“I’m a bit uncomfortable with the overexposure” Charles Novia on Olajumoke’s Story

Charles Novia‘s latest opinion piece is titled “Olajumoke’s Unleavened Bread And The Oven Of Opportunists” – he says he is wary of the overexposure and that people will try to take advantage of her.

Read!

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I have written glowingly about the Olajumoke duckling-to-swan story for a few days now on my Facebook page and praised those whose hands were compelled by the benevolence of fate to change her life.

However, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the overexposure of the young lady to the media. That’s just me but from experience it may have unpleasant consequences if it it not well-managed.

I agree that she should enjoy her newfound fame within the ambits of the international attention she’s receiving presently but I can’t help thinking too that she’s walking into a treacherous terrain with much of that overexposure.

Questions to be asked are: who is her manager? Does she have one and is she being psychologically preened for the after effects of this exposure? What’s her state of mind in the midst of this euphoria? Given that she has been docked into a somewhat positive maelstrom of media machineries, is she being prepared for when a time would come when she might not be the flavour of the moment? Because I think she’s trending right now as a distraction to the realities we face in the socio-economic sector. Nigerians need something positive for once to make them forget the harsh realities of the drudgery of our individual existentialism in the present scheme of things. And Olajumoke is the perfect and beautiful distraction.

But we are going to be bored very soon. And when that happens, who will cushion her expectations when things slow down? A modeling agency is just an agency and not a management agency. Who would manage her realities?

Yes, we have all bought her bread ( pun not intended) and eaten slices off her loaf of inspiration. But wherein she was a slice of life a few days ago as a nondescript trudger of the survival path, we all are now partakers in the breaking of her whole loaf.

Olajumoke has to be careful. She has a family. She has a husband. From empirical antecedents, the marriage is usually the first casualty of this kind of invasion of privacy. It happens all the time.

If the young lady loved her husband as a bread seller, she should be encouraged to strengthen that love now that she’s literally a bread bringer to the home. Because she would soon start mixing with the hawkish lot who would soon start whispering serpentine advice into her ears. It happens all the time. Beyond the media glare would be a fundamental introspection of her future with the spouse.

And that’s where the crunch lies.

The media is all pleasant and powerful when it comes to pushing the Olajumokes of this world to new heights. But the media gives with one hand and takes with the other.

My suggestivism does not in anyway pre-suppose an impending doom but alerts on an intending loom.

The life of the Bread Seller is presently brought to us closer through a whimsical telescope. It won’t be long before the want of more sensationalism would put her life under a selfish microscope.

Stories would soon be cooked up or exaggerated about her, just to suit the media.

It happens all the time.

That’s why she must be the person at this point in her life to take charge of her narrative. She must hold on the yeast of her future while we munch on the dough.

Her life was unleavened just a few weeks ago.