– How A Mother’s Greed May Ruin Her Daughter’s Life
By Ifeanyi Okonkwo
There is a virtue, Adaobi Alagwu probably presumes, in being brazen, thus her inclination to place on parade her infant child, Omarosa’s murky roots. Only a mother afflicted by insolence and lack of shame would soullessly jeopardise her daughter’s self-esteem by forcing the paternity of an unwilling father on her.
In the wake of billionaire magnate, Tunde Ayeni’s decisive rebuttal of Alagwu’s claim that he is the father of her child, more posers have been raised concerning paternity fraud.
A recent post by a social media commentator condemned Ayeni’s bid to stop Alagwu from using his name for her daughter, arguing that he would fail in his bid. He said, “Anybody can bear any name he or she likes, provided you’re not impersonating anyone. A female child cannot be said to be impersonating Mr Ayeni simply by having the same surname with him.” Whilst this position might be convenient for people who might have a jaundiced perspective to the enormity of the implications of such a rejection as AdaObi and her daughter have faced, the question to ask is who in their right senses would keep a name that will be a constant reminder of their mistakes and humiliation. If AdaObi had as much any sense of self-worth would she have insisted on acceptance as she has for her daughter from a man so unwilling and so detesting of her that he’s willing to go to any lengths in proving his disapproval and rejection of them both?
Why is it okay to force an unwilling man to take responsibility for a child that was forced on him when all accountability should be with the 31-year-old single lady who out of greed jeopardized her future to keep an unwanted pregnancy for a married man?
It would be recalled that Tunde Ayeni wrote the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), recently, asking it to void any international passport presented by his estranged girlfriend and Abuja lawyer, Adaobi Alagwu and her child, bearing his name.
Declaring any such document illegitimate, Ayeni, speaking through his lawyer, Dele Adesina (SAN) established that Alagwu’s daughter isn’t entitled to the use of his name on her travel document as he has no familial relationship with her.
Ayeni disclosed this by copying the NIS a “Cease and Desist” legal notice he sent to Alagwu entitled, “Withdrawal of Consent for Use of the Family Name ‘Ayeni’ With Respect To Your Daughter Omarosa.”
Ayeni’s recent step was informed by Alagwu’s adoption of his name on her daughter’s international passport even after a DNA test had established that she wasn’t Ayeni’s child. His letter to the NIS follows the recent arrest and detention of Alagwu for trespassing on and breaking into his private property in Abuja.
The duo has been entangled in a battle of wits that has seen Ayeni issue multiple press statements to refute claims of paternity of Alagwu’s child.
In her desperation to get hooked on the billionaire magnate and former bank chief, Alagwu fabricated a plot to get pregnant by him and, so doing, implant herself and her child as beneficiaries of his estate.
Alagwu, a trained attorney, was misled by the belief that she had the upper hand on Ayeni. She thought she had him by the balls.
Like all frantic liars, she thought she had gained a victory over Ayeni simply by claiming that she was pregnant for him and her baby girl belonged to him (but she was mistaken).
Her adoption of his name for her daughter, Omarosa has been dismissed as a last-ditch resort as she struggles to hold on to her ex-billionaire boyfriend who was until recently her benefactor and family’s meal ticket.
To underscore how bad the menace of such desperate girls is, a cursory look at her company website reveals the same address as the one from which she was humiliatingly ejected by Ayeni.
Pundits aver that if she had truly been gainfully employed as she claimed – since she fell out with Ayeni – her company address ought to have changed both online and offline.
Her so-called company website has no meaningful indicator of how business clients could reach her. There are no markers on the website detailing or establishing her presence as the administrator or CEO of a thriving enterprise, contrary to her claims.
What this translates to is that she (Alagwu) has no viable source of livelihood and has always been completely dependent on Ayeni.
Only a woman bereft of self-respect and shame would carry on so, without a care in the world about how badly her lack of a decent livelihood rubs off on her.
As Alagwu deploys every wile and weapon in her arsenal to fight her way into Ayeni’s household, not a few people have advised her to desist from what is a wild goose chase. But she is undeterred.
