though I had to drop one along the way, and it became more of a major and a minor situation. I made the big trip entirely alone. It was just me, a school dorm, and a plan that felt very simple at the time. Go to school, finish, and come back home with a degree.

I started in a smaller city, not one that people usually mention when they talk about Canada. My mum paid my tuition for the first two years without any issues. She was the one supporting me, along with the agency the school used to help with things like accommodation, visa and so on. Everything felt manageable.

What happened after those first two years?

My mum called me one day and told me that my father, her husband, had taken her pension. All of it. He’s not a working man; he’s a pastor, and he had gone and spent the entire thing. Just like that. She was the breadwinner in our house; she always had been, and the only real cushion we had was wiped out by one man’s decisions. I was so angry because how could she give him that money? He was putting it in a business to ‘duplicate’ it. What? You know this man, mummy and didn鈥檛 think 鈥榟mm, my second & last child, my only daughter is still halfway through school鈥�. No! You squandered all the funds you worked hard for and saved for your children鈥檚 education! I could not speak to any of my parents for a very long time.

What’s your relationship with your father like?

Strained, to put it lightly. He’s always been a very strict and almost unpredictable man. The only reason he’s never hit any of us is because he holds his pastoral title so high above himself that he can’t reconcile violence with who he’s supposed to be in public. He almost has, though. On several occasions, we have watched him physically struggle not to hit us. He’s abusive in every other way. Verbally, emotionally, and financially clearly. I don’t like him. I don’t think there’s a softer way to say that.

When your mother told you the money was gone, what was your reaction?

I refused to drop out. That was the only thing I was certain of in that moment. I had already started something, and I wasn’t going to let his irresponsibility be the reason I didn’t finish. So I started working. Whatever I could get. Call centre jobs, barista work, retail, anything that would let me cover my international tuition fees, which, if you know anything about studying abroad, are not small numbers.

That must have been an enormous shift for someone so young.

It was the beginning of what I now just call the seven years. Because that’s roughly how long this cycle of crisis lasted, one thing compounding into the next, never really stopping long enough for me to catch my breath.

Can you walk me through some of what happened during that period?

There’s so much. I’ll try to give you the shape of it. At one point, I had managed to gather a significant amount of money for my fees, money I’d put together slowly over months. Family members chipping in here and there, strangers being kind, savings from work and even some loans. I was at a bus stop at night, and it was stolen from me. I didn鈥檛 even know when. It was just gone. I remember standing there after, not even fully processing it because my body had gone somewhere else entirely.

How did you cope with something like that happening?

Honestly, not well. I isolated a lot during that period. I pushed people away without even realising I was doing it. By the time things were really falling apart, I had almost no one around me, which I now understand was partly my own doing. When you’re drowning, you don’t always reach for the hands trying to help you; sometimes you just sink quietly because it feels like less work.

Then the health crisis happened. 

You also had a health crisis during this time?

Yes. Emergency surgery for ovarian cysts. I had to go through that completely alone, no family nearby, very little support system left because I’d pushed so many people away. It took some GoFundMe to complete the fee I needed for this. Recovery was so lonely. I don’t think I can fully explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. You’re healing physically, and there’s no one checking in, no one bringing you food, you’re just existing through it by yourself in a foreign country.

It was worsened by the fact that I had taken out loans, and loan sharks were actively looking for me. 

Loan sharks. Can you tell me about that?

I took out what was available to someone in my position, an immigrant who’d come for school. Some bank loans, but also some local predatory lenders, because at certain points, those were the only people willing to give me anything. It got bad enough that they once showed up at my house. A neighbour managed to distract them while I left through the back. I ended up having to leave that entire city because of it.

What She Said: My Dad Spent My Mum鈥檚 Pension. Now I鈥檓 Stranded in Canada

That sounds terrifying.

It was. And it’s strange because in the moment, you’re so focused on just surviving the next hour that the fear doesn’t always register until much later. I think about it now, and I get a delayed kind of terror that I didn’t fully feel at the time.

With everything happening, how did your studies progress?

It starts and stops. I had to pause and retake courses more times than I can comfortably count, four or five at least. Every time I couldn’t clear a semester balance on time, I’d lose progress and have to redo things. I watched people I started university with finish, move on, build lives, while I was still stuck retaking a course I’d already passed once before but couldn’t afford to complete properly the first time around.

What finally brought you to the point of wanting to give up and come home?

It was last year. There was a point where I was very close to actually finishing, and a cost came up again, money I was expecting fell through, and I was told that if I missed a certain date, I wouldn’t be able to complete some courses and would have to retake the entire thing from scratch. On top of that, my visa was expiring, and I needed to renew it, but there was an issue with my student paperwork, something about fees not being paid or the institution not recognising my standing properly.

I went to my advisor, who told me she had no time to apply that same day, and then ghosted me for over a week.

What happened with that visa situation?

This is the part I still don’t fully understand. While I was waiting on my advisor, I went to the larger office that handles visas, just to ask questions, and they told me they’d received my email and everything was being sorted. I hadn’t sent any email. When my advisor eventually responded after that week of silence, I asked her directly if she’d sent anything on my behalf. She had no idea what I was talking about. She hadn’t sent anything either.

I still don’t know how it happened. By that point, I had already mentally prepared myself to just go back to Nigeria, papers or not. And then somehow, legally, I was allowed to stay. All I could do was thank God. There was no other explanation I had for it.

Still, I decided to leave Canada eventually. This was because even with that resolved, the bigger issue never went away. The fees, the debt, none of that disappeared. It’s been over ten years of nothing going right in any consistent way. So I bought a ticket home, told my parents and even sent money ahead to secure my own apartment in Nigeria because I was not going to live with them.

Why was that so important to you, having your own place?

My parents are a huge part of why I went through what I went through. They were very strict growing up, and my father’s financial recklessness is the entire reason this seven-year cycle started in the first place. I love them, in whatever complicated way you love your parents, but I was not going to fly all the way back just to walk into another version of the environment I was trying to escape.

Understandable. What happened next? 

To get from where I was to Nigeria, the route went through Germany. I asked if I needed a transit visa, and they said no. When I got to the airport, someone said to ask again before I boarded the flight, and it turned out I did, in fact, need one. They apologised, said it was their fault for the wrong information, but I still needed the visa to proceed, and they never refunded my ticket money.

How much was that loss?

Thousands of dollars. Money I did not have to lose again. It felt like every road I tried to take back home was either blocked or, in the case of my papers, divinely intervened for me to stay. I don’t know how else to explain a pattern like that.

What happened after the flight fell through?

My parents arranged for me to stay temporarily with family friends while I sorted everything out. I had sent money home some time ago that I requested back. My parents decided to send it to me through said family friends, but they never gave me a dime. They said it was to cover my rent and food. 

What was that experience like?

