By Taiwo Obe
She might have said it with a laughter, but she didn’t sound funny: “See how you are talking to me like I am still that little girl but I am a big woman now….”
Far from it: I wasn’t condescending; I had only expressed my pleasant surprise after finding out that this Nike, seated across from me, is not just different in stature but also in status from that little Nike.
It must be about 20 years ago that Adenike Akindele’s avuncular neighbour, who was then my company’s printing supplier, literally handed her over to me to get her part-time jobs whenever she was on holidays.
Tall, slim, pretty and stylish, she fitted in perfectly as model for our clients’ calendars and stuff like that. And, she did them superbly.
…then, she disappeared….
On 1 March 2016, she was a guest at the 68th birthday gig for film-maker Tunde Kelani at the Goethe Institut, Lagos. That’s where we met again, after what seemed like an eternity, for just about a minute; we shook hands and I gave her my business card.
Last week, she called to request a meeting. Why not?
Seeing her now, still tall, still pretty, still stylish, but not slim, I had to find out what she’s been up to.
I couldn’t have imagined what she told me and it was my reaction that brought about the no-longer-that-little-girl riposte: “I’ve been a spa consultant. I design, I supply, I create spas – medical spas, hotel spas, residential spas, resort spas.”
In my mind: you don’t mean it.
She tells me more: “We’ve (done some collaborations), we’ve solely designed some. We consult majorly. That’s the first point of call people come to me for advice to benchmark their projects against. Then we take it further to the design phase. Sometimes, we even help with leasing.” And, according to her, she’s been doing this for about seven years.
Along the way, she also attended the Taiwo Ajai-Lycett school for actors and actresses, majoring in acting elocution poetry and yoga. She, herself, has been involved in the training of spa therapists and their owners, and she even won an award at a competition for schools and training centres teaching spa therapy and cosmetology. “I have trained no fewer than 50 therapists till date,” she said.
I took time out to check out her LinkedIn profile.
I was curious; blown away, more like, so I quizzed her further: “What led you to this?”
Her answer showed that I didn’t really know her as much as I thought: “I am actually an entrepreneur. I have always been one. I have never planned to seek employment. I always wanted to work for myself. I can say I started working even when I was in secondary school. I had been designing for my parents…that was fashion, anyway…and they paid me progressively. I have a penchant for beauty, for aesthetic outlook, and because of my background in modelling, also a little bit of pageants – in 2002, she contested in the Miss Nigeria pageantry – I developed this whole business line in health, wellness and fitness: Kebeth Dali.” Her middle name is Elizabeth, just in case you are trying to decode the company’s name.
This is where we get to why she is visiting me. “To tell you about my event and seek your advice,” she announced.
She has an upcoming event* “to showcase advanced aesthetics and plastic surgery as a luxury-end medical service, available locally in Nigeria right now.”
This is her game plan. To create awareness, especially now that foreign exchange is scarce, that “whereas people prefer to travel abroad for a lot of treatments, especially in the aesthetics sector, these services are available in Nigeria now. That we have doctors in Nigeria, trained here; some of them are partially trained here and abroad, who constantly go for their Continuous Professional Developments (who are able to provide most of these services). I have been working with these doctors. I have been sending my clients, most people who don’t want to travel abroad, to them through my concierge service….When I decided to bring this forward was: I met a white South African lady who came for a revision treatment, with a doctor on my platform, because of a breast augmentation (she did in South Africa) which went bad. It even got to a point that she was infected. She sought for a plastic surgeon in Nigeria because her work timeline did not allow her to travel back for her revision treatment. It (the revision) was done here, taken care of, and I spoke to her subsequently and she said it was perfect.
“What I now realised is that if we position ourselves right, this will even help market us as a (beauty tourism) destination, whereby people actually fly in to see these doctors…that is what this event is all about: showcase our doctors and create an atmosphere whereby people know that these treatments are available in Nigeria. This event is for anyone who’s aesthetically savvy, anyone who knows that the way you look is the way you are approached. It is for people who want to ‘look the part.’ It is also gender-neutral.”
Certainly, my little girl is an entrepreneur.
This is where her gaze is: “I want to position Nigeria as the beauty capital of Africa, well, West Africa. When you travel anywhere in Africa, and they look at our movies and our music videos, they say ‘oh, you Nigerians are very, very pretty, you guys like to dress, you like to look good.’ All this don’t happen just by saying it. They are mentally created. That aesthetic is mentally created.”
That’s my little girl…. And, indeed, she is a big woman now.
By the way, in 2014, the global aesthetic medicine market size was valued at US$5.9 billion.
* Belle Eclat holds on 10 September at The George Hotel, Lugard, Ikoyi, Lagos Nigeria. Interested? Send a mail to kebethdali@gmail.com.
*Taiwo Obe is Founder/Director at The Journalism Clinic
