A Blossoming From A Hard Place –

“As the first child of the family, I never really knew my dad. Growing up, all I knew about him was that he always showed up on Fridays or Saturdays and, by Sunday evenings, he was gone again. I also knew that he was a trader and that he did his business in Lagos while we stayed in Ibadan.

For the first 6-7 years of my life, all I reckoned with as family was my mom and I; then this man who always showed up at the weekends, whom I called dad. When I was about seven years old, my mom had my brother. It was not long after my brother was born that things changed. My father – who used to come home every weekend – suddenly didn’t come every weekends weekend anymore. His visits became long and far in-between.

Next, my place of residence was changed – I was taken to my grandparents’ house, and I began to live there alone with them. These different incidents suggested to me that something was happening and that whatever was happening was not palatable, but I didn’t have a full grasp of what had happened. As a boy in Primary 2, I didn’t understand what had happened for what it was – a separation; but I was keenly observant as events unfolded around me.

My mom always had those moments when she was overwhelmed from the stress of taking care of us, trying to pay bills, working long hours of work, and sorting out the whole situation she’d found herself. Mom was a disciplinarian, she always wanted things to be done in particular ways, and if you fell short, you could receive a slap or a beating. I never wanted to be on the receiving end of these gestures and so I tried to not upset her.

As a child, I was picky with foods – I didn’t like swallows and so my mom would bring out her cane and force me to eat swallows. In those moments of her frustrations, she’d utter words that made me know that there was trouble in paradise.

Coming home at the end of the term with not-so-good grades, my mom would go on a rant about how she was paying of school fees, a duty that my father had abdicated, and I wasn’t repaying her efforts with good grades. I was totally unaware of the weight of whatever she was going through.

The first memory I have of my school fees not being paid, I think, was in Primary 3. A teacher (or so) came to our class with a sheet and began to call the names on it. My name was on the list. Our offence was that we hadn’t paid our school fees, and the repercussion was that we would leave the class immediately.

As a small boy, it hurt me that my classmates were in class while I was outside, playing. It wasn’t a good feeling. When my mom came to pick me, I caused a small tantrum and told my mom what had happened. In the end, it was my grandfather who paid that school fee.

In those growing up years, people saw my mother as my aunty, while they thought my grandma was my mother. That was because I grew up in my grandmother’s house and people saw us together often. Whenever she was stressed , she’d snap and speak angrily at me. That was how, as a little boy, I began to reckon that something unpalatable was going on. Much more, these experiences stressed me psychologically as a little boy.

Whenever my friends in class talked about the things their father did, I always had nothing to say about my father and this used to cause me pain. Sometimes, I’d just cook up stories of experiences and claim that these incidents happened between my dad and me.

Deep inside of me, I knew that even though I was fooling the rest of my friends with those concocted stories, I knew I couldn’t deceive myself. At some point, I stopped telling lies and I just became very silent. By being quiet, people were less curious about my life, and I loved it like that. People would see me and say, ‘this boy is really quiet,’ but deep down inside of me, I knew I wasn’t quiet, I was just suppressing things instead of expressing them.

As the years piled on top of one another, I developed a serious dislike for my father. My mother and her siblings didn’t also help to try to make me like him, they never painted a likeable picture of him. One time, when he attempted to take us away from my mother’s people so we could be with his own people, my mom told me unpalatable things about him in order to make us refuse to go with him.

You see, my father was Igbo but my mom wasn’t. As kids, my brother and I were told that the Igbos eat people. Once I heard that Igbo people eat human beings and that my father was Igbo, a strong sense of dislike welled up inside of me towards him. I was young and couldn’t critically dissect the fact that if my dad was Igbo as my mom claimed, then I must be Igbo too.