It was not good. Instead of using that money the way it was intended, they withheld it from me and basically turned me into unpaid help in their home. I was looking after their children, cleaning, cooking, functioning as a nanny in every sense except one. They had a two-year-old and a baby not even a year old yet. The wife worked, the husband just lounged around all day, expecting things to be done for him.

The one line I drew, the only one, was diapers. I did everything else, from cooking, dishes, and taking care of the children all day and when I got a job again, whenever I was home. But I would not change diapers. That was the one boundary I held onto in that entire situation.

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They didn’t even let you eat properly?

No. They claimed whatever money was sent covered my room and board, but somehow that never translated into me actually being fed by them. I was working in their home all day and still had to figure out my own meals separately.

Eventually, they brought up the asylum conversation. 

What asylum conversation? 

They were the ones who pushed it. They said this was the only way left for me to stay in Canada. They contacted people, made connections, and eventually told me that to stay legally and get permanent papers, not the temporary kind I’d already been given through whatever divine intervention happened with my visa, I would need to apply for asylum on the grounds of being queer.

How did you feel about that suggestion?

I genuinely did not want to do that. I want to be honest, there’s a lot I can’t fully say about why. I’m a pastor’s child. Certain things can’t come out, even to myself. I cannot even accept certain things about myself fully. Who says I’m queer? But yes, the suggestion was made purely as a legal pathway, not because I had ever said anything like that out loud to them or to anyone.

What were your actual options at that point?

Asylum or marriage. Those were the two doors left open to me to legally remain. Neither of them felt like something I had chosen for myself. They both felt like things being handed to me because every other option had already closed.

Where are things now with the family you were staying with?

I’ve moved out. I told them months ago I would be leaving, and at the time, they all agreed it made sense. But the week I was actually meant to move, the husband, the same one who lounged around all day while I cared for his children, screamed at me, asking if I knew who I was and where I thought I was going. I left anyway. What else was I supposed to do at that point?

What do you want people to take from your story?

Honestly, I don’t have advice right now. I don’t even know if I want this for awareness exactly. I think I just needed to let it out, to tell someone, because saying all of this out loud made me realise what a ride this has been. What a life.

I was in secondary school once. I never thought this would be my life ten plus years later. I’m still in the thick of it; I don’t have a neat ending for you. I’m just still here, trying to figure out what comes next.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Lade*, a 27-year-old PR professional based in Lagos. She talks about growing up with a mother who sabotaged her at every turn, the friend’s mother who stepped in and changed everything, and why cutting off the woman who gave birth to her is the best decision she has ever made.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Lade*, and I’m 27. I work in PR, and I鈥檓 a Junior Account Manager at a firm on the Island. I like my job, I’m good at it, and I have plans for where I want to take it. I just got back from South Africa, where I did my master’s in Communications and Media Studies, and I graduated top of my class while already working, so I came back ready. That’s who I am now.

Take me back. What was growing up like for you?

It was not a happy home. I鈥檓 an only child. My parents were there in the physical sense, but there was no real support, financially or emotionally. From as early as I can remember, I was mostly on my own. My father left us when I was younger than 10. My mother was even worse. She may have stayed, but she was not someone I could rely on for anything. She wasn’t showing up for me, wasn’t providing, wasn’t present in the ways that matter. Especially when I got into uni. I did not get 1 Kobo from her. I just knew very early that whatever I was going to have in this life, I was going to have to get it myself. 

What did getting it yourself look like as a student?

I was running a small business from school, selling clothes, accessories, beauty supplies, and lashes. I also eventually started hairstyling and nails. Just whatever I could do to make sure I had what I needed, because waiting on my parents for money was not a reliable strategy. My mother would say she didn’t have anything when I called. My father was the same. I had one uncle who would help when he could, but even that was not consistent, just whenever he had. So I learned to be resourceful very early out of necessity, not by choice.

Was there a specific moment that clearly showed why you couldn鈥檛 rely on your parents?

Yes. I got an athletics scholarship to a university abroad. I had worked for it, I earned it, and I was so proud of myself. My mother contacted the institution without telling me and had my name withdrawn. She told them I wouldn’t be coming. I found out when I called to confirm my acceptance, and they told me the spot had been released.

Her reason, when I confronted her, was that she didn’t want me to go that far. That was it. That was the whole explanation.

How did you even process something like that?

I don’t think I fully processed it for a long time. When something like that happens, you go through so many things at once. Disbelief, grief, anger. And then underneath all of that is this quiet, devastating realisation that the person who is supposed to want the best for you actively doesn’t. That she looked at an opportunity that could have changed my life and decided her discomfort was more important.

I had to pick myself up and keep going because what else was I going to do? But that moment never left me.

Did the pattern continue through university?

It never stopped. There was significant money that came for me through a relative that she collected and never gave me. I found out years later. There were calls that only ever came when she wanted to disturb me, to dump something heavy on me, to guilt-trip me. I used to dread seeing her name on my screen. I would watch my roommates light up when their mothers called, and I would feel this thing in my chest that I didn’t even have a word for. Jealousy maybe. Grief. Both.

I stopped going home except once in a while, and even those visits cost me. I wouldn’t sleep. I would come back to school carrying more than I left with.

Did things change?

After NYSC, I got a customer care role at a company in Lekki. Entry level, just trying to stack experience and save up before my master’s. That’s where I met Tolu. We worked together, at the same level, just two people trying to figure things out. We started having lunch together, spending time outside work, and eventually, I was spending a lot of time at her family’s place.

There was something about that house. The energy was just different. That’s the only way I can describe it. I would walk in, and something in me would just settle. It was warm and calm, and nobody was on edge. I didn’t realise how tense I always was until I was somewhere that I wasn’t, especially when I started bonding with her mother. 

What She Said: I Would Have Said Yes to an Open Relationship, But She Never Asked

That must have felt amazing after years of feeling unsafe in spaces where you should feel the safest. When did you first properly connect with Tolu’s mother?

It was over food, actually. Mrs Adeyemi* makes fufu from scratch on weekends. Tolu thinks it’s too much stress and wants nothing to do with it. But me, fufu is my favourite, I grew up eating it, and I miss it when I don’t have it. So one Saturday I’m there, and Mrs Adeyemi is in the kitchen, and my eyes must have said everything because she just started laughing and told me to come and sit down.

We spent that whole afternoon in the kitchen together. Just talking. About food first, then about books, because she noticed what I was always carrying around. Tolu is not a reader; she doesn’t have that patience. But her mother and I would exchange books, argue about characters, and recommend things to each other. It just grew from there naturally.

What did she give you that was different?

She asked me about my life like she actually wanted to know. My plans, what I was working towards, what I was worried about. Not in the interrogating Nigerian parent way, but in the way of someone who was genuinely curious about you as a person. I wasn’t used to that from a mother figure, and it took me a while to stop waiting for the catch.

