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| Chief (Mrs.) Sadiat Akanke Oloto with husband, Buari Alade Oloto |
encounter with Alhaja Sadiat Akanke
Oloto the wife of Lagos land
merchant and title Chief, Alhaji Buhari
Alade Oloto, the international
business woman of style who deals in gold and jewelries gave an inspiring
insight into the real reason why many young marriages in today’s society breaks
before their first, fifth or tenth year anniversary.
who was on her way back from the Holy land of Mecca, Saudi Arabia with her darling husband when she granted the
interview took us round her interesting philosophy of marriage, motherhood and
how to build a lasting matrimony. It is an interesting expose only on your
Africa’s Number 1 Celebrity Encounter Blog, Asabeafrika. Enjoy the excerpts.
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| Iya Oyo with her husband and daughter |
year or two, why do you think ladies of today find it difficult to keep their
marital vows?
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patience. That is the first thing. Secondly, their level of education which is
higher than ours is also disturbing them. I do tell many of them to be very
patient with their husband. A woman’s first responsibility is to be patient
with her husband. Don’t think we that lasted in our marriages didn’t make
sacrifice, we did. And our sacrifice is “Stupidity”. We became stupidly humble
in order to massage our husband’s tough hearts. If you are a bit stupid and foolish,
you will have a successful matrimony, a lasting marriage. But if you start
proving that you are right at all times or your husband is stupid, then you are
on your way out, you will never succeed in a marriage. One of you must accept
responsibility for the mistake, even if your husband proved that he is right at
that time and you know that he is wrong, you just exercise patience. Later,
later when you settle down, you can then say “Dear, you only cheated me the other time. I know you were only trying
to show your masculinity” if that man is sane enough, he will hug you and
say “Dear, sorry, I was wrong” he
will definitely say so. I used to advise my friends and their daughters and
even my daughters. I used to tell them that “you
need to apply wisdom and be patient because a man can cheat you at times and he
will still be claiming he is right”.
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| The GDA meets Buari Oloto’s wife, Iya Oyo |
But if you are gentle and intelligent,
the man will end up apologizing to you at the end. It happens with my own
husband, I will say “Alhaji, you only
played a smart one on me. I was actually right” and he will say “Oh, sorry, my mother. I am deeply sorry”
and it will end there. But today’s ladies are full of pride, they lack
humility. They want to claim right at all cost because they feel they are
educated which is too bad. Let me tell you a story. A young girl in London
often visits me whenever I am in town.
She is my daughter’s friend. She had a boyfriend who co-incidentally was
my friend’s son as well. All of them usually come to see me whenever I am in
town. So, one day she told me about her boyfriend who offended her by having a
fling with another girl. She said although, the boy apologized to her but she
eventually decided to retaliate by also having a fling with a boy. So, I
cautioned her and told her the implication of what she did. She said, ‘O yes, but what right does the boy posses
to go and have a fling with another lady in her absence? And that the same
right he has to do such also applies to her’. So, I knew she needed some
lectures on life and I gave her. I said
it is a man that can do such with no iota of disgrace or moral let down but if
a woman does it, then it becomes abomination. And if you are wise enough, your
man will desist from doing such. She kept saying, “Mummy, since he did it, I also
did it to retaliate”. She went further to tell me that the boy is even
aware of her act and that he has also forgiven her since it was a tit for tat
binge and that the guy said “no problem”, that he is not worried by her action.
Being an elderly person, I told her there and then that the guy will not marry
her again. I was saying it with a benefit of hindsight but she never believed
me.
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika…’I wish our women will learn how to separate educational qualification from marriage qualification’ |
A year later I saw her in Lagos and
I was keen to know how she ended up with the issue. I asked her about the guy
and she said “Ah, we have broken up”.
I said to her “But I told you then and you never believed me”. You said he has forgiven you, I said he
didn’t forgive you. As from that moment he knew you could retaliate his action
in terms of sleeping around, he will never feel comfortable marrying you again
because he knows anytime you catch him having flings, and you could also
retaliate by sleeping around with anyone. So, I warned her and prayed for her.
I said ‘Now, you are in Lagos, Lagos
people are not like London people o. The day they catch you with a flinger,
they won’t even allow you to say “sorry”. So, be wise and apply wisdom in your
dealings with men’. She thanked me and left.
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika….’Education is presently destroying our girls marriages these days’ |
So, that is the reason why I
said education is a bigger problem to our new crop of young girls because they
love to claim rights all the time. Of course, education is good. We all want
the best for our children but in as much as we give them education, we must
also enlighten them on how to relate with their husband and how to handle
matrimony as an institution. They need to be impacted with wisdom; you need to
know how to relate to your in-laws, relate to your husband’s friends and people
around him. Let there be trust, let your husband know your movement. Let him
trust you, it is trust and humility that can bail you out of marital obstacles.
So, that we don’t keep having bread and butter marriages. I call it bread and
butter marriages because you construct it today and in six months time, it has
been deconstructed. You have Pastors
and Imams
sitting to bless you in public and you allow judges and lawyers break
you in secrecy.