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My mom had younger sisters and, because of her own experience with my father, she always warned her sisters about men that loitered around to seek their affections. She made me play the spy, to see which man was coming around to see my aunties since I was staying with them at my grandparents’ house. Sometimes, my aunties would use me to trail their boyfriends at the time, to know what they were up to. I saw men in a different kind of way and a hatred for men began to grow in my heart.
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As I grew older, I began to put things together. By the time I advanced into secondary school I knew things I didn’t know before, my logic side had begun to form. As I comprehended the events of my childhood, I understood that it was my father who had put my mom in this unpleasant state of existence.
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In the late 90s my mother had a chance to start her life afresh, she remarried. Because her new husband was based in Abuja, she had to leave Ibadan and move to Abuja. She left my kid brother and me at my grandparents’. Knowing that my mother was going to remarry did not hold any significance for me at the time. There were times when I wished my mother was around and I could see her but then my grandparents tried to fill that void.
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My mother’s brother lived with my grandparents at the time I was growing up and we used to fight a lot. I grew up around rascally people at Mokola and, with my parents not around, I was prone to becoming wayward; that was what usually caused our clashes at the time. One thing I figured out as I grew older was that my uncle never liked the fact that his sister, my mom, remarried. For me, at first, it meant nothing.
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The reality of my mom’s decision did not hit me until one day when, in the senior secondary class, I was filling a form and in the form, I had to fill my parents’ names. Because my mother had remarried, she no longer bore my surname. Filling two different surnames in the section of the form hit me very differently.
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Until that moment, I didn’t fully contemplate the weight of her choice to remarry. It was after I had left secondary school that I felt betrayed by my mom’s choice to remarry. Even now, many years after, I still feel that pain of being left behind and being put in a strangely awkward situation for the rest of my life.
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I grew up around women – my mom, my aunties, my grandma. For this reason, my sentiments used to be tilted towards whatever they wanted. They dictated how I should live my life, what to do and what not to do. However, there’s something about manliness that is inbuilt. As a boy grows to become a young man, he wants to take charge of his fate, and he wants to explore the things that make him a man, particularly his decision-making process.
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A man will always want to own his decisions and it was as I hit this part in my growing up that I began to have issues with the women around me. I wanted control of my own life but they weren’t going to relinquish it easily. I would later understand why.
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Let me give you an example: after secondary school in 2003, I wanted to study Medicine at the University of Ibadan. It was the dream of every science student, back then. To get in, the cut-off for Medicine was usually set at 270-280 something. In my first JAMB, I scored 210. My mom, being a nurse, wanted her first son to be a doctor too and so, you could say there was an agenda. With a score of 210, UI was not on the table anymore and so I decided to do the LAUTECH Pre-degree program.
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My mom and her sisters said I couldn’t get into LAUTECH because I wasn’t an Oyo State indigene. I listened to them and I gave up the idea of pre-degree. It hurt me. Then, they suggested that I take a shot at the Polytechnic of Ibadan. Attending a Polytechnic didn’t align with my dreams and plans for myself, so I declined that.
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From 2003-2006, I was home, seeking admission. To while away time, I decided to learn ‘Computer’ which comprised learning how to use Microsoft Word for desktop publishing and C+. In 2005, I persuaded my mom to allow my kid brother to join her in Abuja and he did that same year. The next year, 2006, I moved over to Abuja and join my mom in her new home too, completely unaware of what awaited me in Abuja.”
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“Once I got to Abuja, my step-dad promised to assist with part of my school fees and so I sought admission at the Nassarawa State University. Since I could operate a computer, I chose Computer Science as my preferred course, instead of Medicine. My choice of Nassarawa didn’t go down well with some of my mother’s siblings.

It was at this point that I discovered why my aunties never wanted me to go outside of Ibadan for my education: they needed me to be around to look after their mom, my grandmother. Hence the reason why they discouraged me from trying LAUTECH too. It was also why they suggested the Polytechnic of Ibadan because I’d remain in the house and be able to take care of grandma if I attended the Polytechnic Ibadan.

I resumed at Nassarawa in 2006, but then, in 2007, something happened. One of the times I came home to Abuja from school, my mom and my stepdad had an altercation. It started small but grew very quickly into a big conflict. In the middle of their misunderstanding he said I was old enough to caution my mom; his words were not very savoury.

