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Beyond The Ayeni Name…Will Adaobi Alagwu Save Her Child From Future Disgrace?
Beyond The Ayeni Name…Will Adaobi Alagwu Save Her Child From Future Disgrace?
– How A Mother’s Greed May Ruin Her Daughter’s Life (Video)
By Ifeanyi Okonkwo
There is a virtue, Adaobi Alagwu probably presumes, in being brazen, thus her inclination to place on parade her infant child, Omarosa’s murky roots. Only a mother afflicted by insolence and lack of shame would soullessly jeopardise her daughter’s self-esteem by forcing the paternity of an unwilling father on her.
In the wake of billionaire magnate, Tunde Ayeni’s decisive rebuttal of Alagwu’s claim that he is the father of her child, more posers have been raised concerning paternity fraud.
A recent post by a social media commentator condemned Ayeni’s bid to stop Alagwu from using his name for her daughter, arguing that he would fail in his bid. He said, “Anybody can bear any name he or she likes, provided you’re not impersonating anyone. A female child cannot be said to be impersonating Mr Ayeni simply by having the same surname with him.” Whilst this position might be convenient for people who might have a jaundiced perspective to the enormity of the implications of such a rejection as AdaObi and her daughter have faced, the question to ask is who in their right senses would keep a name that will be a constant reminder of their mistakes and humiliation. If AdaObi had as much any sense of self-worth would she have insisted on acceptance as she has for her daughter from a man so unwilling and so detesting of her that he’s willing to go to any lengths in proving his disapproval and rejection of them both?
Why is it okay to force an unwilling man to take responsibility for a child that was forced on him when all accountability should be with the 31-year-old single lady who out of greed jeopardized her future to keep an unwanted pregnancy for a married man?
It would be recalled that Tunde Ayeni wrote the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), recently, asking it to void any international passport presented by his estranged girlfriend and Abuja lawyer, Adaobi Alagwu and her child, bearing his name.
Declaring any such document illegitimate, Ayeni, speaking through his lawyer, Dele Adesina (SAN) established that Alagwu’s daughter isn’t entitled to the use of his name on her travel document as he has no familial relationship with her.
Ayeni disclosed this by copying the NIS a “Cease and Desist” legal notice he sent to Alagwu entitled, “Withdrawal of Consent for Use of the Family Name ‘Ayeni’ With Respect To Your Daughter Omarosa.”
Ayeni’s recent step was informed by Alagwu’s adoption of his name on her daughter’s international passport even after a DNA test had established that she wasn’t Ayeni’s child. His letter to the NIS follows the recent arrest and detention of Alagwu for trespassing on and breaking into his private property in Abuja.
The duo has been entangled in a battle of wits that has seen Ayeni issue multiple press statements to refute claims of paternity of Alagwu’s child.
In her desperation to get hooked on the billionaire magnate and former bank chief, Alagwu fabricated a plot to get pregnant by him and, so doing, implant herself and her child as beneficiaries of his estate.
Alagwu, a trained attorney, was misled by the belief that she had the upper hand on Ayeni. She thought she had him by the balls.
Like all frantic liars, she thought she had gained a victory over Ayeni simply by claiming that she was pregnant for him and her baby girl belonged to him (but she was mistaken).
Her adoption of his name for her daughter, Omarosa has been dismissed as a last-ditch resort as she struggles to hold on to her ex-billionaire boyfriend who was until recently her benefactor and family’s meal ticket.
To underscore how bad the menace of such desperate girls is, a cursory look at her company website reveals the same address as the one from which she was humiliatingly ejected by Ayeni.
Pundits aver that if she had truly been gainfully employed as she claimed – since she fell out with Ayeni – her company address ought to have changed both online and offline.
Her so-called company website has no meaningful indicator of how business clients could reach her. There are no markers on the website detailing or establishing her presence as the administrator or CEO of a thriving enterprise, contrary to her claims.
What this translates to is that she (Alagwu) has no viable source of livelihood and has always been completely dependent on Ayeni.