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika….’I don’t know why a woman will tell her man that she want to revenge his promiscuity, it does not make sense to me’ |
industry, do you think arrogance and too much of education is also the reason?
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika….’Our young women are too conscious of their education to the detriment of their marriages’ |
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| Iya Oyo explaining a point to the GDA |
thing applies to them. In their own case, the problem is multi-dimensional.
First is popularity and second, is bad association. They feel because they are
famous they could act like men but you cannot act like a man. You are not a
man. You can’t say because they said your husband is dating somebody somewhere
in town; then, you too will retaliate. Our husbands can gyrate, they can catch
town but we cannot catch town because the home is ours. Our primary
responsibility is to ensure that our gyrating husbands return into a peaceful atmosphere.
With you in the fling spree, who will hold and mold the home? Who will make the
home returnable? Some of them say they are celebrities; does that give you the
license to be loose and single? The real celebrities I know in this Lagos, they all sat in their husband’s
homes. They run a peaceful home. We have a lot of social senior sisters who are
original celebrities that stood and stayed with their husbands.
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika….’Building a successful home is different from having a good education’ |
They are not lost,
they don’t fornicate and they don’t “retaliate”. They support their husbands in
both good and bad times. Maybe our contemporary female celebrities lack counselors
who can help them understand the nitty-gritty of marriage and the matrimony.
But those aged celebrities before us were never like that. They had passion for
family values and were in possession of their homes in their own days; you can’t
hear that they are caught in any scandal or sleep around with low men, and that
was why their marriages stood the test of time. They were disciplined and that
applies to our own set, we cherish our matrimony a lot. And even some few young
ladies that are coming behind have started imbibing this same principle and
they can even advice an adult who want to stumble. This new crop of girls are
really, really wise. For the majority who lack wisdom, we will keep praying for
them. The reason is simple; any great woman who cherishes the goodwill of her
children will never pray to lose her marriage. She will do everything possible
to make it work and you can hardly see any product of a stable family growing
wayward. It is children from broken homes that in most cases disturb the
society later in life.
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| Iya Oyo to Asabeafrika…’Peer Pressure and arrogance kills our lady celebrities’ |
If your
father and mother were united to the end, you discover that the tradition will
be transferred to the next generation. But in some rare, exceptional cases, a
lady that is well brought up from monogamy can grow up to become a wayward
house wife due to bad influence or peer pressure. The kind of friends you keep
matters a lot in life. I was watching a movie upstairs before you came in this
morning, this particular lady,(In the movie) her husband often come home late
in the evening as a result of traffic and city pressure. But the wife will
always help undress him and make him feel like a man. She never saw anything
bad in doing that. But immediately she told a friend about her humble gesture
to her husband who often arrive home late as a result of traffic, the friend
advised her to fight him and keep him in check. The man and his friends
normally wine out at a joint to beat traffic and his wife trusted his
discretion but the day she told her friend, calamities set into their
relationship. And before you know it, their home broke up and their three
children became casualties. In a particular scene in the movie, her husband
came back from work only for her to stop him from moving around in the sitting
room. The man was surprised and couldn’t imagine what befell his wife. But
before he knew it, the woman got hold of a sharp object and threw it to the man.
His head started bleeding as the cut. On getting to the hospital, he lied to
the doctor that he had a domestic accident. But the doctor was able to discern
that it was a domestic violence not an accident; and like in such cases, the
union broke. So, bad friendship, bad influence could corrupt good manners.
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| Iya Oyo a Socialite with a difference |
have seen several pictures of yours in the living and guest rooms. Even at 60,
you are looking trim and sharp. What is the secret of your beauty?
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| Iya Oyo, an Epitome of Beauty and Style |
don’t have beauty secret. I use whatever my children give me, either Vaseline
or cream. I don’t use any other thing. What I will just say is that a woman
must watch what she eats. Food makes you big, and meat adds flesh to your body.
Whatever you consume must be in moderation, food kills. I don’t eat much. I had
a cup of tea this morning. Even yesterday, my house maid had to remind me for
breakfast. I had my breakfast at noon with a friend who came visiting. I ate Jollof rice and the tea I had this
morning is the next food after that meal since yester noon. I like fruits and
vegetables. As a woman, you must eat in moderation. If God permits you to eat
twice fine, but don’t eat late. You must have your super latest by 7pm, if you
miss that time, then you can go to bed that day without meal. If it is fruit
you can afford, you can have your sleep. But our people eat too much.
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| Alade & Akanke Oloto, Love made in Heaven |
My
husband hates gluttonous people. My husband can take just a cup of tea and
biscuit for breakfast. And for lunch, he can have a small portion of wheat and
vegetable soup. That is his style. So, that is for food. For cream, people are
now getting awareness. Education is helping our women to stay away from using
cream. You see that most of our educated kids nowadays don’t use cream again.
There is no how ugly or beautiful they are, they will rather be ordinary than
bleaching or toning with various creams.