For me, I felt I had no business in their fight, na dem see each other, marry each other. It was none of my business what they did with each other. He went on and on till I got riled up and I went vocal at him. Tensions escalated and I punched him; he came right back at me and hit me hard. Being a police officer, he had the muscle and skill to deal with me.

In the end, I had to run out of the house and go hide at my mom’s friend’s house. I knew that I couldn’t return to the house for the rest of my stay in Abuja. My mom figured that I was at her friend’s and so she smuggled my things to me and I returned to Nassarawa from there.

For a while, after I returned to school, I felt unsafe. I was always looking over my shoulders, paranoid, that someone might have been tailing me. My mom’s friend’s house became my place of refuge, anytime I came home from school. Mom would come and meet me there.

In December 2007, I came to Ibadan for the Christmas festivities. During that period, I went to Lagos to locate my father. As I contemplated the journey, the words my mom said to me as a child about Igbo people being carnivorous kept ringing in my head. I kept tossing it in my head, wondering if, really, I was safe. It was the first time I was seeing him in about six years. He never remarried but he had his retinue of women.

It was a beautiful reunion, we were overwhelmed by the joy of seeing each other again. Even though I was a full-grown man, he still saw me as a little child, and he offered me things you would offer to enthuse a child – like asking me if I wanted biscuit. I understood where that was coming from. We were catching up on all the things we’d missed but still, the things I’d been told as a kid about his people made me hold back a lot from him during my stay with him. I guess he sensed my cautiousness and that didn’t make him talk about himself too.

On the whole, it was a beautiful, memorable encounter but it didn’t last very long as I had to return to Nassarawa. When I was leaving Lagos, he got a gift for my kid brother too. I returned to Abuja and then on to Nassarawa. Life continued. My stepdad found the gift my father had sent to my brother, and it was through the gift that he got to know that I had been in touch with my father.

When it was time to pay my school fees and my mom tabled the matter before him, I was told he said, “sheybi he has found his father, let him go and meet him for his school fees.” There was an ASUU strike and school was shutdown. When the strike action was called off, we were due to write exams straight and I’d not paid my school fees yet so I had to go back to my father.

February 1, 2008 was a Friday. I got on a bus coming down to Ibadan with plan to move on to Lagos afterward to see my father. The bus got filled and we got on the road, it was an 18-seater, with four people on each row of seats. As we approached Owo, Akure, a jeep ran into a truck carrying logs of wood and all the logs of wood spilled over onto the express.

The last thing I remembered was that our bus, while coming at top speed, ran right over the logs of wood as they fell on to the express!”

“The accident happened sometime around 1-2pm but help and evacuation to the hospital didn’t happen until about 4-5pm. Doctors in the country were on a nationwide strike, and so when victims were evacuated to the nearest hospital, help trickled in slowly. The victims that got attended to were those who could reach out to relatives or who had friends that came over and ran around for them.

Me, once the accident happened, I became unreachable. I lost my phone and I was not in a shape to reach out to anyone. Life was seeping out of me and so I don’t remember much of what happened. It was when I came around that I was told it was a woman who paid for the oxygen that brought me back to life.

This woman did not know me from Adam. Her father was involved in the accident too and so she’d come to be with him. It was much later, after I had come around and begun to heal, that we found out that she and my mother were from the same village.

Unaware of what had happened, my mother called me to know how the journey had been so far but my number was unreachable. I don’t know how many times she tried to call but, when my number was consistently unreachable, she called the driver’s number. The thing is, whenever I was traveling, my mother would always follow me to the park. That often afforded her the chance to build some form of skeletal rapport with some drivers at the parks.

When she followed me to the park in Abuja, she had collected the driver’s number before we left the park and so after she made attempts to reach me and she couldn’t, she decided to call the driver. She told me later that someone picked the call and told her that there had been an accident and that whomever she intended to talk to was dead; then the line went off. The person didn’t disclose where the accident had happened so my mom was thrown into panic with no helpful information.

She frantically began to call everybody in Ibadan but no-one knew where to start the search. Because she used to follow me to the parks in Abuja, and had known some of the drivers, she began to call them to know if they’d heard of any fatal accident and where the accident may have happened.

