She called him Sweetheart. For 34 years, they were inseparable —husband, wife, best friends, gossip partners. But just weeks ago, her world imploded. Her husband, a business tycoon turned politician died. She tells Adedayo Adejobi how she was stripped, beaten, and accused of murder by her own stepson and the police after his death
When Christiana married the man she called Sweetheart, she thought their story would be one of faith, family, and triumph. For 34 years, she says, they were inseparable—husband, wife, best friends, gossip partners.
“Anybody that knew us knew I called him Sweetheart,” she recalls softly, eyes clouding. “In fact, people even stopped calling me Christiana. I became Sweetheart. That’s how close we were.”
Together, they built a home where laughter echoed through spacious rooms—even if those rooms were often filled with strangers Christiana had taken in.
“If someone had nowhere to stay, I brought them in,” she says.
“He would walk into the house and find a stranger at the dining table. At first, he tolerated it. But then he’d become their friend. That was the kind of man he was—gentle, humble, generous.”
But the love story that seemed unbreakable would be tested by politics, by illness, and by the suffocating pressures of a public life that refused to let them rest. And when tragedy struck this August, Christiana’s world unravelled in ways she could never have imagined—grief twisted with suspicion, police cells replacing prayer vigils, and betrayal festering within the family she thought was hers to protect.
For years, Sweetheart—known in political circles as a grassroots man of the people—dreamt of transforming his state. He was no stranger to the campaign trail. By the time he attempted the governorship in November 2024, it was his fifth run.
“He loved his people too much,” Christiana says. “He couldn’t sleep until he felt he had solved everyone’s problems. He’d always put others before himself.”
But Christiana had begged him not to contest. “I told him, don’t run, the ruling party will crush you. But he believed he could make a difference.”
Instead, defeat plunged him into heartbreak. Behind the rally smiles and the rousing slogans lay mounting debts, endless court disputes, and the ghost of an illness that had stalked him since 2019.
That year, after another bruising election, doctors in Dubai diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. “We managed it as a family,” Christiana says. “The medications helped. But the stress of politics… it dragged him back into the darkness.”
Mental illness is a quiet predator, and in Sweetheart’s case, it was deadly.
In private, he oscillated between soaring highs—spending, talking, brimming with confidence—and crushing lows, where he withdrew, hallucinated, and whispered fears to the walls.
“He would say masquerades were chasing him at night,” Christiana recalls. “He was terrified people were after him. He thought the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission – (EFCC) would come, that he’d wasted his money, that he’d failed his children.”
Family life became a delicate dance between hope and despair. Their children adored him, but it was Christiana who often bore the brunt of his restlessness. “He was a soft father,” she smiles faintly.
“The children always ran to him for what they wanted. I was the disciplinarian. They called him their getaway father.”
Yet as debts mounted—N360 million refunded over a bitter land dispute, loans clawed back by banks — his anxiety sharpened. Even after Christiana secured their home from repossession in August, relief was fleeting. “I thought once the bank gave us back our documents, he would be free,” she says.
“But the fears were still there. He was broken.”
August bled into September with unsettling signs. Sweetheart paced barefoot on the balcony at night. He grew lean, his once warm eyes clouded with dread.
“Something had stolen his joy,” Christiana admits. “We laughed with him, we prayed, but inside he was crumbling.”
On the 1st of September, after another sleepless night, the family rushed him to Southern Gem Hospital in Victoria garden city, Lagos. His blood pressure was soaring at 198/105, his pulse racing at 150. Sedatives calmed him briefly. By morning, doctors urged he remain for observation. But Sweetheart insisted: he wanted to go home.
That evening, Christiana attended a church programme, leaving the children by his bedside. When she returned, he begged once more to be discharged. “He said he couldn’t even bathe properly in the hospital,” she sighs.
What happened next shattered everything. At dawn, CCTV cameras captured him stepping off the balcony.
“My son Melvin screamed when he saw the footage,” Christiana says, her voice breaking. “The police officers there saw it too. My husband jumped. It was his illness. It wasn’t us.”
But instead of sympathy, she says, came handcuffs.
Barely days after her husband’s death, Christiana and her children found themselves accused of the unthinkable.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. “We were still mourning, yet the police treated us like criminals.”
At Panti police station in Lagos, she alleges, her son was beaten, suffocated by hardened inmates at the officers’ signal. Christiana herself claims she was stripped, her clothes torn, her dignity shredded.
“They threw me, my children, even our seventy-seven-year-old family helper into the cells,” she recalls.
“We begged them to stop. We had receipts, bank statements, everything to prove we did nothing wrong. But they didn’t want the truth.”
Her stepson— “a child who never once slept in our house in fifteen years”—had gone to the media, accusing her of draining her husband’s account the moment he died. The story went viral, fuelling whispers that a family feud had turned fatal.
But Christiana insists the real evidence clears her. “The CCTV shows it. The doctors know his condition. The autopsy hints at a fall—broken ribs, fractured skull. I didn’t kill my husband. I loved him.”
For Christiana, the battle is no longer only about grief. It is about reclaiming her husband’s dignity and her family’s truth.
“Social media is not a law court,” she says firmly. “Justice will not come from bloggers. My husband suffered with bipolar disorder. He was depressed. He heard voices. That is the truth.”
She calls the police investigation compromised, accusing officers of playing games while a grieving family was locked behind bars. Only the intervention of the Lagos Commissioner of Police, she claims, spared them from being charged and remanded in prison.
“I will never forget how he asked: Did you even call the doctors? Did you check with the hospital? Do you have the autopsy? And the DCP had nothing. Nothing.”
For all the betrayal, the accusations, the bruises—literal and figurative—Christiana insists her faith holds. “God was there on the mountain with us. He’s still here in the valley,” she says quietly.
But her grief lingers, raw and defiant. “He was my sweetheart. My friend. My gossip partner. The father of my children. If only he had left politics, maybe he’d still be here. But I will fight for his name. I will fight for justice. And I will not stop until the truth is told.”
As she speaks, Christiana clutches a photograph of the man she loved for more than three decades. His smile beams back, frozen in a happier time.
“He gave me the space to fly,” she whispers. “Now, I have to fly for both of us.”
For all the politics, all the debts, all the rumours, this is the story Christiana wants the world to remember: a husband, a father, a public man—undone by illness, abandoned by those he trusted, and mourned by the woman who still calls him Sweetheart.
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