A mother can take the place of anyone else in a child’s life but no one can take the place of a mother in that child’s life. This aphorism was affirmed by two of Nigeria’s famous entertainers, Steve ‘Yaw’ Onu, and Olajuwon ‘Jaywon’ Iledare, in this week’s edition of the popular reality television show, Supermom, the celebrity edition. Yaw, a renowned on-air-personality, actor and comedian, rose to fame on the TV comedy drama, ‘FLATMATES’ with his character’s humourous refrain, uwah bu paw paw mehn yaw which kept people glued to their television sets every Saturday. The seventh of 10 children, Yaw, who hails from Awka in Anambra State, has now metamorphosed into a sought-after entertainer and was recently selected as one of Nigeria’s Olympic torchbearers.  

But his road to success was not smooth. According to Yaw’s mum, whose turn it is to share her story on the popular show which airs on major terrestrial television stations in Nigeria, it was indeed very hard feeding 10 mouths and having to pay rent in their squalid apartment in Lawanson, Surulere, Lagos. “Whenever the rains came, it fell directly on us because the roof was leaking,” she said. A trader of okrika (secondhand clothes) in Yaba market, the 62-year-old woman recalls that she had to take to petty trading to compliment her husband’s salary. She also ensured Yaw and his siblings hawked cold drinks and ‘pure water.’

“She would tell me she was teaching me business, instead of her to just say she wanted me to help her out in the market,” Yaw jokingly adds. One day, while on itinerant hawking in Aswani Market, Lagos, she was arrested by town council officials and she was locked up. “I go prison oh because I dey train children. That day, my children no see me,” she says. Because she could not bail herself, a good Samaritan did. The family would also suffer another adversity when the matriarch was involved in a tragic accident in a molue (a popular Lagos mass transit bus) heading to Iyana-Ipaja from Maryland which had a brake failure and somersaulted several times. Mrs Onu, who was standing in the bus, sustained minor injuries but was unconscious which made many people to assume she was dead. “I was taken with the other corpses to the mortuary. It took a man who came to see if he could identify the casualties to discover that I was still alive.” Ironically, when her children came visiting, the youngest of them said, “Mama, we never chop o” even before asking how she was faring. Despite her initial objection to his choice of career, she now prefers to be called Mama Steve because he had brought her suffering to an end. “My children made it; thank God I did not suffer in vain.”

For Mrs. Comfort Iledare, the mother of Kennis Music artiste, Jaywon, reality dawned on her that life is not a bed of roses when she lost her husband in 1998 and was left to cater for four kids. There was nothing she didn’t sell among her paraphernalia, just for her kids to go to school. One of her most painful experiences was when she had to sell her jewellery and pot to her friend who bought them instead of just lending. her the money to pay her children’s school fees.