I was told by the doctors that after the oxygen revived me back to life, I was in a delirium, and amidst my ramblings, I dictated a phone number. One of the doctors took down the number and called it. It was one of my aunties’ number; the doctor then informed them that I was at the hospital. That was how they found me.

My aunty found someone in Ondo State to come check on me and then they made arrangements for an ambulance to come and pick me from Owo back to Ibadan the next day. My arms were badly bruised, shards of glass caused laceration to my head and my femur was broken, which is why I have a limp till date. In the end, only 5 of us in that 18-seater bus survived, everybody else died.

I was first brought to UCH, I was there for a while and, for the first time since their separation, my mom and dad stood next to each other by my bedside. They took shifts to take care of me. It was also an opportunity for them to sit down and thrash out some of the issues that they had. However, since my mom had already re-married, the issue of them coming back together was off the table. They kept in touch from then onwards and became friends all over again.

When the doctors began to talk about casting and drilling the bone, my mom wouldn’t have none of that. She figured that the process of healing would take too long, and knowing her son, she knew I couldn’t take the necessary precautions that will enable full, proper healing.

It was then I was taken to a trado-orthopedic centre. In the end, it didn’t matter whether it was the trado approach or the surgical approach, I ended up spending the same six months at the hospital. By implication, automatically, I was missing a whole academic session at Nassarawa.

After I was discharged, I became too terrified to get on a road trip again after surviving that fatal accident. Plus, my mates in school were now ahead of me so, going back to school wasn’t such an exciting prospect anymore. It was in that moment of solitude, of stillness, that I sought God. Apparently, as a child, people had told my mom that I was going to be a man of God but it never appealed to me. Who would want to be a pastor when they can be a medical doctor or a computer scientist?”

The whole of 2008 found me trying to get on my feet again and seeking the face of God. Apparently, as a child, people had told my mom that I was going to be a man of God but it never appealed to me, unlike being a doctor or a computer scientist. In 2009, I picked up an application to join the Baptist seminary. I love music so I applied to study Church Music but I wasn’t offered admission. To keep money coming into my purse, while waiting for another opportunity to apply to the seminary again, I got a job as a secondary school teacher.

The following year, 2010, I applied again to the seminary; this time I applied for Theology, and I was offered an admission. At the time, I thought going to the Seminary would just be about reading the bible and discussing scriptures. I got into seminary in 2010 and I realized that it was a properly structured tertiary education program equivalent to a university education. They even had a CGPA system.

I didn’t have the money to pay for my studies but the Baptist church sponsored me through school. In the set before me, the church gave only partial funding to the students. My set got a hundred percent funding, I learnt that, at the deliberations, my situation as a young school teacher was instrumental in their decision to award full scholarship. Right after our set, they church returned to partial funding. It was a much-needed miracle ahead of something that was to happen. Four months into my studies, my father passed away. The full funding was God’s provision to keep me in school before the need even arose.

I got in, settled down very quickly and took my courses very seriously. I was the youngest student in my class and that made me become friends with older folks and these men showered me so much love. Amongst ourselves, we’d discuss about what we’d do after graduation, and what church we’d pastor. Every time this topic came up, they’d say to me that I would end up as a lecturer at the school of theology – no church for me.

It was also through these friends that I learnt about fatherhood. The community of these older male friends gave me something that I’d missed all my life. Gradually, the empty glass of love began to fill up. In the end, I didn’t graduate with a first class, I graduated with a strong second-class upper grade. After I obtained my bachelor’s degree in theology, I returned to Ibadan.

It continued to ring in my head that I’d teach, but before I can teach I’d have to get a church experience first. While others whom we did our undergraduate studies together got attached to churches for pastoring, somehow, I didn’t. In the end, I chose to work as a church administrator.

I belonged to a foster family and they have always been kind to me; through them I saw what it means for a family to stay together, united. While working as church administrator, my foster father admonished me to take a Master’s degree form and return to school. I had a ready excuse – I didn’t have money to run a Master’s program.

