“Why I Haven’t Considered Remarrying” – Gov. Oshiomhole

At the 5th anniversary of his tenure as Edo State Government, the governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole spoke to journalists about his life as a widower.

When he was asked why he's yet to remarry, Oshiomhole said:

I wish you would have avoided the question because really when I talk about my late wife, people may not understand why.  

If you come from my background, any woman who agrees to marry a man who is not rich, a man who alternates between police stations and cells and lives in a one or two bedroom apartment, that is your real love. When my wife said I love you, it was from her heart. 

To have the kind of wife I had, who was familiar with all the police stations in Kaduna and outside, and sometimes searching for her husband who might have gone to work and detained by Police on account of trade union work, it was her lot to stand by me and she bore all the deprivations of a husband you were never sure where he was going to be at the next minute.  

At a point, she called me an absentee husband. So I looked around and imagined that she should have been by my side today to share the joy of my 5th year anniversary. 

The only worry she ever had was who was going to employ our children owing to my agitations with big establishments, because as an organized labour, when we leave the NLC, we fear that our lives would be lonely because it would be a payback time for all those big people I have harassed in the course of my work.  

So, it would have been joyous for her to see that five years down the road , I have more people around me than I have before.  

Her second fear was that she never approved my involvement in politics because she was very proud to be referred to as the wife of Oshiomhole because then she gets all the favour and saw the affection because most Nigerians were happy with my stewardship at the NLC.

She was worried that once I get into politics, I would be ridiculed and all of that would go. She felt I should keep the name. But I told her even before I went into the NLC, NLC was a write off and I said you can always chose how you want to be remembered.

So for all that and for many other reasons, that is one thing that I regret that she should have been there to also see the other side of life.  

I have seen it all, in this state now, they are people who will call me the oppressor and you know who they are, the oppressors of yesterday. If you ask ‘Mr fix it’ who I am, he will tell you I’m oppressing him because I have de-fixed him.  

It would have been nice for my wife to see life’s full circle; that those guys who feasted on us and cheated, that we have reduced them to political vegetables and placed them on permanent political oxygen”.