Colleague, Oba Ara, Recounts Ordeal with Tope Alabi, …how she publicly humiliated me some years ago

Evangelist Tope Alabi was one of the guest artists I invited to perform at my yearly “Power in Praise Concert” seven years ago at Cele Praying Ground, Ikosi-Ketu, Lagos.

Prior to the event, I paid her required fee and her management assured of her presence at the program. She eventually arrived around 2am while other gospel artists, Lanre Teriba Atorise, Dare Melody and a host of others were already on ground. 

With my character of parental upbringing and home training, it is a norm for me to respect people, including those older than me and those I am older than. That was exactly what I did on that day, giving her a deserved respect and honour.

But to my utmost surprise, when Tope Alabi mounted the stage to perform, her first statement directly to me way and I quote, ‘If you see the way this guy was prostrating to me, I don’t know him from Adam, today is the first time I’m seeing him, I don’t know him before’.

I almost passed out and it seems the ground should open and swallow me up. I had never been so humiliated in life like what I experienced that fateful day. I managed to put myself together and pretend as if nothing happened, but inside of me I was boiling and was not happy.

Little did I know my humiliation just started. She did the worst, as she was about to start singing and set her eyes on the camera we intended  using to record her performance, she said and I quote; ‘Please, don’t capture my performance with camera, that was not included in our agreement, we don’t become friends after meeting in the court’. I quickly asked my crew to put off the camera and she performed without allowing us to record her performance.

Since then she always snubbed me anytime I see and greet her at events. I do that to honour my calling as a minister of God.

Those two demeaning characters of Aunty Tope made me lose my love for her and since then I started having different perceptions about her personality. I see her as ‘a big cock that does not want the upcoming one to crow (‘Akuko gagara ti ko fe ki kekere ko’). 

With her present public outburst and comment on Oniduro mi, it proved that Aunty Tope is full of envy, hatred and jealousy of the upcoming ones from growing.