I do not know why she fondly referred to the Almighty Allah as the ‘Owner of Life’. I know it is the equivalent of one of Allah’s names, Al-Mumeet (the One who gives life and the One who takes it away. He ordains who becomes lifeless). On several casions when we discussed a plan or talked about a politician planning for the 2027 or 2031 elections, her retort was usually that “why do people plan as if they own their lives? Do they consider what the Owner of Life has in stock for them?” On such occasions, I usually wonder why she enjoyed referring to God with that deserved, fitting, and apt appellation.
Then, on October 14, 2025, the Owner of Life actually manifested Himself to her, her family, friends, well-wishers, colleagues, and associates, revealing why He truly deserves that appellation. The previous day, I had driven in the same car with my second son, Oladipo, from our Abuja home to drop Aishat Odunayo Olaniyonu, my wife of 28 years at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja, for her journey to Lagos. She was accompanied by our youngest son, Oladepo. They were to be an advance party for a wedding ceremony that the entire family was to attend on October 18 in Lagos.
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Then, this fateful Tuesday morning, I spoke to her on the phone about 10 am as I worked out. She was perfectly okay. She had no complaint. I returned home and was preparing to go out when the phone call came from Oladepo. He had left his mum about 50 minutes earlier, hale and hearty, in the Ojodu area where they stayed with a family friend. He was already somewhere in the Alimosho area to deliver a gift he had brought from the UK for his late friend’s mother. He just got to his destination and had not disembarked from the vehicle when he was informed that his mother had slumped where he had left her in Ojodu. He immediately put a phone call through to me.
“Daddy, call Aunty Ronke. They said mummy slumped”, he said in a very hasty and frightened voice. I did as he said and simply asked Ronke if my wife had been taken to the hospital. The person I called was in an extreme state of chaos. I directed that there should be no waste of time. She must be rushed to the hospital. Our first son, Oladapo, who called me on the phone advised that while they were taking her for medical attention, we should quickly observe two rakat prayers for her recovery. I complied. I knew we needed divine intervention when a woman who was hale and hearty less than two hours before then was reported to have slumped.
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After the prayer, I picked up my already packed bag and headed for the Abuja airport. I believed I had to get to Lagos as fast as possible to take charge of the situation. A protocol officer at the airport was already helping to arrange an airline ticket for my journey to Lagos. On my way, I put a call to Oladepo to be sure he had gotten back to where his mum was and could give me a first-hand report of the situation. By this time, the picture I had in my head and mind was that Odunayo only fainted and would be revived in a hospital after which I had to be on the ground in Lagos to monitor the situation and care for her until she was fit to return to Abuja.
However, I got a shocker when I called Oladepo on my way to the Airport. As soon as he picked up my phone call, I heard the young man shouting at the top of his voice: “Let me see my mummy, let me see my mummy”. When I told him to calm down and tell me what was happening, he shouted: “Daddy, can you believe it? They are saying mummy is dead”. Inalilahi wa ina Ilaehi rajiun.
From the benefit of hindsight, the Al-Mumeet whom Odunayo liked to call ‘the Owner of Life’ had demanded her life about 90 minutes after our conversation. She was not sick. She was her usual boisterous self when we had that phone conversation. A hair stylist was in the house to dress her hair and she was to wash her hair with a shampoo in the bathroom. She left the living room and as soon as she got into the bathroom, the Owner of Life took her life. She had not uncorked the shampoo container, but the tap was running. The people in the living room did not know anything had happened to her until the hairstylist was making a fuss about being unduly delayed and was threatening to go back to her shop to attend to other customers.
Her host went inside the room to relay the message of the hairstylist when she found her on the floor of the bathroom. The bedlam that followed is better imagined. One could guess that between when she slumped and when her host saw her on the ground, there could have been about 30-minute intervals. That must be the reason the hairstylist was complaining bitterly about being unduly delayed. When my sons and I went to see her body in the private morgue on Wednesday morning, she was looking so peaceful as if she was asleep. No stress on her face. No wound on her. I guess the Owner of Life was kind to His wonderful servant while taking her life.
As it seems, the two most important women in my life had died similarly. 14 years ago, some hours after my mum spoke to me on the phone and prayed for so long for me, I got a call that she was suddenly unable to speak or move her body while on the sofa in her living room in Lagos. I was in Abeokuta and within one hour of that first call, the hospital she was rushed to certified her as ‘brought in dead’. She was not sick. You could imagine the feeling of deja vu that came over me that Tuesday.
In my 28 years of marriage to Oduanyo, she has been a major force propelling my life. She was my solid pillar of support. She was a strong woman. She was my rock of Gibraltar. A very good companion. A reliable and faithful partner. A loyal and devoted wife. She was a woman of huge capacity and multiple competencies. And she deployed all these in serving her family and humanity. While members of the family, including our children, friends, and associates called her Mamamia, a nickname I gave her over 20 years ago, sometimes the children also hailed her as ‘Mama in Charge or ‘In Charge Mama’.
She took charge of my life and that of the children such that she provided for a lot of our needs. I only needed to fund her and provide the endorsement. She made me dependent on her for so many things and on several fronts. Now, she has left me in limbo at a time when I was already used to the pampering. To show how dependent I was on Odunayo, immediately after her burial, we got to our Abeokuta home and I could not locate the key to our room. She was the only one who knew where she kept it when we left the place last June after the Eid-el-Kabir festival. I did not care to know where she kept it because I had always assumed we would return to the house together anytime or at least she was a phone call away from me if I needed to ask where the key was. After a fruitless search, we had to replace the lock.