She also just saw things without me having to say them. I never sat her down and explained my home situation in detail. She just watched and understood and made space accordingly.

That鈥檚 beautiful. Were you still in contact with your mum?

Not really. We were never in contact. She just called once in a while to berate me, but I had not spoken to my mother in over a year when a cousin saw me at a birthday gathering Mrs Adeyemi threw. Put everything together and reported back. My mother called me immediately, not to ask any questions, just to accuse. She said I was embarrassing the family by going to beg from strangers. She said Mrs Adeyemi was using me, doing it for show, filling my head with ideas. When that didn’t land, she went further.

How far did she go?

She got Mrs Adeyemi’s number somehow and called her directly. I don’t know the full details of that conversation, but I know it was ugly. She accused her of trying to steal her daughter, of interfering in family business, and she threatened her. Then she started calling aunties and uncles, turning it into a whole family matter, telling everyone that I had abandoned my mother for a stranger and that I was being manipulated.

She showed up at my office in Lekki one day. I wasn’t even there; I found out from a colleague that she had come and caused a scene in the lobby. I do not even know how she found out where I work. She dropped voice notes in family group chats. It was relentless.

What did Mrs Adeyemi do when all of this was happening?

She didn’t move. When I came to her completely mortified and apologising for something I hadn’t even done, she sat me down and told me that nothing my mother said changed what she knew about me. She didn’t badmouth my mother, not once. She just made it clear that her door was not closing.

And when it became obvious that I couldn’t comfortably go back to my own home, or rather family, after everything, she shocked me with her next steps. She didn鈥檛 really say anything, just had the housekeeper clear out a room and told me this was my home for as long as I needed.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What did that feel like?

I cried for a very long time because I was grateful, but I was also grieving. I was 24, 25 at this point, and I was receiving something for the first time that I should have had my whole life. You don’t realise how heavy you’ve been carrying something until someone lifts it. That’s the only way I can describe it.

I鈥檓 happy for you. How did life change after that?

Mrs Adeyemi funded my Master’s in Communications and Media Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa. She sat me down and told me she had been watching me, and she wanted to invest in where I was going. She didn’t frame it as charity; she framed it as belief. She told me she expected to watch me do something with it.

I graduated top of my class. By my second year, I was already working remotely for a PR firm in Lagos that had taken me on. I came back to Nigeria with a degree, a job already running and a plan. I think about the scholarship my mother pulled me out of, and I think about this, and I feel things I don’t have words for.

Did you ever decide to cut contact with your mother?

Of course. The office incident was the final thing. I had spent years managing her, absorbing the chaos, trying to maintain something because she was still my mother, and I had been taught that meant everything. But standing in my office and hearing that she had come there screaming in the reception, at my place of work, was so heartbreaking and humiliating that something just permanently closed in me.

I didn’t say anything to her. I just stopped. I stopped picking up, stopped responding to her emergencies, told the security at my office to never let her in, moved out of my house so she couldn鈥檛 reach me and because I was truly welcomed by the Adeyemis. I just stopped engaging. That was how we cut things off. 

How has the extended family responded?

Every angle you can imagine. She carried you. Blood is blood. How can you be living like this and leave her suffering? How can you be going abroad and not taking her with you? You will regret this. She’s still your mother, no matter what she did.

I used to cry when these conversations happened. Now they just make me tired. Because none of the people saying these things were there. They didn’t see what I saw, they didn’t live what I lived. And most of them didn’t show up either, so the audacity is ridiculous.

How do you feel now?

Free. It was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made because no matter what she did, she is still my mother, and there is grief in that that doesn’t just disappear. But I have never felt lighter. I have never felt more like myself.

I now have a mother who chose me. I have a home I can walk into and breathe. I have a career I’m building on my own terms with someone in my corner who believes in where I’m going. I have peace. And I spent so long not knowing what that felt like that I don’t take a single day of it for granted.

What do you want other young women in similar situations to take from your story?

That blood does not automatically mean love. And the absence of love from a parent is not a reflection of your worth; it is a reflection of their limitations. You did not deserve it. I did not deserve it.

And if someone shows up for you, let them. Don’t talk yourself out of being loved because it’s coming from somewhere unexpected. Mrs Adeyemi did not have to choose me. She chose me anyway. And I chose myself when I stopped waiting for my mother to become someone she was never going to be.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

Kemi* is a 30-year-old tech sis and real estate investor split between the UK and Nigeria. She talks about meeting the woman she thought was her person, building something real across countries, and the moment a hack exposed a double life she never saw coming. This is What She Said!

Can you tell us about yourself?

My name is Kemi, and I’m 30. I work in tech, I have a remote role in the UK, and I take contract and consulting gigs in Nigeria as well. I also run real estate in Nigeria, so I’m constantly in and out. Lagos, Abuja, London, sometimes elsewhere. It’s a life I’ve built deliberately, and I love it. My family are mostly in the UK. I’m close to them, and they know I am a proud lesbian. In Nigeria, I’m more careful, but I’m not hiding. I also just ended a 2-year relationship.

What does being careful in Nigeria look like for you?

It means I don’t make public announcements. Like, if I don’t tell you myself, you will never know. The people in my life know me. I’ve never been someone who lives in shame about who I am; I just pick my spaces carefully. Nigeria requires a different kind of navigation, and I’ve learned how to do that without losing myself in the process. Also, the queers back home are constantly creating safe spaces for all of us to feel welcomed, loved and accepted for who we are.

Alright. Can you tell me about how you met your ex?

Sure. I was in the UK, give or take two years ago. I was out just having a good time, and this woman walked up to me. Just approached me with this confidence that I immediately respected. We started talking, and about twenty minutes in, I caught the Nigerian accent in her voice, and I asked where she was from.

We both just lit up immediately, you know how it is when you find your people somewhere unexpected. Turns out she was on vacation. We spent the rest of that evening talking, and something just clicked.

What happened after that?

She went back from her vacation, and I eventually got back to Nigeria, maybe a month after that interaction. I called her. That’s how it started, just a phone call that turned into something neither of us was fully planning for.

What was she like?

She’s 28, but then she was about 26, I believe. She鈥檚 very creative, and she鈥檚 into photography, videography, and DJing. Very talented, very magnetic. She makes any room feel more alive just by being in it. She’s pansexual, which I knew from early on, and that was never an issue for me. I’m polyamorous by nature, though I鈥檝e never been the type who needs or prefers multiple relationships. I am often very content and happy with just one partner, but I am just aware that I am able to love and be with multiple people at the same time. So, I’d been very happily monogamous in this relationship. She was enough.

What was the energy like between you two in those early days?

Electric. It started electric and became warm, and that warmth is what made it feel real. We were building something, not just a relationship but a whole intercountry life. She’d come to me, I’d go to her, we had our rhythm. It felt genuinely good.

