By Según Oderinde
No more for Ekua Abudu are lonely nights and lovelorn days; broken promises of marriage and the consequent heartbreaks; the sneers and sniggers from friends and fiends who thought she would remain single for life in spite of all her wealth and successes.
Now, she is ready to tell it on the mountains that she has found love again and this time, it is for keeps, forever. Ekua got married in a private but classy ceremony Friday, December 21st, to the avuncular Femi Akinsanya, reputed as one of Nigeria’s greatest art collectors.
The news was broken by her childhood friend, Toyin Saraki, wife of the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki, early Saturday morning. Mrs Saraki’s several posts on Instagram of the new couple and their guests dripped pure elation. She wrote, “To God be the Glory. And a lovely surprise! Congratulations to my darling friend Ekua and her beau, Mr Femi Akinsanya on the occasion of their Marriage Blessing Ceremony, yesterday.”
Ekua is the first child of Taiwo Koffie Sagoe, renowned lawyer cum businessman, Modupe Sagoe, a foremost name in the textile business. She is a lawyer, educationist and proprietor of the prestigious Greenwood House School, Ikoyi. The dark-skinned beauty was once married to Lagos businessman, Wale Abudu, but their marriage packed up due to irreconcilable differences.
Since then, the very enterprising woman has had her fair share of heartbreaks from men, many of who saw her as a veritable meal ticket. As much as she jealously guarded her heart, it opened up to the sweet cadences and lyrics of poetic predators perpetually on the prowl.
She celebrated her 50th birthday in 2015 in the presence of friends and relatives but without a husband by her side though she and Femi had been dating for a few years. And when she crossed that age, there were side talks that it was over for her and love or marriage. But, along came Femi Akinsanya, an elderly art collector, investment banker, freelance financial advisor and private equity investor who returned the sheen to her skin again and made her smile-wide grin even broader.
Ekua is an unabashed art lover while Femi’s interest in African art is said to date back to his childhood in Ibadan, Oyo State, where he grew up surrounded by indigenous artworks that played a major role in daily life, culture and religious rituals. The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection in Lagos is a premier gallery of African art consisting of sculptures from all major regions of Nigeria along with canonical examples of artworks of Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo, Cross River and Benue origins and bronze and brass sculptures from the 20th Century interregnum periods of art from the Edo Kingdom of Benin.