She was my storm breaker when the tide threatened to sweep me away last year. She stood firm for me. Last year, when I wrote about my travails during a five-month illness, I only made a little mention of her roles in the way God intervened to save me. She did a lot more than an article could cover. If I were writing a book about that period, there would be a need to devote several chapters to Odunayo. She was the stormtrooper. I could recollect many occasions where only her interventions saved me from becoming a victim of wrong diagnosis or wrong application of a correct diagnosis.
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She was proved so right by her several interventions that a colleague of mine who visited us in the hospital several times once asked me if she was a medical school dropout or a one-time nurse. She perfectly played the roles of nurse, minder, and caregiver. For my children and me, for her mum and her siblings, there was no length Odunayo could not go to sacrifice for our happiness. Many of her friends and members of the extended families also benefited from her generosity and support. She was a courageous, hardworking, determined, and focused woman. Her labour of love was incredible and ceaseless.
I married her in the church as she was born a Christian. Her baptismal name was Happiness because she was born on New Year’s Day. When we were courting I assured her she would be free to practice her religion while I would also remain a Muslim forever. I was surprised during the christening ceremony for our first son, she informed the Muslim clerics that she had decided to embrace Islam and had chosen the name Aishat as her Muslim name. My parents and I were very happy.
Since then, Odunayo improved by the day in her iman (faith). She prayed five times, fasted, had embarked on the holy pilgrimage in 2010 and her capacity for giving sadakat was incredible. If Odunayo was consistently buying roasted corn from a woman by the roadside, she would secretly empower the woman with N50,000 or N100,000. She was always concerned that while such money meant nothing to some close relations that we often give to, they meant a lot to all these petty traders. It would help them take care of other family issues without any effect on their business or if they invest it in their business, it would make great changes.
Last Ramadan, as a mark of thanking Allah (SWT) for restoring her husband to good health, Odunayo began feeding 50 people twice a week during the iftar session. For all the security men, about five of them in our estate, the iftar feeding was a daily affair during the Ramadan session. It is as if she knew the last Ramadan was her last.
Last Saturday, our former co-tenant came on a condolence visit. She said she was told by our former landlady that Mamamia’s last words were ‘Inalilahi wa ina Ilaehi rajiun (from Allah we have come and to Him we shall return). Oladapo and I corrected her that that was an exaggeration. Nobody saw Mamamia when she slumped and at the time her host saw her on the floor, she was no longer talking. However, we all know that the phrase ‘Inalilahi wa ina Ilaehi rajiun’ was a regular retort to her. She uttered it anytime and anywhere she saw anything that surprised her or appeared unexpected to her. In fact, if she suddenly found out on her way out of the house that her purse was not in her handbag, her first expression of surprise will be ‘Inalilahi’.
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Mamamia was many things to many people. To her aged mother, she filled the void of her late husband who died 36 years ago. To her children, she was a guardian angel. There was nothing she could not give to ensure their well-being. To me, she was a dependable ally, a fortress in whom I felt protected. To her friends, when she is on your side, you can go to bed and have no worries again. For many of her son’s friends, she was a pan-Nigerian mother who never discriminated against anybody but related to them like her own children. To her folks back home in Sabomi and Kiribo in Ondo State, she was their golden ambassador. To the less privileged people in all the places we have lived from Lagos, Abeokuta, and Abuja, she was always seeking to serve Almighty Allah through them. To many ordinary people whom she met in the market or saw on the street, she was caring and always seeking to spread joy.
Odunayo liked children. We both stopped having biological children 23 years ago after three beautiful and well-groomed boys. However, she continued to have many children who saw her as their ‘mother’. Her latest are Hafsat, Imam, Adnan, and Amani whom she met alongside their parents while we lived in the Mabushi area of Abuja. She loved them so much and they loved her too. Amani whose real name is Fatimah Aminu Jefiya, is her favourite and youngest. She is just four but very precocious. Mamamia called her ‘My Margi Princess’ and she could never do anything wrong in Mamamia’s estimation. In fact, Mamamia’s day was not complete without forcing me to listen to what I now called Amani News for the day. When I returned home from work, she would tell me what she discussed with Amani or what Amani’s mum told her about the young girl, earlier.
The kids also loved Mamamia. During my illness, Amani’s eldest brother, Imam, told the mother who was going on a holy pilgrimage that the only request he was making was for her to always pray for Papamia (as they also referred to me) in Masjid Haram, the holy mosque in Mecca. He said the mother should not bother to buy him anything. It was the young boy’s way of repaying Mamamia’s loyalty.
Imam’s only sister, Amani, and her mum loved Odunayo to bits. Amani would pack her bag and insist she was relocating from her mother’s Gwarinpa residence to Gidan Mamamia. When the mother told Amani that Mamamia is dead, she rejected the story. ‘Mamamia tajay London’, she replied, meaning Mamamia has only gone on a visit to London the way she sometimes did. Any visit Mamamia paid to the United Kingdom translated to a new jaka (bag) and takalumi (pair of shoes) for Amani. The young girl loves fashionable things, a trait Mamamia believed she shared with her. Except that this visit by Mamamia is not to London. Mamamia ta rasu. The Owner of Life has recalled Mamamia. We will never see my Abeke again. So, so sad.
Yusuph Olaniyonu, journalist, strategic communicator and administrator, writes from Abuja.
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