How did you both contribute to the relationship?

We were both present and invested. I have more financial resources than she does; that’s just the reality. I work in tech and real estate, and I’ve built well for myself. I am also considered a 鈥渘epo baby鈥�. I am aware of my privilege. She earns from her creative work, and it’s good money for what it is, but it’s not the same level. I spent millions on her over the course of our relationship, and I did it because I wanted to. Because she was my person, and that’s what you do for your person.

I did notice things, though. She was consistently able to afford certain trips, certain things that I couldn’t fully account for on a photographer and DJ’s income. I’d wonder sometimes. But she didn’t like discussing money, and she showed up in other ways, so I let it go. I told myself I was being ungenerous, that maybe I just didn’t fully understand her finances.

What She Said: My Husband Wants a Child. I Don鈥檛

When did things start to shift?

About a year in, I started getting calls and texts. Things were being sent to me that were clearly meant to alert me to something. A lot of it was this person implying that my partner was cheating, but not in so many words. I noticed. I wasn’t blind, but I also didn’t have the full picture yet, and I loved her, so I kept moving. Which I now understand was me not wanting to see what was right in front of me.

What eventually brought everything into the open?

She was hacked this year. Her social media, her contacts, everything. And whoever hacked her used that access to send out her nudes and photos of her in compromising positions with various men, to her entire contact list. And posted publicly on her socials. I was among the people who received them.

Whoa. That is a lot. What was that moment like?

I can’t fully describe it. It was like the ground just disappeared. You’re looking at images of someone you love, someone you’ve built with, someone you trusted completely, and you’re seeing a version of them that was apparently always there and you just never knew.

And the thing that hit me hardest wasn’t even the betrayal in isolation. It was the volume of it. It wasn’t one person, one mistake, one moment of weakness. It was a whole parallel life. A string of men who had been consistently financing her trips, things, and lifestyle, and she had been paying them back in kind. This had been happening the entire time.

Did you know any of them?

That’s the part that still makes me feel sick when I think about it. One of her close friends, someone I had gotten close to myself over the course of our relationship, someone I considered part of my circle, was one of them. I had welcomed this person. Sat across from this person and had genuine conversations. And the whole time鈥�

How do you even begin to process that?

I haven’t fully processed it, if I’m honest. The intimacy of that betrayal is different. It’s one thing for there to be strangers. It’s another thing entirely for it to be someone you yourself had let in. That requires a kind of audacity that I’m still wrapping my head around.

I鈥檓 so sorry. You mentioned you’re polyamorous. How does that sit with everything you found out?

This is the part I keep coming back to. I am polyamorous. I had been genuinely, happily monogamous in this relationship because she was against anything open or poly. She made that very clear early on; she wanted monogamy, and I respected that because I wanted her.

But here’s what I now know. She wasn’t living monogamously. She was living a version of the life I would have been completely open to, multiple partners, different connections, except she was doing it secretly, funded by men, while telling me she needed exclusivity. She knew I was poly. She knew I would have been open to a conversation. She chose deception anyway.

I would have said yes. If she had just been honest, I would have said yes. That is the thing I cannot get past. Not having other people. It鈥檚 her choosing to lie about it when she didn’t have to.

What did you do when you found out?

I ended it.

How did she respond?

She’s not really letting it be over. She keeps reaching out, keeps trying to find a way back in. Which I understand on a human level, two years is two years, and feelings don’t just stop. But I also know what I know now, and I can’t unknow it.

And on top of that, get this. The bitch is pregnant. She doesn’t know who the father is. And she wants me to stay. She’s asking me to make it work. I have been laughing since I found out, again through social media. What does she want me to say? 

How are you sitting with that?

I genuinely don’t have words for what it is to be asked that. To be asked to stay by someone who maintained a whole secret life, whose nudes were sent to your phone, who let a man you considered a friend be part of her deception, who is now carrying a pregnancy she cannot even attribute. And to be asked to make it work.

I loved her. I really did. I’m not going to pretend that’s disappeared overnight because it hasn’t. But love is not the only thing that matters. What you do with someone’s love matters too. What she did with mine is something I have to sit with every day right now.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

Looking back, were there signs?

That’s one of the most disorienting parts of a betrayal like this. You start reviewing everything. Every comment she made that you laughed off, every time money appeared from nowhere, every moment where something felt slightly off, but you chose to believe in her instead. And you realise you weren’t oblivious because you were stupid. You were oblivious because you were in love, and you were happy, and you trusted her. And she knew that, and she used it.

The male-centredness of it is what gets me the most on reflection. Because looking back, there were signs. Things she said, ways she operated around men, certain dynamics I clocked but didn’t sit with long enough. She was very comfortable with a particular kind of male attention, and I understand now what that was funding. I just couldn’t see it because I was too busy genuinely enjoying what we had.

What do you want other women to take from this?

Trust yourself. That’s the only thing I know for certain right now. When something doesn’t add up, when your body is telling you to look closer, when the little things are quietly accumulating, trust that. Not in a paranoid way. Just in a self-respecting way.

I was happy. Genuinely happy. And I don’t regret that happiness because it was real for me, even if it wasn’t fully real for her. But I also wish I had given more weight to the things that didn’t sit right. I wish I had asked the questions I was afraid to ask.

You can love someone and still demand the truth from them. Those things are not in conflict. I just forgot that for a while.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

Adaeze* is a 36-year-old Chief Product Officer based in London who also runs a business in Lagos. She talks about knowing since she was a teenager that she never wanted children, building a life and a marriage around that truth, and losing the person closest to her because a doctor decided a woman’s body was her husband’s business.

Can you tell me about yourself?

I’m Nigerian, born and raised, though I’ve lived in the UK for about ten years now. I did my master’s here, stayed for work, and honestly never left. I’m a Chief Product Officer at a tech company in London. I also run a business back in Lagos because Nigeria never really leaves you, no matter how long you’ve been away. The business also made more sense back home than here.

In terms of who I am as a person, I’ve always been focused and driven. I knew early what I wanted from life, and I went after it doggedly. I’m not someone who does things by accident.

I turned 36 this year, and I am married. We鈥檙e mostly happy. I don鈥檛 feel like I can really complain. I have been lucky in life.

That鈥檚 nice. How long have you been with your husband?

We’ve been married for five years. We met when I was 26, so we dated for five years before that. He’s a good man. A really good man, actually.

Tell me about your upbringing. What was your family like?

I’m an only child, which has shaped a lot of things about me. My parents were present, hardworking, and all of that. But because I had no siblings, my cousin was essentially my sister. We grew up together, spent every holiday together, and called each other about everything. She was my person. My first call for anything, good news, bad news, random Tuesday energy. She鈥檚 only 2 years older, and we were inseparable.

What was growing up as an only child in Nigeria like?