If she won’t care what becomes of her name, at least she ought to be concerned about the implications of her actions for her innocent daughter, Omarosa.
If anything, Alagwu must be wary of mortgaging her daughter’s interest in her frantic bid to settle scores with her estranged lover, Ayeni. Even if she enjoys the inalienable right to adopt any name of her choice, including Tunde Ayeni’s, for her daughter, the onus rests on her to listen to the voice of reason and embrace moral rectitude by protecting her daughter from certain ignominy and shame of answering to the name of a man who publicly rejected her.
And to those goading her into believing in her lies that he paid her bride price and his wife is the architect of this rejection, it is unimaginable how twisted they are in their thinking. Hanging on to the last straws of desperation, they look away from the obvious display of rejection from Mr Ayeni, a man married for 30 years and experienced in the ways of life enough to convince his wife and friends he will go to any length to erase Adaobis existence.
If it wasn’t his making why didn’t he publish a disclaimer? The man wants Alagwu to feel the full weight of his rejection by placing his wife in front of him and arming her with the authority to denigrate Alagwu and make her face the folly of bringing nothing to the table except a fair complexion in comparison to his established wife.
How does she think her daughter would feel when she grows up and finds out that her mother had forced upon her, the name of a man who went to great measures to denounce her?
It’s about time Alagwu embraced caution and silenced her ego, lest she becomes a sad, cautionary tale. For most of history, one essential, immutable difference between men and women was that men could hide the fact that they had created a child and women could not. Pregnancy and childbirth showed the world who the mother was; paternity could only be assumed.
New parents are often told how much their babies look like the father. The research on whether most do or do not is ambiguous, but the fancy persists, in part because, consciously or unconsciously, people think that emphasising the resemblance will set a man’s mind at ease, thus fortifying the paternal bond.
Fortunately for Ayeni, he refused to be misled by such a wanton appeal to sentimentality. As Nara Milanich, a professor of history at Barnard College, writes in her solidly researched and enlightening new book, “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father” (Harvard), a “common metaphor invoked by nineteenth-century jurists was that Nature had concealed fatherhood by an impenetrable veil.”
Thanks to science, the DNA test to be precise, Tunde Ayeni was able to penetrate that mythical veil to establish the convoluted plots of his estranged girlfriend, Alagwu’s paternity fraud.
Until recently, that veil was often a source of frustration, leading to domestic doubts and irresolvable courtroom conflicts. Literature gives us many a husband driven half-mad by the suspicion that his child is not the fruit of his loins, as is King Leontes, in “The Winter’s Tale,” and women who deceive their husbands on this score, like the wife in Maupassant’s story “Useless Beauty,” who tells her husband that one of their seven children isn’t his, but won’t say which.
Paternal unknowability, however, was also enormously useful. Many legal traditions around the world, including the Anglo-American one, adhered to the marital presumption of legitimacy at least until the twentieth century: a child born to a married woman was considered to be the biological progeny of her husband. (A child born to an unmarried woman was, Milanich writes, “historically deemed a filius nullius, a child of nobody.”) Milanich tells the story of a man named Remo Cipolli, who, in 1945, sued his wife, Quinta Orsini, for adultery, and sought to deny paternity, after she gave birth to an infant who appeared to be black. Cipolli and his wife, who were both white Italians, lived in a small town near Pisa, where several African-American soldiers had been stationed at the end of the Second World War.
The case became notorious—the baby was known as “the little Moor of Pisa.” In the end, although a civil court found Orsini guilty of adultery, it also concluded that her husband, Cipolli, was legally the baby’s father.
Thanks to science, Ayeni would experience no such embarrassment and heartache through paternity fraud.
In all of these, the fate of one human element hangs in the balance, that of Alagwu’s innocent young daughter. And her salvation, interestingly lies in Alagwu’s hands. Will Adaobi Alagwu quit barking up the wrong tree? Will she desist from her wild goose pursuit and so doing save her innocent daughter from immediate and future disgrace?