Only a woman bereft of self-respect and shame would carry on so, without a care in the world about how badly her lack of a decent livelihood rubs off on her.
As Alagwu deploys every wile and weapon in her arsenal to fight her way into Ayeni’s household, not a few people have advised her to desist from what is a wild goose chase. But she is undeterred.
If she won’t care what becomes of her name, at least she ought to be concerned about the implications of her actions for her innocent daughter, Omarosa.
If anything, Alagwu must be wary of mortgaging her daughter’s interest in her frantic bid to settle scores with her estranged lover, Ayeni. Even if she enjoys the inalienable right to adopt any name of her choice, including Tunde Ayeni’s, for her daughter, the onus rests on her to listen to the voice of reason and embrace moral rectitude by protecting her daughter from certain ignominy and shame of answering to the name of a man who publicly rejected her.
And to those goading her into believing in her lies that he paid her bride price and his wife is the architect of this rejection, it is unimaginable how twisted they are in their thinking. Hanging on to the last straws of desperation, they look away from the obvious display of rejection from Mr Ayeni, a man married for 30 years and experienced in the ways of life enough to convince his wife and friends he will go to any length to erase Adaobis existence.
If it wasn’t his making why didn’t he publish a disclaimer? The man wants Alagwu to feel the full weight of his rejection by placing his wife in front of him and arming her with the authority to denigrate Alagwu and make her face the folly of bringing nothing to the table except a fair complexion in comparison to his established wife.
How does she think her daughter would feel when she grows up and finds out that her mother had forced upon her, the name of a man who went to great measures to denounce her?
It’s about time Alagwu embraced caution and silenced her ego, lest she becomes a sad, cautionary tale. For most of history, one essential, immutable difference between men and women was that men could hide the fact that they had created a child and women could not. Pregnancy and childbirth showed the world who the mother was; paternity could only be assumed.
New parents are often told how much their babies look like the father. The research on whether most do or do not is ambiguous, but the fancy persists, in part because, consciously or unconsciously, people think that emphasising the resemblance will set a man’s mind at ease, thus fortifying the paternal bond.
Fortunately for Ayeni, he refused to be misled by such a wanton appeal to sentimentality. As Nara Milanich, a professor of history at Barnard College, writes in her solidly researched and enlightening new book, “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father” (Harvard), a “common metaphor invoked by nineteenth-century jurists was that Nature had concealed fatherhood by an impenetrable veil.”
Thanks to science, the DNA test to be precise, Tunde Ayeni was able to penetrate that mythical veil to establish the convoluted plots of his estranged girlfriend, Alagwu’s paternity fraud.
Until recently, that veil was often a source of frustration, leading to domestic doubts and irresolvable courtroom conflicts. Literature gives us many a husband driven half-mad by the suspicion that his child is not the fruit of his loins, as is King Leontes, in “The Winter’s Tale,” and women who deceive their husbands on this score, like the wife in Maupassant’s story “Useless Beauty,” who tells her husband that one of their seven children isn’t his, but won’t say which.
Paternal unknowability, however, was also enormously useful. Many legal traditions around the world, including the Anglo-American one, adhered to the marital presumption of legitimacy at least until the twentieth century: a child born to a married woman was considered to be the biological progeny of her husband. (A child born to an unmarried woman was, Milanich writes, “historically deemed a filius nullius, a child of nobody.”) Milanich tells the story of a man named Remo Cipolli, who, in 1945, sued his wife, Quinta Orsini, for adultery, and sought to deny paternity, after she gave birth to an infant who appeared to be black. Cipolli and his wife, who were both white Italians, lived in a small town near Pisa, where several African-American soldiers had been stationed at the end of the Second World War.
The case became notorious—the baby was known as “the little Moor of Pisa.” In the end, although a civil court found Orsini guilty of adultery, it also concluded that her husband, Cipolli, was legally the baby’s father.
Thanks to science, Ayeni would experience no such embarrassment and heartache through paternity fraud.
In all of these, the fate of one human element hangs in the balance, that of Alagwu’s innocent young daughter. And her salvation, interestingly lies in Alagwu’s hands. Will Adaobi Alagwu quit barking up the wrong tree? Will she desist from her wild goose pursuit and so doing save her innocent daughter from immediate and future disgrace?