Oh, there were constant expectations around marriage and children. You know how it is. Nigerian families don’t really ask if you want something; they just assume and begin planning. Marriage was always a given. Children were always a given. Nobody sat me down and said, “What do you want your life to look like?” They just assumed they already knew.

But I was always watching. Even as a young girl, I was very observant. And what I observed growing up didn’t quite match the picture everyone was trying to sell me.

What do you mean?

I mean, I was watching the women around me. Aunties, family friends, neighbours, women in church. And I could see something happening to them that nobody was naming. This slow erosion. Who they were before motherhood, their personalities, their ambitions, their energy, just quietly disappearing. Not all of them. But enough of them that I noticed. They became a shell of who they were. A mother and a wife. Almost nothing else. 

And then there was something else I was watching. The children were carrying their parents’ unresolved pain around like it was their own. Trauma passed down like an inheritance nobody signed up for. I saw that too, and it sat with me.

How old were you when you started putting this together in your head?

Honestly, early. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. I know people hear that and they say oh you were just a child, you didn’t know. But I knew. Some things you just know about yourself, and this was one of them. I did not want to be a mother. Not because I didn’t love children, I genuinely do, but because I could see clearly what it would cost me, and I didn’t want to pay that price.

You say you love children, but you don’t want them. A lot of people struggle to hold those two things at the same time.

People find it very convenient to use that against me, actually. I volunteer at orphanages, I donate to schools, and I show up for the children in my life. And people look at that and say, “But you’re so good with them, you’d make such a great mother.” As if the only valid way to love children is to produce one of your own. I find that exhausting.

You can love something without wanting it for yourself. I love the ocean. I don’t want to live in it.

So you carried this knowing into adulthood, into relationships. When did it first come up seriously with someone you were dating?

Always immediately. I was never going to hide something that fundamental. In my early twenties, I was in a few relationships where I said it early, and the men either disappeared or tried to convince me I’d change my mind. One guy literally said, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.” I was done with him after that.

But when I met my husband at 26, something was different. He was different. And I still told him, within the first few real conversations we had, I don’t want children, I have never wanted children, and this is not something I’m going to change my mind about. You need to know this now before either of us gets any deeper.

What did he say?

He said it didn’t matter. That I was what he wanted. And I believed him completely because he meant it. I genuinely think he meant every word of it in that moment because of how he treated me in the following years. He also never brought it up or tried to convince or hijack me with it.

What was it like building a relationship with someone who accepted that part of you so fully?

It was everything, honestly. Because it wasn’t just about the children question. It was about being known. He saw me, all of me, and he wasn’t trying to edit any of it. No one had ever loved me quite the way he did. So patiently, so completely, so specifically. He knows me in a rare way, and I don’t take that lightly.

We dated for five years and then got married when I was 31. And the first two years of marriage were just genuinely good, like bliss.

What changed after two years?

He came to me and said he’d been thinking, and he thought he did want children after all.

I want to be fair to him here because this is a public conversation and he’s a good person who deserves that fairness. People change. Life shows you things you didn’t know about yourself. He was watching his friends become fathers, his siblings, people all around him. Something had shifted in him, and he was being honest with me about it. I respected the honesty.

But I was also very clear with him. I said, 鈥淚 have never lied to you. I told you from the very beginning exactly where I stood, and I told you that would not change. It hasn’t changed. Not even slightly. I have a full life. The lack of children doesn鈥檛 make me feel like anything is missing in my life.鈥�

How did he take that?

He heard me. He wasn’t aggressive about it or manipulative. But I could see the sadness in him, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t. It became this thing that lived underneath everything. We weren’t fighting; people always imagine it must have been this explosive conflict, but it wasn’t. It was quieter and in some ways harder than a fight. Just the same conversation on a loop with no resolution. His pain on one side, my frustration on the other.

What were you frustrated about specifically?

That I had been so clear. From day one. I gave him every opportunity to walk away before either of us was in too deep, and he chose to stay, and now here we were. I wasn’t angry at him for having feelings, but I was frustrated by the situation. Because I hadn’t moved. I was exactly where I said I would always be.

And he was frustrated too, not at me exactly but at himself, at the situation. Because he knew it was unfair to ask me to change. He knew that. But he also couldn’t help what he was feeling. We were both just trapped in this very honest, very painful loop.

While all of this was happening in my marriage, something happened with my cousin.

What She Said: My Husband Bankrupted My Businesses Until My Friends Helped Me Build One He Couldn鈥檛 Find

What happened?

She got married a few years before me to a man whom her family approved of. They seemed happy. She had her first child a bit earlier than she wanted, but she loved her baby. Still, she intended to keep the minimum 4-year gap she always wanted between kids. So she went to the doctor and asked about birth control.

What happened at the doctor’s?

The first thing they asked her was, “Does Oga know?” Meaning her husband. That was the first response to a grown married woman asking her doctor about her own reproductive health. Not, 鈥榳hat are your options鈥�, not, 鈥榟ere’s what we recommend鈥�, not, 鈥榣et’s talk about what works best for your body鈥�. But 鈥淒oes your husband know you’re here?鈥�

They told her to wait. Have a second child first, and then come back.

Did she have the second child?

Yes, she did and only 2 years after. Still, she tried to go back but she got pregnant again before she could get there, just months after the second child. So now she had three pregnancies back to back.

That’s an enormous amount of strain on a body.

It is. And after the third child, she went in immediately and asked for the implant. She wasn’t waiting this time.

What happened?

They told her husband.

He was completely against it. He blocked it entirely. Wouldn’t hear of it. And he also refused to use condoms. So she had no protection and a husband who wanted more children and doctors who had already shown her whose side they were on.

What did she do?

She stopped having sex with him for over a year. Just trying to hold the line around her own body because nobody else was holding it for her.

That must have been incredibly isolating.

I can only imagine because she didn’t tell me what was happening. Not the full picture. I knew bits and pieces but not the whole truth, and that is something I will carry for a very long time.

She could feel him pulling away from her during that period. She thought he was cheating. And she was terrified of losing him, of losing her marriage, of what it would mean. So eventually she gave in, and they had unprotected sex because that was the only version on offer. And she got pregnant with the fourth child. Her body was not ready for it.

This was a pregnancy she did not want. A pregnancy she had spent over a year trying to prevent. A pregnancy that led to serious complications.

When did you find out how bad things were?

Too late. That’s the honest answer. She didn’t tell me until it was too late. I think she didn’t want me to go into warrior mode; she knew me, she knew exactly what I would do. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she thought she could handle it. I don’t know, and I’ll never know, and that not knowing is its own grief.

By the time I understood the full picture, I was on the first flight to Nigeria.

What did you do when you got there?

