There are a few lessons every Nigerian woman should learn; and, as a matter of fact, every woman in the world should know: no man is worth fighting for, no matter how good-looking or rich he is or how impressed you are by his sexual acrobatics. And no, it doesn’t matter if, at one point, you were Miss Nigeria in 1979 at the age of 19.
The story is as complicated as it is bizarre; it reads like a high-stakes telenovela written by Tyler Perry himself. It all begins with a man, as all tragic romances do. The man is Dr Tosin Ajayi of First Foundation Medical Centre. A long time ago, he met a woman, Adenike Ajayi, and they got married. After 12 years, he left the house and his five children for “security reasons” and went to live with Helen Prest Ajayi. He lived with her for 25 years until his death in 2020. The union was survived by one child, Tomisin. 
Helen said he had left his wife and was living at the Sheraton Hotel Ikeja, which was where she met him.
At Tosin’s death, in the words of W.B. Yeats, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, both women declared war over his “dead body”. It was reportedly that these women dragged each other over who should pour sand on his casket at his funeral. Is any man so important that you need to fight for him that way? I mean, he is dead.
Helen said she lived with him for 25 years and believed she deserved to be the one calling the shots on his last rites as well as administering his estate, but Adenike’s argument was that Helen was only a mistress since they never got an official divorce.
It’s always amazing to see a Nigerian man at the centre of chaos because I wonder why he didn’t just divorce his first wife, who said he used to visit “sometimes”. Whatever that meant.
Now the matter has been taken to court because properties need to be shared, and the courts are not on Helen’s side. Why? Because bigamy is an offence in Nigeria and, unlike some European countries, cohabitation is not recognised as a union by the law.
Even if they had married traditionally, it would not somehow supersede the first marriage.
“Separation, no matter how prolonged, does not dissolve a valid marriage unless there is a formal dissolution,” the court held.
The saddest part of this is Helen herself was still married to Jimmy Davies in 1988.
So, if they were both married to other people, what is her claim based on? There’s a maxim in law that the person who comes to equity must do so with clean hands, and Mrs Helen’s hands were nothing but.
However, in the midst of all this, I blame the man. I can almost hear you say Nigerian women will never take accountability, but I can bet he is smiling in heaven (or hell) at the chaos he unleashed. Perhaps it made him feel good that he had two women in his rotation, two women devoted to him, and he wanted that devotion to continue even in death.
The truth remains there’s literally no man worth fighting another woman for. If the good doctor wanted to practise polygamy, he could have done it lovingly like our forefathers, rather than divisively.
Helen doesn’t see it this way, in her mind, she saved a man who was in a ‘bad marriage‘ and with a bad woman he didn’t want to see even in death. Of course he was in a bad marriage. So, why didn’t he just divorce Adenike? Perhaps, he simply forgot.
As of now, the court held that Adenike Ajayi was the sole surviving wife of the deceased and therefore exclusively entitled to administer his intestate estate.
But Helen and her daughter are going to the Court of Appeal, especially since the claims the court declared her daughter “illegitimate” and “born out of wedlock”.
Another dreary part of this story is Helen is a lawyer. How could she let this happen to her?
Finally, what have we learned ladies? How a man treats a woman he claims is ‘bad’ is exactly how he will treat you. Men are not that complex. In the words of Shakira and Beyoncé, ‘He’s not worth the fight.’ They both need to drop their legal weapons.
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