Why Babangida’s Hilltop Home Became Nigeria’s Political “Mecca”.
By George Omagbemi Sylvester | Published by SaharaWeeklyNG.com
Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s birthday visit to Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) in Minna (where he hailed the octogenarian as a patriotic leader committed to national unity) was more than a courtesy call. It was a reminder of a peculiar constant in Nigerian politics: the steady pilgrimage of power-seekers, bridge-builders and crisis-managers to the Hilltop mansion. Jonathan’s own words captured it bluntly: IBB’s residence “is like a Mecca of sorts” because of the former military president’s enduring relevance and perceived nation-first posture.
Babangida turned 84 on 17 August 2025. That alone invites reflection on a career that has shaped Nigeria’s political architecture for four decades; admired by some for audacious statecraft, condemned by others for controversies that still shadow the republic. Born on 17 August 1941 in Minna, he ruled as military president from 1985 to 1993, presiding over transformative and turbulent chapters: the relocation of the national capital to Abuja in 1991; the creation of political institutions for a long, complex transition; economic liberalisation that cut both ways; and the fateful annulment of the 12 June 1993 election. Each of these choices helps explain why the Hilltop remains a magnet for Nigerians who need counsel, cover or calibration.
A house built on influence; why the visits never stop.
Let’s start with the obvious: access. Nigeria’s political class prizes proximity to the men and women who can open doors, soften opposition, broker peace and read the hidden currents. In that calculus, IBB’s network is unmatched. He cultivated a reputation for “political engineering,” the reason the press christened him “Maradona” (for deft dribbling through complexity) and “Evil Genius” (for the strategic cunning his critics decried). Whether one embraces or rejects those labels, they reflect a reality: Babangida is still the place where many politicians go to test ideas, seek endorsements or secure introductions. Even the mainstream press has described him as a consultant of sorts to desperate or ambitious politicians, an uncomfortable description that nevertheless underlines his gravitational pull.
Though it isn’t only political tact that draws visitors; it’s statecraft with lasting fingerprints. Moving the seat of government from Lagos to Abuja in December 1991 was not a cosmetic relocation, it re-centred the federation and signaled a symbolic neutrality in a country fractured by regional suspicion. Abuja’s founding logic (GEOGRAPHIC CENTRALITY and ETHNIC NEUTRALITY) continues to stabilise the national imagination. This is part of the reason many leaders, across party lines, still defer to IBB: he didn’t just rule; he rearranged the map of power.
Then there’s the regional dimension. Under his watch, Nigeria led the creation and deployment of ECOMOG in 1990 to staunch Liberia’s bloody civil war, a bold move that announced Abuja as a regional security anchor. The intervention was imperfect, contested and costly, but it helped define West Africa’s collective security posture and Nigeria’s leadership brand. When neighboring states now face crises, the memory of that precedent still echoes in diplomatic corridors and Babangida’s counsel retains currency among those who remember how decisions were made.
Jonathan’s praise and the unity argument.
Jonathan’s tribute (stressing Babangida’s non-sectional outlook and commitment to unity) goes to the heart of the Hilltop mystique. For a multi-ethnic federation straining under distrust, figures who can speak across divides are prized. Jonathan’s point wasn’t nostalgia; it was a live assessment of a man many still call when Nigeria’s seams fray. That’s why the parade to Minna continues: the anxious, the ambitious and the statesmanlike alike seek an elder who can convene rivals and cool temperatures.
The unresolved shadow: June 12 and the ethics of influence.
No honest appraisal can skip the hardest chapter: the annulment of the 12 June 1993 election (judged widely as free and fair) was a rupture that delegitimised the transition and scarred Nigeria’s democratic journey. Political scientist Larry Diamond has repeatedly identified June 12 as a prime example of how authoritarian reversals corrode democratic legitimacy and public trust. His larger warning (“few developments are more destructive to the legitimacy of new democracies than blatant and pervasive political corruption”) captures the moral crater that followed the annulment and the years of drift that ensued. Those wounds are part of the Babangida legacy too and they complicate the reverence that a steady stream of visitors displays.