I went to that hospital, and I was very clear. What they did, disclosing her request for contraception to her husband without her consent, is a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. It is a violation of her rights as a patient. I told them I would pursue every legal avenue available if they did not take her care seriously from that point forward. I am not someone people easily dismiss. I made sure they understood that.

And I spoke to her husband. I won’t repeat exactly what I said to him, but he understood me.

Were you able to get her any protection going forward?

They agreed she would get the implant after this final pregnancy. I even started pushing for her husband to get a vasectomy since the idiot would not use condoms. I was fighting on every front I could find.

How did your fight end?

She died. The baby died too. Her body had been through too much: four pregnancies, back to back, no real recovery time between any of them, and a fourth one her system simply could not survive.

She was my sister. The person I called first for everything. And she is gone.

I’m so sorry.

The thing I keep coming back to is how preventable it was. At every single point, there was an intervention that could have changed the outcome. The doctor who asked “Does Oga know?” instead of just doing their job. The hospital that told her husband instead of protecting her privacy. The husband who decided his desire for more children was more important than her life. Any one of those moments, if it had gone differently, she might still be here.

How has losing her shaped the way you think about your own choices and about not wanting children?

It didn’t change my mind. I want to say that clearly because I think people expect me to say it did, like losing her was some kind of lesson that pushed me one way or the other. I had already decided long before any of this happened.

What it did was show me in the most devastating way possible what is at stake when women don’t have control over their own bodies. This is not abstract. This is not a debate on Twitter. Women are dying. My cousin died. Because she could not access basic healthcare. Because the system around her treated her body as something that belonged to her husband rather than to her.

My grief needed somewhere to go. So I’m building an NGO focused on women’s reproductive rights in Nigeria. Specifically, around access to contraception, patient confidentiality, and the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies without requiring anyone’s permission.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

Coming back to your marriage. You’re building this NGO, you’re carrying this grief, and you’re also navigating something very personal at home. Where are things with your husband now?

We’ve arrived somewhere. It took a long time and a lot of honest, painful conversations, but we got there together.

He wants a child. He has wanted one for a few years now, and that hasn’t gone away. I don’t want one. That hasn’t gone away either. And we love each other too much to keep asking the other person to be something they’re not.

So he’s going to have his child. Surrogacy or adoption, he hasn’t decided yet. And when that baby comes, we’ll live separately.

Wow. How did you arrive at that decision?

By being honest. About what we both needed and what we could and couldn’t give each other. I don’t think I should stand in the way of him having the thing he wants most. Just like he doesn’t think it’s fair to ask me to have a child I don’t want. So we’re trying to find the most loving version of a situation that has no perfect answer.

That’s an enormous thing to agree to. Are you scared?

Of course I am. I’m terrified of what it means, of whether we can actually make it work, of losing the version of us that has existed up until now. I love this man. I love our life. And I’m watching it change shape in real time.

But what’s the alternative? Watch him grieve something for the rest of his life that I could have stepped out of the way of? Stay in something that starts to curdle because we were too afraid to be honest? That’s not love. That’s just two people being afraid together.

Do you think it will work?

I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. What I know is that we love each other enough to try. And if it doesn’t work, it won’t be because we lied to each other or because one of us pretended to want something they didn’t. We will have been honest every step of the way, and that matters to me.

To be loved is to be known. He knows me. I know him. Whatever comes next, that part doesn’t change.

What do you want women, especially Nigerian women, to take from your story?

That your body belongs to you. Not your husband. Not your doctor. Not your mother-in-law. Not society. You.

My cousin was a grown woman and a mother who walked into a hospital and asked for help, and the first question she was asked was whether her husband approved. That question cost her everything. It set in motion a chain of events that ended with her dying over a pregnancy she never wanted to carry.

No woman should have to negotiate access to her own healthcare. No woman should have to choose between her body and her marriage. No woman should die because the people around her decided someone else’s opinion of her body mattered more than her life.

She deserved better. They all deserve better. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, because if I can’t bring her back, the least I can do is make sure fewer women end up where she did.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.

Adanna*, 36, met the man she would spend ten years with in university. He was gentle then, attentive, and always had a way of making her feel chosen. What followed was a slow erosion of everything she had built and everything she was, driven by an addiction that grew from something she barely noticed into something that swallowed him whole and nearly took her with it. This is what she said.

Can you tell us about yourself? 

I’m Adanna, I’m 36. I work in brand management, been doing it for about eight years now. I come from a comfortable family, we were never struggling, so I always had a foundation. I started a hair business on the side a few years back that was doing well, then I tried to open a salon. Neither of them made it to where I wanted them to go. I’m based in Lagos. I’m single. 

You reached out to talk about a relationship that took a lot from you. How did it start?

We met in university. He was in my department, we had a few of the same friends. He was genuinely gentle. Soft spoken, attentive, remembered small things you mentioned in passing. He always made me feel like I was the most interesting person in the room just by how he listened to me. I fell for that version of him completely. We started dating in our second year and by the time we finished school I could not imagine my life without him in it.

That sounds sweet. When did things start to change?

It started very slowly. There is no single morning where I woke up and everything was different. It really crept up on me, I think even him. In our mid twenties we were in Lagos, both trying to build careers, and the social scene around us was what you would imagine. It started with regular parties and clubs we would frequent, then we kept running into the same people, certain crowds, and eventually we started noticing certain things that got passed around. He tried Molly first, at a party we both attended. I was there. It didn’t seem like a big thing then. A lot of people around us were doing it. I didn’t think too much of it. I later tried it myself but quickly stopped because the trip wasn鈥檛 was for me. 

When did you start thinking about it?

When it stopped being a party thing and became a regular thing. He was using every blessed day. Then LSD came in. He was curious about everything, that was part of who he was, and he framed it as exploration. Expanding the mind. I was not completely naive but I also loved him and he was still functional, still showing up, still the person I knew underneath it all. Or so I told myself.

What came after that?

I smoke weed recreationally so I once tried to wean him off all he was doing and transition to weed since he needed to use so badly and I felt it was a safer option but it backfired and he started doing Cocaine. That was when I felt the ground shift properly under my feet. 

Cocaine is expensive and it is hungry. It asks for more of you faster than the other things did. His personality started changing in ways I could see but struggled to name. He became more erratic. More defensive. Small things would set him off. The gentleness that I had fallen in love with started having gaps in it, moments where someone else was looking out of his eyes.

How did it start affecting you practically?

The main thing was money. That’s where it always shows up first. He started borrowing. Not large amounts at first, just here and there, I’ll sort you back by the weekend. He never sorted me back. I kept lending because I kept believing him. Over time the amounts got bigger and the timelines got vaguer and I stopped seeing any of it come back. I think in the first three years alone I had given or lent him close to two million naira that simply disappeared.

Did you talk to him about it?

