By Moses Okezie-Okafor
Re: Betty Akeredolu’s ‘Remarriage’: Such traditional practices are fuelers of GBV –Priscilla Usiobaifo, Braveheart Initiative
I may be wrong, but I searched carefully and I did not see one instance throughout Mrs. Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu’s highly publicized travails before, during and after the death of her husband when learned counsel or her Braveheart Initiative came to her defense against what must be the most extreme case of bullying of a woman based on her marital and domestic circumstances that Nigeria has seen in recent times.
She was publicly pilloried and grievously excoriated with nothing left sacred – from her looks, to her marriage to her children to her place of origin. She trended on X and other social media platforms as all sorts of characters, including popular influencers with massive reach joined in lynching her, tearing the dress from her body and then the flesh from her bones and left her, for a while, the most hated woman in Nigeria.
Her right to marry her husband and the validity of her marriage to him (never mind the decades that have passed under the bridge of the union), the true ethnicity of her children, even their paternity in some quarters, her alleged oppression of her in-laws and their alleged hatred of her, her so-called ‘power-hungriness’ in wanting to take over in Ondo from her dead husband (how that was expected to work out under our laws beats me hollow till this day) etc, nothing was off-limits.
She was thus well and thoroughly inducted by horrific ordeals into the exclusive club of Tura’i Yar’Adua and Hauwa Danbaba Suntai – women whose sin, it would appear, was being First Ladies whose husbands died in Office and left them defenceless before the wolves.
I did not hear Learned Counsel who authored this current denunciation, or her organization, come to Betty’s aid. Yet, hardly has she, supported whole-heartedly by the same in-laws who reportedly hate her, and with her eldest son by her side in solidarity, made a move to take back her personhood than I am reading, in print and in public, from a learned person no less, how she is the problem women face and an enabler of Gender Based Violence.
Is there to be no end to these weals, pray?
Yet, there was no traditional marriage, no payment of dowry, not even a demand to marry (or is it, remarry) Betty by the younger husband of her deceased husband, Prof. Wole Akeredolu. All there was, was just a formal notification to her people that our brother you entrusted her to is dead, but she still pleases us and we are here to tell you we still want, nay, need, her in our family and she will always be safe with us – and she becomes the subject of another round of denunciations?
There is a need to mull on who is really enabling GBV right now.
Whether you agree with me or not, I say, let Betty be. Don’t make her into a cause célèbre for VAW and subject her to another round of torture.
Let Betty mourn Aketi in peace.