Max Siollun, a leading historian of Nigeria’s military era, has observed (provocatively) that the military’s “greatest contribution” to democracy may have been to rule “long and badly enough” that Nigerians lost appetite for soldiers in power. It’s a stinging line, yet it helps explain the paradox of IBB’s status: the same system he personified taught Nigeria costly lessons that hardened its democratic reflexes. Today’s generation visits the Hilltop not to revive militarism but to harvest hard-won insights about managing a fragile federation.
What sustains the pilgrimage.
1) Institutional memory: Nigeria’s politics often suffers amnesia. Babangida offers a living archive of security crises navigated, regional diplomacy attempted, volatile markets tempered and power-sharing experiments designed. Whether one applauds or condemns specific choices, the muscle memory of governing a complex federation is rare and urgently sought.
2) Convening power: In a season of polarisation, the ability to sit warring factions in the same room is not small capital. Babangida’s imprimatur remains a safe invitation card few refuse it, fewer ignore it. That convening power explains why movements, parties and would-be presidents keep filing up the long driveway. Recent delegations have explicitly cast their courtesy calls in the language of unity, loyalty and patriotism ahead of pivotal elections.
3) Signals to the base: Visiting Minna telegraphs seriousness to party structures and funders. It says: “I have sought counsel where history meets experience.” In Nigeria’s coded political theatre, that signal still matters. Outlets have reported for years that many aspirants treat the Hilltop as an obligatory stop an unflattering reality, perhaps, but a revealing one.
4) The man and the myth: The mansion itself, with its opulence and aura, has become a set piece in Nigeria’s story of power, admired by some, resented by others, but always discussed. The myth feeds the pilgrimage; the pilgrimage feeds the myth.
The balance sheet at 84.
To treat Babangida solely as a sage is to forget the costs of his era; to treat him only as a villain is to ignore the architecture that still holds parts of Nigeria together. Abuja’s relocation stands as a stabilising bet that paid off. ECOMOG, for all its flaws, seeded a habit of regional responsibility. Conversely, June 12 remains a national cautionary tale about elite manipulation, civilian marginalisation and the brittleness of transitions managed from above. These are not contradictory truths; they are the double helix of Babangida’s place in Nigerian memory.
Jonathan’s homage tried to distill the better angel of IBB’s record: MENTORSHIP, BRIDGE-BUILDING and a POSTURE that (at least in his telling) RESISTS SECTIONAL ISM. “That is why today, his house is like a Mecca of sorts,” he said, praying that the GENERAL continues to “mentor the younger ones.” Whether one agrees with the full sentiment, it accurately describes the lived politics of Nigeria today: Minna remains a checkpoint on the road to relevance.
The scholar’s verdict and a citizen’s challenge.
If Diamond warns about legitimacy and Siollun warns about the perils of soldier-politics, what should Nigerians demand from the Hilltop effect? Three things.
First, use influence to open space, not close it. Counsel should tilt toward rules, institutions and credible elections not kingmaking for its own sake. The lesson of 1993 is that subverting a valid vote haunts a nation for decades.
Second, mentor for unity, but insist on accountability. Unity cannot be a euphemism for silence. A truly patriotic elder statesman sets a high bar for conduct and condemns the shortcuts that tempt new actors in old ways. Diamond’s admonition on corruption is not an abstraction; it’s a roadmap for rebuilding trust.
Third, convert nostalgia into institutional memory. If Babangida’s house is a classroom, then Nigeria should capture, publish and debate its lessons in the open: on peace operations (what worked, what failed), on capital relocation (how to plan at scale), and on transitions (how not to repeat 1993). Only then does the pilgrimage serve the republic rather than personalities.
