A popular Nigerian Yoruba film and television actress, Hassanat Taiwo Akinwande, popularly known as Yetunde Wumi has revealed that her saddest and most regrettable day was the day she was arrested for drug trafficking at the Muritala Muhammed International Airport.
Akinwande revealed this in a personality interview on Ojopagogotv, a YouTube channel television.
It would be recalled that the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) arrested Wumi on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at the verge of boarding Virgin Atlantic plane to London in United Kingdom where she was trafficking 100 wraps of cocaine, amounting to 1.2 kilogrammes of cocaine.
She stated, “I was arrested at the airport for carrying Cocaine. I asked God, why me? But Who am I before God? After realising the wrong that I did, I told God, I had never wanted to do this but it is you, God that arrested me and you will be the one to secure my release. The vow that I made to God if He helped me out of the problem I put myself into is between me and God.”
The actress also revealed why she was uneducated, saying that it was as a result of a divorce between her parents.
According to her, “I was a baby then. I was told that I was two-year-old when my father retrieved me from my mother. He said that he could not allow his daughter to be raised outside his home. He took me from my mother and handed me over to his mother. It was his mother that I grew to know as my mother. It was long before I knew my mother. His mother has only two children, my father and his younger sister. The two have died. My father’s younger sister, Habiba, did not have a child. One day, she came to visit my grandmother, whom I was staying with. She requested from my grandmother to allow me to stay with her. She was living in Ibadan. I was around eight years old. My grandmother has enrolled me in a primary school. I was on the long vacation after my primary two education when my father’s younger sister visited us. My grandmother consented and said that maybe through Taye, God may bless you with your own child. That was how she took me away from my grandmother. My grandmother told her, saying “Habiba, let this girl go to school, please help me enrol her in school. And should she fall sick, don’t take her to hospital, just give her water from the pot and bath her with the water, she would be fine. Those are the two things my grandmother told her.”
“When we got to Ibadan, I started selling “Ogi”. I would hawk bread in the evening and hawk “Ogi” in the morning. At times, I would hawk food without soup. She did not enrol me in school. Her husband told her then, Habiba, let this little girl go back to school, but she declined. There was a day that the man told her to take me to a lesson in front of our house, saying, let her go for evening lesson so that she would be able to read and write. She fought the man and told him that she could do whatever she likes with her life, after all, she is the daughter of her elder brother. That was how I could not go to school. At a point I said that if I travel to my father during Ileya festival, I would not return to my aunt again. In the ninth month of the 1971, it remained eight days to the end of the Muslim fasting, a message was sent to me that my father has died. I have nowhere to go and that was how the woman inherited me completely. That was why I could not go to school.”
She concluded, “If I have somebody to send me to adult school now, I am ready to go to school. Let me advice everyone. Parents and guardians, let us send either our children or children of others living with us to school. I regret not going to school and the repercussion is huge. I am not happy with that woman at all because she suffered me. Education is key and important in the lives of humans. An uneducated person is not different from a blind or dumb”.
