Aisha, the first daughter of former military president, Ibrahim Babangida, has shared her journey into finding her purpose after the collapse of two marriages.
Although, she told her story at the 2016 SHE FORUM AFRICA conference, it started going viral recently.
Three years after her first marriage, Aisha got divorced and remarried again as a third wife but the union didn’t last long. Embarrassed by her two failed marriages, Aisha turned to her mother’s foundation, Better Life for Rural Women programme, and there, she found her purpose.
Better Life for Rural Women programme is a project of late Maryam Babangida, tackling issues confronting Nigerian women.
Read her story below
Mine is a story of grace to wisdom.
I grew up with my parents, seeing what it is that they do. So, two days ago, somebody asked me, “were you built for this role? Were you nurtured for this role?”
I said, “yes I was,” because this is all I know, this is all I’ve seen and this is all I’m proud of because it’s a legacy worth living.
So, I grew up seeing my parents work selflessly and devoted themselves to people. Making sure that they are all okay. So, here I am married and so, I’m suddenly divorced and I have a little baby. I had the biggest wedding anybody could ever imagine. I got divorced and I was thinking that I have shamed my parents.
At the same time, I have shamed the people that invested in coming to my wedding. Those that came from faraway and everything. How do I now look at everyone of this people and face them? So, I prayed to God to get me married quickly which is another big mistake because I thought I needed to do this now because this is what I know.
I grew up with a mother. I grew up with seeing her literarily feeding my father, looking after him, serving him, so, naturally, I’m going to follow that. So, how did my marriage break up. If I was doing right, if I saw what my mother was doing. So, I got married again but my mother dies and she left this legacy, Better Life.
So, she dies and another embarrassment came to me. Here I am now, living another life as a married woman and not realising that in a marriage, you can be inter-dependent. In other words, I can be married and still nurture this man and still do what I was brought to this world to do. I didn’t realise that.
So, she’s no longer here and my second marriage goes down again. But the embarrassment was that I did not pay attention to her foundation when she was sick, I was building somebody else. So, I get divorced again and in a hurry to do her work.
Unfortunately, none of the family members or people close to her mum were ready to put her through and give her basic but important information about the foundation.
Soon, her father decided to contest for an election and her mother’s workers were asking how they could benefit from her father’s campaigns. Realising that her mother’s workers were more concerned about themselves, she decided to shut the organisation and rebuild.
“Now I can rebuild but the only thing now is that I’m going to add value to what she’s been doing. So, I had to do this on my own,” she said.
However, rebuilding didn’t come easy because she was getting back-stabbed by the people she employed. According to them, she was a ‘CBN’.
Noting how much her mother did before she died, Aisha said she is determined to do more especially because it has been told to her face that she is not her mother and so cannot do what she had done.
“This is all I know and I am enjoying every bit of it because this is what I was raised to do.”
Watch her speak here
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