At 84, Ibrahim Babangida remains a paradox that Nigeria cannot ignore: a man whose legacy straddles NATION-BUILDING and NATION-BRUISING, whose doors remain open to those seeking power and those seeking peace. Jonathan’s visit (and his striking “Mecca” metaphor) reveals a simple, stubborn fact: in a country still searching for steady hands, the Hilltop’s shadow is long. The task before Nigeria is to ensure that the shadow points toward a brighter constitutional daybreak, where influence is finally subordinated to institutions and where mentorship hardens into norms that no single mansion can monopolise. That is the only pilgrimage worth making.
Ajadi Celebrates Juju Legend Femolancaster’s 50th Birthday in the UK
Nigerian Juju music legend, Otunba Femi Fadipe, popularly known as FemoLancaster, is being celebrated today in London as he clocks 50 years of age.
Ambassador Olufemi Ajadi Oguntoyinbo, a frontline politician and businessman, led tributes to the Ilesa-born maestro, describing him as a timeless cultural icon whose artistry has enriched both Nigeria and the world.
“FemoLancaster is not just a musician, he is a legend,” Ambassador Ajadi said in his birthday message. “For decades, his classical Juju sound has remained a reminder of the beauty of Yoruba heritage. Today, as he turns 50, I celebrate a cultural ambassador whose music bridges generations and continents.”
While FemoLancaster is highly dominant in Oyo State and across the South-West, his craft has also taken him beyond Nigeria’s borders.
FemoLancaster’s illustrious career has seen him thrill audiences across Nigeria and beyond, with performances in the United Kingdom, Canada, United States of America, and other parts of the world. His dedication to Juju music has projected Yoruba traditional sounds to international stages, keeping alive the legacy of icons like King Sunny Ade and Chief Ebenezer Obey while infusing fresh energy for younger audiences
He further stressed the significance of honoring artistes who have remained faithful to indigenous music while taking it global. “In an era where modern sounds often overshadow tradition, FemoLancaster stands as a beacon of continuity and resilience. He has carried Yoruba Juju music into the global space with dignity, passion, and excellence,” he added.
The golden jubilee celebration in London has drawn fans, friends, and colleagues, who all describe FemoLancaster as a gifted artist whose contributions over decades have earned him a revered place in the pantheon of Nigerian music legends.
“As FemoLancaster marks this milestone,” Ajadi concluded, “I wish him many more years of good health, wisdom, and global recognition. May his music continue to echo across generations and continents.”
celebrity radar - gossips
Gospel Songstress Esther Igbekele Marks Birthday with Gratitude and Celebration
Gospel Songstress Esther Igbekele Marks Birthday with Gratitude and Celebration
By Aderounmu Kazeem Lagos
Lagos, Nigeria — The gospel music scene is aglow today as the “Duchess of Gospel Music,” Esther Igbekele, marks another milestone in her life, celebrating her birthday on Saturday, August 16, 2025.
Known for her powerful voice, inspirational lyrics, and unwavering dedication to spreading the gospel through music, Esther Igbekele has become one of Nigeria’s most respected and beloved gospel artistes. Over the years, she has graced countless stages, released hit albums, and inspired audiences across the world with her uplifting songs.
Today’s celebration is expected to be a joyful blend of music, prayers, and heartfelt tributes from family, friends, fans, and fellow artistes. Sources close to the singer revealed that plans are in place for a special praise gathering in Lagos, where she will be joined by notable figures in the gospel industry, church leaders, and admirers from home and abroad.
Speaking ahead of the day, Igbekele expressed deep gratitude to God for His mercy and the opportunity to use her gift to touch lives. “Every birthday is a reminder of God’s faithfulness in my journey. I am thankful for life, for my fans, and for the privilege to keep ministering through music,” she said.
From her early beginnings in the Yoruba gospel music scene to her rise as a celebrated recording artiste with a unique fusion of contemporary and traditional sounds, Esther Igbekele’s career has been marked by consistency, excellence, and a strong message of hope.
As she adds another year today, her fans have flooded social media with messages of love, appreciation, and prayers — a testament to the profound impact she continues to make in the gospel music ministry.
For many, this birthday is not just a celebration of Esther Igbekele’s life, but also of the divine inspiration she brings to the Nigerian gospel music landscape.
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