Many times. He always had an explanation. He was between jobs, a deal had fallen through, he just needed to get through this one rough patch. He was a convincing person, that was one of his gifts and eventually one of his weapons. He could explain anything in a way that made you feel like the unreasonable one for questioning it.

Did it ever escalate beyond borrowing?

Yes. One payday I came home and my card was not where I left it. I turned the whole apartment upside down. Eventually I checked my account and the money was gone. Nearly everything I had been paid that month, withdrawn in chunks from different ATMs across two days. I confronted him and he denied it, then admitted it, then cried, then promised. He said he owed people, that things had gotten out of hand, that he was going to fix it. He came back three days later with flowers and an elaborate apology and I, God help me, I stayed.

Why did you stay?

Because I remembered who he was before. Because I genuinely believed the person I had fallen in love with was still in there and the drugs had just covered him up. Because leaving felt like giving up on someone who was sick. I had read enough to know addiction is an illness and I kept applying that framework to justify staying inside something that was hurting me. Also, I will be honest, I was ashamed. My family knew him. Our friends knew us together. Starting over at that point felt enormous.

Did it happen again, the stealing?

Several times. He got better at it. Sometimes it was cash from my bag, small amounts, something you might think you miscounted. Once he took jewellery, gold pieces my mother had given me and he sold them. It broke my heart. When I found out he said he had been desperate, that he hadn’t known what else to do, that he was going to replace everything. He never replaced anything. 

There was a period where I started hiding money in places around the house, in books, in pockets, in a small envelope taped behind a drawer. I was living with someone I loved and I was hiding my own money from him in my own home. I didn’t let myself sit with how absurd that was until much later. Even when the gambling started.

Gambling?  

It came with the cocaine era and got worse when heroin entered the picture. He was trying to multiply money quickly to afford the habit and he thought he could gamble his way there. He could not. I found out about the gambling debts when people started calling his phone at strange hours, and then calling mine when he wouldn’t answer. Men I had never met, asking me where he was, telling me he owed them. I paid some of those debts because I was terrified of what would happen if I didn’t. Looking back I was also funding the problem by doing that but at the time it felt like protecting him.

What happened next? 

He started getting physical when I started trying to protect my money more seriously. Once I began refusing to hand over cash or lend when he asked, he would get frustrated and it would tip into anger. The first time he grabbed me I told myself it was the drugs, that he would never do that sober, that it wasn’t really him. 

The second time I told myself the same thing. By the fourth or fifth time I had run out of that excuse but I was so deep in by then and so tired that leaving felt harder than staying. He always came back afterwards with something, a letter once, handwritten, pages long, telling me all the ways he knew he had failed me and all the ways he was going to change. I kept those letters for a long time. I don’t know why.

How was all of this affecting your work and your businesses?

My 9 to 5 I managed to hold onto because I needed it, it was the one thing I kept a wall around. But the hair business I had started, it was doing genuinely well, I had supply chains, regular clients, things were building. The money I should have been reinvesting kept going elsewhere. Into him, into his debts, into replacing what he stole. I couldn’t grow it past a certain point because every time I got to that point something happened and I was set back. I eventually let it go quiet. The salon I tried to open a few years after that, I had saved carefully, I had a location, I was ready. He found the account. I still don’t know exactly how. By the time I was due to sign the lease the money was significantly short. I had to walk away from that one too. Those two things, what they would have been by now, I don’t let myself calculate it too often.

Was there ever a moment where you almost left before you finally did?

Many moments. I packed a bag once and went to my sister’s place and stayed for two weeks. He called every day. My family, who only knew part of the story, encouraged me to think carefully before making a permanent decision. He showed up at my sister’s door one evening looking so diminished, so genuinely broken, that I went back. I went back and things were better for maybe three months. Then they weren’t.

What finally ended it?

My younger sister. She had come to visit me for a weekend and he was in the house. I had run out of some things and stepped out briefly to get them. I came back and she was shaken. She didn’t tell me immediately what had happened, she just said she wanted to leave. Later she told me he had cornered her in the kitchen and asked her to lend him money, and when she said she didn’t have any on her he got aggressive with her. He didn’t touch her but he frightened her. My little sister came to visit me and she left frightened.

Something in me went completely still when she told me. Not angry, not sad, just still. Like a decision had already been made somewhere inside me before I had consciously made it. I called him and told him to come and get his things. He came with another apology. I listened to the whole thing and then I told him to take his things and go. He did.

How was the aftermath?

Harder than I expected and easier than I feared, at the same time. The first few months I kept reaching for my phone to call him because ten years is ten years. Habits don’t care about good decisions. I also had to properly look at what I had lost, financially, professionally, in terms of time and choices and doors that had closed while I was busy managing someone else’s crisis. The number, when I finally sat with it, was staggering. Not just money. Years.

Do you have regrets?

About staying as long as I did, yes. About loving him, no. I think I loved a real person, the person he was at the beginning was not a performance, he was genuinely that man. The drugs just ate him. My regret is that I kept trying to save someone who at a certain point had stopped wanting to be saved, and I paid for that with things I cannot get back.

Do you still keep in touch?

Not at all. It took me a long time to leave him so when I finally did, I cut all access. I even moved a few months later because he kept showing up at my door. He kept calling so I had to change my sim and even requested for a transfer to a different branch because he kept showing up at my office as well. It is very difficult to unravel 10 years of entanglement. But eventually I did. I do not seek him out. I know nothing about how he is. I genuinely don鈥檛 even know if he鈥檚 alive. It鈥檚 okay. It鈥檚 better like this. He鈥檚 done enough. 

What do you want someone reading this to take away?

That love is not enough on its own. It is necessary but it is not sufficient. You can love someone completely and still be completely wrong to stay. And the longer you stay trying to rescue someone from themselves, the more of yourself gets lost in the rescue. Get out before you have to rebuild from nothing. I got out with something left. Not everyone does.

*Names have been changed.

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

Tari*, is 48, a mother of four, and the owner of two thriving frozen food stores that her husband does not know the full details of, even now. She married young, dropped out of university, and spent the better part of two decades watching one man specifically, make decisions about her life while she looked for gaps to breathe in. This is what she said.

Can you tell us about yourself?

I am Tari. I am 48 years old and I am from Bayelsa but I do not live there. I鈥檇 rather not say where. I am married and I have four daughters. I run two frozen food businesses or cold rooms and I have other things on the side. I am a busy woman. I like being busy. Keeping still was never good for me.

When did you get married?

I was twenty. He was introduced to my family through mutual friends. He was in his early thirties, established, well to do. He owned a shipping company and dabbled in real estate. By every measure the people around me were using, he was a good catch. I did not exactly choose him the way people choose things nowadays. It was more like, this is what happens next. You finish school, you find a good man, you marry. I was in my final year when we met and before that year was over I had dropped out and I was pregnant with my first child.

Why did you drop out? 