My foster mother told me to stop whining about my lack of money and just pray for God’s will to be done and that was what I did in the end. I did everything I could to deliberately frustrate my going back to school for Master’s degree but my plans all failed. I passed all the screening stages and was admitted for the Master’s degree program. The program spanned two years and it cost about N400,000.

God made everything work out in such a way that all I paid for my masters program was N30,000. Offers to pastor churches came my way right after graduation which was something I’d always wanted. However, this time, there was a new problem – whenever the churches found out that I was still single, they would withdraw their offers.

While waiting for a miracle, the Registrar of the school called me one day and told me that the school needed people to further specialize in an aspect of Specialization. He knew that I had an interest in that particular area of specialization. At PhD level, students would have to pick one aspect of the religion and specialize in it. A week after the conversation with the Registrar, I received a text message for an interview from the school.

As is it the procedure, when prospective students indicate their interests in taking the PhD program, the school decides when they begin the program, sometimes it may take up to 2-3 years before they’d contact prospective candidates. For that reason, I didn’t expect them to reach out to me soon, so I carried on with my life,

From the time I worked as a teacher at the private school, I’d known a young woman, and through the years, we’d become close.

As my PhD pursuit came on the horizon, I proposed to her. I explained my journey to her and everything about my life. As God will have it, she bought into my vision. As our courtship grew, we began to plan our wedding and putting things in place, even though at the time, I had no concrete pastoring job yet. On the Thursday of the weekend I was getting married, I received a call from the seminary to come to the school and pick up my admission letter the next day, Friday.

On the Saturday which was my wedding, as we danced in church, and everyone rejoiced with us, my head kept thinking about a million things. When the wedding ceremony was over and we retired to the hotel, my wife picked her phone, called the proprietor of her school, and resigned. In my mind, I was screaming. Dumbfounded.

From the story so far, you can tell that, since I hadn’t expected that I’d start my program so soon, I had no accommodation arrangements ahead of my move to the seminary. You see, the thing is, during the marriage counseling leading to the wedding, we’d been admonished that it would be advisable that we shouldn’t leave apart for at least the first 5 years of our marriage; my wife intended to toe that line, hard core. My wife was born into her father’s own house, she never lived her life moving from one apartment to another, and I was taking her to a place where I had no roof over my head.

With the Committee issuing my PhD admission letter on the eve of my wedding, we had to move to the town where the seminary was located but we had nowhere to stay in that town. This development completely altered my honeymoon plans because, right after the wedding, I resumed at the Seminary for my PhD and Lecturing assignment.

A friend had promised to host my wife and me in Lagos; that was supposed to be our honeymoon. I called him after the wedding to tell him about the latest development and to request if he could monetize and send the cost of the honeymoon to us instead. It was that money that my wife and I used to move our things from Ibadan to where was going to be our new city. That was on the Monday after our wedding.

I called a friend who had a room apartment and he obliged us to put our things in the apartment. We found a guest house to stay and it was from there we began to seek an apartment. Remember, I was in a limbo of sorts as I couldn’t take any of the church offers because I was a bachelor. Once I got married, I got an offer to pastor a church and that was how we started out.

My wife received her last salary in July, while I got my first salary in August. That was how we started our marital journey. It was wild, and to be honest, it is hard for me to tell anyone to do the same. In all things, my family and I have come a long way.

Being raised by a single mother is a hard experience; it is so much pain and needless hardship that one goes through. Someone who knew me from my Mokola childhood years, saw me preaching and waited after the service to talk to me. He couldn’t believe that I could come from such a rough environment filled with vices and not be corrupted by the vices.

Though I grew up in the middle of all forms of debauchery and vices, I never succumbed to the temptations, this was even before I found God. The opportunities to partake in these vices were there but it just never caught my fancy.

Now that I am a father, I have come to understand that fatherhood is being available. There is the role of presence. A father should always be there. Just being there means a lot to your children, more than you probably realize. My son sees what I do in the house, and he tries to do the same, to fill the gap when I’m not there. He’s learning fatherhood. Even though he is a small boy, the memory will linger.

I am just grateful for how God has taken my journey and turned things around in my life.”

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