Singer and fast-rising actress Eniola Akinbo popularly known as Niyola has recounted the loss of her mum, her dad and her closest friend.
The Swallow star in an interview shared on Instagram on Thursday said that losing her parents was a big loss for her and leaving Nigeria helped her a lot.
“A lot of things happened. It was pain, it was loss, it was gain. I lost very important people in my life, three of them. I lost my friend. I lost my friend, a very close friend of mine, I lost my mom and I lost my dad. And I don’t mean this the wrong way but I have to say it, because if I’m sharing my story, I have to be honest, I think moving out of Nigeria did a great deal for me.
“I’ve always kind of moving between here and there, I was never really settled. But moving out of Nigeria helped me to see life from a very different lens. It helped me to see life from a different place, a different way and to unlearn a lot of things that I had learnt here and also learnt and decided if they were really who I wanted to be or who I was programmed to be,” she said.
The 35-year-old also recounted how devasted she was when her mum fell ill, stating that she didn’t have the time to indulge in some of the activities ladies engage in because she was busy taking care of her mum.
“There’s that, and there’s the game. I lost my mom and all of a sudden it felt as if scales fell off my eyes and I could see. So in the time that my mum was ill, and at the hospital at Ikeja, I would go there every day. I didn’t even have the time of day to make my hair, to fix my nails or to just do all these things that we females feel we need to do.
“They’re great but I felt they were hard to do like going to the store, I couldn’t just go down there with my hair. I didn’t have the time, my mum was lying there fighting for her life,” she said.
The actress played the lead character Tolani in Kunle Afolayan’s Netflix film Swallow.
