Hajjiya Aisha Babangida delivered a powerful and heart-warming speech at the SHE FORUM AFRICA conference held at Sheraton hotel ,Abuja as she opens up about her divorce and managing her late mothers’ foundation (THE BETTER LIFE PROGRAM).
Hajjiya Aisha Babangida begins her speech by telling the audience that her story is one of wisdom and grace. She goes ahead to tell us that she was built and nurtured for this role because it’s all she knows and has seen while growing up and it’s also a legacy that she is very proud of.
She further mentions that she got married, had a little baby girl and got divorced twice and felt that she had shamed her parents and everyone who invested in coming to her wedding.
She explains how she didn’t realize that she could still be interdependent in her marriage i.e. nurture her husband and still do what she was brought to this world to do. She talks about her second divorce saying “so she’s no longer here ( her mother) and suddenly my marriage, (second) goes downhill, instantly. I begin to wonder maybe she was the one holding the marriage itself, but the embarrassment was, I didn’t pay attention to her foundation when she was sick, I was building somebody else and I am very proud that I built somebody else, a man. I get divorced again and now I am in a hurry to do her work because this is all I know and I am enjoying every bit of it because this is what as I said, I was raised to do.”
The crux of her speech was the challenges she had to face before taking over the foundation because she had no guide and information to continue from where her mother left of and so she decided to shut down the organization and single handily reopened, revived and added value to what it already was. Following the reopening of the foundation which is still a working progress, she established a micro-finance bank to assist the women, men and to bring everyone into the financial sector as her mission was to empower as many people as possible.
She rounds up her speech by saying “there are 3 Fs that I work with internally; Faith, Focus and forge, forge as to construct successfully ,so this is what I work with and above all humility, I must remember who I am, I must remember where I come from, I must remember that I owe you all something .” Then she says a little Christian prayer she had heard from a friend, “father, in the face of life sometimes awful circumstances, may we find your grace to be a source of awe and wonder. Instruct us in our trials and carry us in your arms when we are overwhelmed, this is for each and every one of us, this prayer is about faith. Once you have faith, you conquer the world, if you focus; every single thing is possible and forge, just go forward and build. And then there is an Islamic prayer that says the divine grants wisdom to whom the divine wills and to whom wisdom is granted indeed receives overflowing goodness, but no one will internalise the message but the realised hearts”.
She ends by encouraging the ladies that they could succeed in life, do what they want to do and still be loving wives that they are supposed to be. Everyone has a story, she said ; “be so proud of your story because that is what makes you live, leave the men alone, by the time we get our acts together, do everything ,they would want to buy in as well, please have faith, that faith in God is what will make you succeed in life and you will be happy, smile at everybody that you go through, that’s why I said that mine is a story of grace and wisdom , everywhere I have to go, I have to stand up, I can’t afford to breakdown, I can’t afford to cry, I have a father who dots on my happiness, I have my siblings”.
“this is who I am I have to sit up because you all look up to me as well, because when you see me you remember my mother, so do I now need to start running around the streets and acting like a mad woman? No, so I have to live for you, you have to live in me, thank you”.
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