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| A Caricature of Iya Oyo in her element |
My children made me to know that;
majority of their friends that I knew, none of them uses cream. But when we
were young, illiteracy was in vogue and that was what led to the mad use of
creams. Some of the elder women before us used cream wrongly and that is why
you see their flesh go bad. But thank God for our new generation ladies, they
are now enlightened and that is how they live. They marry their husband with
their ordinary beauty, no creaming. Even in most advanced countries, you can’t
even sell those kinds of creams any longer. If you display it in a mall, you
will be sued and locked up. I think Nigeria
should also embrace that policy.
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| The GDA engages Iya Oyo |
business and leisure, which country is your best holiday destination?
my youth age when I started travelling; I have never found a place like London. If I am in London, it is like I am at home. In fact, I might stay two, three
months in London if I am not trading
around the globe. If I want to spend my annual holiday, I will be in London for two months. My husband often
complain that I stayed too long, at times he visits twice before we both return
back home. It is my favorite tourist destination. I do travel to America, Italy, Paris, China and
other countries. But those are business trips. For holiday, it is London; it is home away from home. In
fact I live as if I am in Lagos in London. I eat whatever I eat in Lagos, in London and that is why I say it is home away from home.
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| The Couple: Alade and Akanke Oloto |
Almighty for Allah’s grace. We have a mosque behind us here. Immediately the
5am prayer call comes, I will wake up by God’s grace. I will make sure I
observe the prayer, that will take me to about 6:30am, I will return to bed. Then I sleep my second round. Like
the time your SMS came this morning,
I was about to go back to bed. I will sleep my second round, and then wake at 9
am. If I am sleeping at that time, if you are my guest, no one will wake me for
you. You either return or wait. If I wake up by 9 am, I take my bath, have my
breakfast then start picking my phone calls. If I have appointment with
customers, then I move out to the office. I leave by 11 am and by evening I am
back home to welcome my husband.
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| Iya Oyo in rare pose with her spiritual Father, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi (Iku Baba Yeye) The Alaafin of Oyo Empire |
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| Iya Oyo with her darling husband, Buari Alade Oloto on their wedding day |
role model. I have all her habits, she is very accommodating. She is
fashionable. In fact she does it better than me. If my mother wakes up and
dresses up for you, you will think she is preparing for a beauty contest. She
will raise her nails and tie her head gear in a very fantastic way. Before she
passed away, she spent times with us in this house. She was about 105 years. In
fact I can’t beat her in the area of beauty and fashion. She has one very
interesting habit, if my mum wears a pink clothe, she will paint her finger
pink.
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| Iya Oyo…A Very Stylish Lady…Just like her mum… |
If it is yellow, she will paint her finger yellow. Till she passed away,
she was doing all that and the peculiar thing about her was that despite her
age, her hair was still fresh and black. She was a fashion model. If she wears
green, she will paint her nails in green. She spent three months with me in
this house before returning to Oyo where she passed away after
three months. She died in year 2009, Mama
was very interesting. One day she put on her robe and called one of my girls, Subomi
who is now in UNILAG. She was asking for my paint because she was wearing green
and the way she does it, you will see that she wasn’t complete without
complementing her nails with the color of her fabric. So I asked her, ‘mama, what happens to this green nails if
you change clothes tomorrow?’ And she
said ‘don’t worry, at least, this one
will last twenty four hours before I demand for a change’. It was quite
funny to us. One of my friends was equally surprised that Mama was still using paint at 105. But that was my mum for you.
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| The Olotos with Iku Baba Yeye, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, The Alaafin of Oyo |
lord, Dr. Sikiru Ayinde Barrister. She often dances to his
songs every morning. She was the Iyadini of Oke Apo Central Mosque, in Oyo. She also had a title at Araromi in Oyo state. She was a prominent woman. She was a rare woman in her own time.
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| Chief (Mrs.) Akanke Oloto, a woman of many parts |
titles?
for all. I am the Yeye-Luwa of Ido-Osun
in Oshogbo, Osun state. I am also the Yeye-Wura
of Itire Land. I am also the Iyalaje
Adinni of Oto Central Mosque. I am
the Yeye-Oba of ADO-Odo-Ota, Ogun
state. I am the Arigbabuwo Adinni of Itire Central Mosque in Lagos
and the Asiwaju Obinrin of Orepeju Club,
in Surulere here. I think that is
enough for you (laughter)
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| Iya Oyo with Fuji Music Lord,King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, K1 De Ultimate |
generally on how to build good homes?
try to raise good children; there is no child who will not want to be heady.
especially when they gain admission to school and far away from parental care
but you must continue to put them through.
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| Iya Oyo with her husband Chief Buari Alade Oloto with His Royal Majesty, Oba Rilwan Osuolale Akiolu (Olowo Eko) Oba of Lagos on Iya’s daughter’s wedding day in Lagos |
No child is too big to be scolded or
caned. Don’t pamper any of your kids. I still advise my children till date. I
don’t see any child that is too big to advice, teach your children so that you
will have peace. When it is time to pamper, pamper them but when it is time to
discipline, discipline them. No child is too big to be put through. May God
guide all our children and make them a success for all of us.
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| The GDA thanks Iya Oyo for the rare privilege to interview her in the very early hours of the day |
