By now, almost everyone in the attentive audience in Nigeria and even abroad knows Olajumoke’s story.
If anyone quips “Olajumoke who?” at the mention of that name, simply add “the bread seller.” That should settle it. For she is the only person bearing that name and most recently in that line of business who has been the focus of media attention lately and, meaning no disrespect to other bearers of that evocative name, the only Olajumoke that seems to matter at this time.
Balancing a pyramid of loaves of Agege bread on her head as she made her rounds in one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Lagos, the winsome mother of two strayed into a photo shoot, of which the hip-hop artist Tinie Tempah was the subject. But when the shoot was published in the social media, it was the woman carrying a pyramid of neatly stacked loaves of bread on her head that caught public attention.
Everyone wanted to know her identity. The photographer, TY Bello, eventually located her, gave her a makeover, and published her pictures in This Day Style magazine.
Olajumoke’s life has not been and will never be the same again. The pictures catapulted her from obscurity – from near invisibility, despite that pyramid of loaves of bread – to celebrity. It is the stuff of fairy tales.
Banks that would have turned down her application for a loan on the threshold have now signed her up as brand ambassador. Were she minded to seek a loan from them now, they would gladly oblige. What collateral can be greater or more valuable than the star herself?
Her clients also include manufacturers of consumer goods, fashion houses and modelling agencies, and she is billed to figure as a face of Lagos as the state celebrates its 50th anniversary next year.
From the world of rowdy bus-stops and crowded buses and perhaps the occasional taxi cab, from the world of roadside meals washed down with “pure water” sachets, from nondescript clothing and flip –flops, she has been thrust into the world of limousines and airports and air travel and four-course meals in the swankiest restaurants and hotels and designer apparel and high-heeled shoes.
A property developer has offered her a luxury apartment that only the most upwardly mobile can aspire to live in or own in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in town, and has thrown into the bargain a fund for the education of Olajumoke’s children up to university.
Without stating whether it has been so commissioned, an Instagram site has announced that it is accepting bookings from those who may need Olajumoke’s services. Business has been brisk, I gather.
The evangelical churches that promise deliverance and prosperity now daily invoke her as a “point of contact” in their supplication for transformative miracles in the lives of their teeming congregations.
She has been a subject of countless profiles in the national and international media and even her name has undergone some transformation of the eponymous kind: ThisDay’s Olusegun Adeniyi has coined the term Olajumokeism to denote the phenomenon that Olajumoke’s life emblematises.
The perceptive and engaging Punch columnist Abimbola Adelakun has in a sober piece pointed out that Olajumoke’s dizzying rise to stardom illustrates for the most part the failure of a system that afforded her no formal education and reduced her – and millions like her – to the drudgery and danger of street hawking.
But Adelakun’s is almost a lonely voice. Virtually everyone else is celebrating and wishing fervently that an Olajumoke would surface in their lives, now, in these disarticulated times.
I envy Olajumoke and her family their good fortune. But if it is not properly managed, they are going to pay a high price for it. Even the most sophisticated among us will find it difficult to handle a change of fortune so spectacular. For poor Olajumoke, it is a case of too much too soon.
Her anonymity – the anonymity that allowed her to be herself, to mind her business, to be not too concerned about what people are saying or thinking about her, to live her life quietly and unobtrusively and by her own rules and judgment, will be the first casualty of her new, treacherous world.
Lost also is the environment she has always known, now replaced by a world of minders and agents, and teeming with supplicants and opportunists and persons of dubious character and even more dubious motives. This setting opens the door to vicious exploitation – the type that has, even in better-regulated societies, brought down many a celebrity precipitously down from affluence to indigence.
Think also of what Olajumoke’s sudden fame will do to her husband Sunday, who makes a modest income from fitting aluminum door and window frames, and is probably only slightly more knowledgeable about the ways of the world, but is now thrust into Olajumoke’s new circle — the men and women, especially the men, who will spare no effort to make her believe that she deserves better.
If his wife’s name survives her quantum leap to fame, his family name probably won’t. I can almost see them taking her aside and telling her solemnly that Orisaguna simply won’t cut it and that if she wants to really get on, the name would have to be replaced by something more cadenced.
I am reminded of a certain actress originally named Norma Jeane, whose story has some parallels with Olajumoke’s. Her minders, sensing that she could not enter Hollywood with a name like that, changed it to Marilyn Monroe.
She became an instant hit.
Examples abound of persons who came into sudden fame and affluence but wished in retrospect that fortune had left them severely alone.
There is, to take a local instance, the butcher Olagunju from Ede, Osun State, known mostly by his first name like Olajumoke, who won £75, 000 on the Littlewoods pools in the 1950s. Back then, that sum put Olagunju in the league of some of the wealthiest persons in the British Empire.
Even with the strongest will in the world, you cannot have that kind of money and remain a butcher. Advice flowed from every corner urging upon him a lifestyle that matched his new wealth. More wives, to be sure. Landed property. Some business ventures.
They sold him land that belonged to the Nigerian Railway Corporation. His pools betting company was paying out much more than it was taking in, and was soon grounded. They made him a “father” of the Action Group, and he had to pay the dues that came with the honour. One organisation after another sought his financial support.
The money soon ran out. Thereafter, Olagunju would introduce himself wistfully as the “olowo Ede ojoun,” literally, the wealthy Ede man of yore.
To return to Olajumoke: Asked what she would like to do with her new life, she said she would like to go to school and train to become a lawyer. That is a good sign that stardom and occasion have not gone into her head.
The assets that have brought her fame will fade over time; other stars will take her place. Her dream is of a future that is secure.
Those who truly wish her well should help her keep that dream splendidly in view.
NATION
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