Remember Olajumoke? The bread seller from Agege whose life changed overnight after she wandered into a photoshoot and came out a supermodel? She is back in the conversation, and this time the circumstances are a little less glamorous.
Over the Easter holiday, Olajumoke posted a video on social media that got people talking for all the wrong reasons. In it, she was dancing in a bum short and a distressed shirt, singing an indigenous song, cupping her nether region with one hand and holding the other in a way that looked convincingly like she was smoking. It was the kind of video that travels fast, and it did.
It did not take long before the comments section filled up with concern, speculation and in true Nigerian internet fashion, a fair amount of judgment. A chunk of the people who saw it concluded she had picked up a drug habit. The video spread, the narrative spread with it, and before long Olajumoke found herself needing to respond.
She did, and she kept it simple. In a follow-up video she shared online, she said plainly that she does not smoke and she does not drink, and asked people not to put that image on her. The smoking was just content, she explained. She was acting, playing a character for the camera, nothing more.
Whether people believe her is a different conversation entirely. But for anyone who has followed her story, there is something quietly sad about the fact that Olajumoke is once again having to fight for control of her own narrative.
Her come-up is the kind of story Nollywood would turn into a film. A young woman balancing a tray of bread on her head in Agege, minding her business, accidentally walks into a photoshoot that photographer TY Bello was running with British rapper Tinie Tempah. Someone posts the photo. Nigeria loses its mind. Brands start calling. Olajumoke, who most people had never heard of 48 hours earlier, is suddenly everywhere.
But that kind of fame, the kind that arrives without warning and without infrastructure around it, rarely holds. The attention moved on, as it always does, and Olajumoke gradually faded from the front pages she had briefly occupied.
So seeing her pop back up, even under these circumstances, is something. Whether this moment leads anywhere or becomes just another footnote is hard to say. But she is here, she is making content, and she says she is clean. That is where things stand.
Watch the video below.