He asked me to. And the people around me at the time thought it made sense. Your husband is providing, why do you need the degree? I was twenty years old. I did not exactly think I could fight. So, I left.

Hmm. What were those early years of the marriage like?

He was very generous in the beginning. I come from a family that needed, and when I married him I was able to do things for my siblings, pay for their education, support them in ways I was proud of. That part I do not regret. 

The marriage gave me the ability to show up for the people I loved. But even then, he was a particular kind of man. Very much the head. Very much in charge. You moved around him. His church, his schedule, his decisions. Barely any room for you. 

Eventually, we had three more children. 

So you had four children together?

Yes, four girls. And he never let me forget that they were girls. He wanted a son and I never gave him one. He said it enough times in enough ways that it became background noise in the house. 

Eventually he had his son, with another woman, while we were still married. I will not go into how that period felt. I will just say it happened and I remained. But I did leave him though, twice. 

You left twice? Why?

Once in my mid twenties and again in my thirties. Both times I left the children behind. That is the thing my daughters hold onto and I understand why. He was not a kind man and I left them in that house. But I also could not take four children with nowhere to go and no degree to my name. What I would have done with them I do not know. I came back both times, the second time mostly because of them and partly because the world outside that house was harder than I expected without qualifications and without money that was mine.

I鈥檓 sorry. Did you ever decide to start doing something of your own?

Yes, it鈥檚 the main reason I left the first time. We were living in a large estate at the time and I noticed that nobody in the estate sold frozen foods. If you needed fish or chicken you had to leave entirely. I saw an opportunity. I spoke to my husband and he agreed. We got a big freezer, put it in the store room of the house, and I started. He even supplied some of the stock at a discount sometimes because of his shipping business. I printed fliers and my daughters walked the estate one Saturday morning and put them on every gate. I still think about that Saturday. How excited I was.

How did it go?

Better than I expected. Almost immediately, people came and kept coming because they genuinely needed what I was selling. Within a few months I had regulars, I was managing stock properly, I was making real money. For the first time since I dropped out I felt like I was doing something that was mine.

What happened?

My husband happened. Slowly, the way he did everything. It started with the children coming to take things from my stock because something had run out in the main house. He would tell them to take from my store and he would pay me back. He never paid me back. Not once. And when I brought it up he would get disgruntled and say things like, am I not the one who bought the freezer? As if the freezer was the business and not everything I had built around it. He kept doing it until there was nothing left to sustain the stock. The business collapsed.

What did you do after that?

I left the house. That was the first time. I came back about a year later and for a while I worked in his office as his manager because it was the only way I could have income without a degree. But I always knew I wanted my own thing again. Eventually I had another difficult conversation with him and made him promise that what happened the first time would never happen again. He agreed. I started over.

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Did you believe him?

I wanted to. I also did not have many other options at the time so I took the agreement and built anyway. And for a while it was good again. The business grew. I also started a charity around that time with other married women and mothers. We had regular meetings, we were doing real work in the community. That period, even inside an unhappy marriage, I felt like myself.

That鈥檚 really good. Isn鈥檛 it? 

It was at the time. Two, maybe three years later, the same pattern started again. Taking from the stock, promising to replace and not replacing. This time he was more deliberate about it, sometimes intentionally not buying provisions for the house so the children would have to come to my store. What was I supposed to do, let them go without? He used my children to drain my business and he knew exactly what he was doing. When he had finished that, he told me I had to shut down the charity as well. His church had apparently decided it was not good for me to be doing it. That it was stealing his light.

How did that feel?

Like the floor came out from under me. The business I could almost survive losing again. But the charity was something I had built with other women, something that was making a difference, and he took it because a pastor told him it made him look bad. I shut it down. I stayed. I had already left those children once and I was not doing it again and I could not take them with me. So I became a housewife and I stayed that way for four, five years.

What did those years look like?

My children watched me become someone they did not recognise. My friends watched it. My siblings watched it. I was there physically but something in me had gone very quiet. I stopped being someone who did things and became someone things were done to. I do not like to think about that period of my life too much. 

I鈥檓 sorry. Did anything change?

Yes. First, I left again. I could not look at him and I was useless around my children but after a few months of what felt like proper suffering and deeply missing my children, worst of all, having them call me again and again because he would hit them, I just had to go back. Then maybe 7 months later, my people did their thing. That is the only way to say it. My siblings, who I had spent years supporting, and the women from the charity group who had remained my friends even after I had to shut everything down had quietly, without telling me, found a store. On the other side of town, far from my husband’s house, far from his office, far from any of his properties. They put it in my name. They furnished it, stocked it, made it ready. And then they showed it to me on my birthday.

What was that moment like?

I dropped to my knees on the floor of that store and I cried for a long time. Hot tears. I could not speak for a while. These people had taken their own money and their own time and built me something because they had watched me disappear and they refused to let that be the end of my story. My siblings ran the store when I could not be there. For a long time we had to be very careful about who knew what because my husband could not find out. I told him I was taking a catering course or something. I do not even remember the exact lie. He did not ask too many questions because by then he had stopped being particularly interested in what I was doing.

How did the business do?

Where do I even begin? It did very well. The location was good and I knew how to do this by then. Within a year I had a sales rep and a manager. A year after that I opened a second store. I have had both for over five years now. I also started putting money into other things because I learned from losing everything twice that one stream is not enough. I do some small real estate now, buying and selling. I also do bulk supply on the side, connecting buyers to sellers for food items. Nothing dramatic but it adds up and it is mine.

And the charity?

It is still running. I just do not show my face. I work behind the scenes, provide support, help with logistics. My husband thinks it ended years ago. It did not.

If you鈥檇 like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

Did he ever find out about the store?

About a year ago he did. Someone saw me or something slipped. He was furious. How dare I not tell him, who did I think I was, all of that. And then he moved towards me like he was going to hit me, like he always did when he was very angry.

What did you do?

I told him directly, you can beat me black and blue but the moment you lay a hand on me I will leave this house with my children and you will never see any of us again. I do not need your money. You have nothing to hold me here. We can continue this arrangement we call a marriage or you can start a war. I am ready. My brothers are ready.

How did he respond?

He did nothing. He stood there and did nothing. And we have lived in a kind of cold cordial arrangement ever since. He does not bother me. I do not bother him. We share a house.

Why not just leave?

This is my life. These are my children, my home, the years I have put into this place. I will leave if I must. But right now I am okay. I have my business, I have my people, I have my money. The thing he always used to control me was that I had nothing of my own. I have things of my own now. That changes what staying means.

What do you want someone reading this to take away?

Build anyway. Even when they take it. Even when you have to start again and again. Find your people and let them find you. I would not have any of this without the ones who refused to watch me disappear. That is the whole story really. Not what he did but what they did for me.聽

*Names have been changed.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders, and partake in unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .