City Info
Help Me Beg My Wife- Mrs Joy Famutimi ( Nee Isichei)
Marriage, undoubtedly considered God’s most sacred institution, sometimes echoes as “The Good Morrow” very poetically described by the great William Shakespeare, unlocking such good fortunes in man’s life which he could not begin to fathom or contemplate. Other times, however, it reverberates horror and whips such harrowing experiences which contravenes the hallowed essence upon which the creator initiated this institution.
On this episode of “Family Matters,” Eko Hot Blog presents the story of Mr Famutimi, Proprietor of Eagles Tower Schools who has narrated his ordeals having made the most costly mistake of entrusting his life’s work to his ex-wife. We present Mr Famutimi’s narrative not as critics or commentators on this contentious family feud, but as impartial observers merely presenting the assertions of the involved parties.
His is a story recounting more than a decade-long tuzzle with his estranged wife whom he says has refused to relinquish control of a school he handed over to her while in active service in the corporate world.
HE WROTE:
I got married to Joy in 2005 after we had our first child, a boy, out of wedlock. Before the marriage I bought 11/2 Acres of land to build a school and I was allowed to complete payment for the land within 6 months but I was able to pay within “3/2” months without any contribution from Joy.
I started the foundation of the School about January 2006 but serious work couldn’t commence until July 2006.
In the course of the building and infrastructural development of the school, I didn’t collect even N1,000.00 (One Thousand Naira) contribution from my wife, Joy, neither did she offer to contribute.
By September 2007, Eagles’ Tower Schools commenced operations with both Primary and Secondary Schools at the same time. It was a model school, the first of its kind in the whole area. Parents withdrew their children from various schools to join ETS, leading to our having admission from JSS1 to SS2. By the second academic year, (2008/2009), we were approved for both WAEC and NECO Exams in June 2009.
When the school started, I was still in employment with Wema Bank Plc as the General Manager of its Insurance Broking subsidiary – Wema Insurance Brokers Ltd.
Meanwhile, my wife Joy lost her Job with a private (one man business) clearing and forwarding company in July 2006, at the time serious construction started.
So, when the school started in September 2007, I asked her to oversee the school as she wasn’t doing any work while I employed a Principal, Vice Principal and other staff for the Secondary School and a Head Teacher for the Primary arm. Before then, Joy had never had anything to do with the administration of the schools.
Because of God’s hand and the goodwill we enjoyed and the high standard with which we started, in no time, the school was filled up.
At the end of the first year of operation, I was offered another virgin land of a little over one acre (offer letter attached) which we paid for with my money and partly from a loan from First Bank Plc.
After buying the other land, we had a protracted battle with the land grabbers (Omo Onile) which we couldn’t surmount until late 2009 when I started construction on it.
When I retired in September 2009, I didn’t tamper with the running of the school as I perceived that Joy and the staff were doing well.
From 2010, I started asking Joy to let us employ an accountant which she vehemently opposed with spurious reasons but I later relaxed in frustration. I did the same in 2011 and 2012 till I gave up on it as I started having some spiritual issues on it.
Joy started travelling abroad for the first time in July 2011 on the school expense and also in December of the same year. Thereafter, she would travel three times a year from 2012 in April, August, and December up till December, 2015 when our crises started.
Our crisis started in May 2015 when I discovered something that my wife has done since March 2008 when the schools were just about six months old and I was shocked to my bone marrow and had to wait for her to return from her trip abroad. I called a meeting with her and some other family members and friends that I didn’t want to ask her alone.
Please, state exactly what she did… “For now, I don’t want to openly state what she did in the pages of newspapers because it is so criminal and a big shame to womanhood.
At the meeting, I exposed her criminal acts and she denied them and said someone else did it and then started weeping profusely and I was moved to calm her down before others joined me in begging her to stop crying. She threatened to leave the school forthwith.
On getting home that night, she parked all her belongings in boxes (5 of them) including the belongings of our three children which led to her leaving the marriage.
However, after leaving the marriage, she refused to leave the school and she started doing lots of fetish things against me.
In September, 2016, I started suffering from a strange sickness that led to my being taken to LUTH and LASUTH for a long period for the whole of 2017.
During the sickness, she deliberately starved me of funds and my brothers (both senior and junior) had to contribute and were planning taking me to India because of the strange nature of the illness that could not be explained medically.
My spirit refused me and I had to tell my brothers that I wasn’t going to India. Somehow, I started getting better in August 2017 and up till the present day, I am yet to recover fully but only reasonably okay with weekly sicknesses.
Lest I forget, after she left my home, my brothers made frantic efforts to reconcile us so that she could come back home but she frustrated all their efforts and when the strange sickness started, they had to concentrate on saving my life first.
Meanwhile, since she left my house in 2015 up till now (2021), she’s still the sole signatory to and in total control of the bank accounts of the schools.
In the course of the thirteen years she has been running the schools, she has built three big houses in different locations in the Lagos metropolis while she also bought a whole house (not a flat) in Chicago in USA. These are the ones I know of (I have the photograph of the houses).
Before leaving the marriage and my house, she had been going out with different men-friends but after leaving and while in one of her houses, she went haywire and started patronizing various top musicians and became a “Celebrity” on all the social networks.
Sometimes, she came to the school with some senior police and army officers whose aides would be carrying AK47 rifles all over the place. I knew this was to intimidate me because she told me at different time that she’s no longer the Joy I use to know and that I should know that “Odo to ba toju eni kun le gbeni lo.”
Lest I forget, it took me close to six months before I got to know that she had stolen all the landed documents of Eagles’ Tower Schools from the fireproof cabinet I used to keep vital documents and, out of love, I had told her where I kept the keys.
Sometime in 2018, by coincidence on a Saturday morning at about 10.00am, I was in the school to read the Bible and supervise the boarding house students.
Suddenly, two cars drove into the school compound and about six people, all males, alighted and stood beside their cars. When I called the security man on duty to know their mission, he told me that they were looking for madam (Joy) and I then went to them and said that Joy doesn’t normally come to school on weekends to but they responded that she was on her way to meet them.
As we were talking, I heard her horning at the gate and when she parked and saw me, she was visibly troubled because I didn’t usually come to the school that early, even when I come at all. However, she put up a bold face. The visitors met her, I followed them so closely that she couldn’t talk to them privately. She then told me that they were pastors from Winner’s Chapel who came to inspect the school to make an offer to buy the school. I was dumbfounded and when I gathered myself, I asked her why she wanted to sell my school in my absence and that you don’t shave someone head behind him. Then she was lecturing me that she thought that was the best option for me to put me back in wealth as she said she perceived that school business was no longer profitable. She also continued lecturing me that the children I was planning to leave the legacy for were no longer worth it as they would sell the school less than three months after my demise, share the money and start gallivanting all over the world and that it was in my best interest first to sell it and enjoy my life.
I told her finally that she was a very dangerous woman just like one of my senior brothers used to call her. Some two weeks later, she told me that the Winners’ Chapel pastors had offered N550 million for the school but I told her I was not selling the school.
In 2018 and 2019, I called meetings with her in the presence of my pastor and my half-brother together with her own senior full brother named MIKE ISICHEI and we all agreed that I was not going to sell the school. But to my surprise, despite my unequivocal determination not to sell the school, she went on the internet to advertise the school for sale without naming the school but photographs of a part of the school revealed it was Eagles’ Tower Schools.
This forced me to do a “Caveat emptor” (Let the buyer beware), that I’m the owner of Eagles’ Tower Schools and that I was not selling the schools). However, up till now, she’s still trying to achieve that wicked purpose but I have been frustrating her moves.
After Joy left our marriage, I started hearing from people that she had told almost all the parents and anyone related to the school that she was the owner of Eagles’ Tower Schools and that I was just a nominal Chairman. Lots of people believed her because she was controlling everything in the school or about the school.
In all honesty, I had heard that false and criminal information from few people while she was still my wife but I just discountenanced it. I took it that she was just using that to boost her ego, being a very proud person by nature and that it could boost the goodwill of the schools.
When people were saying she owned the school, I asked some of them who should know the truth, why they would believe her considering her age when the school took off? She was only 28 years old then. They responded that she told them that she worked with Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and that she used her gratuity and pension to build the school.
As we all know, people are generally gullible and careless about other people’s affairs so long as they are not affected.
The truth is that she never worked with the NPA. She only worked with a one-man clearing and forwarding agency and she had an identity card (ID) that allowed her to enter into all ports operated by the NPA as the NPA normally issues ID CARDS to all staff of their agents. (I still have her last I.D. issued in 2003 when she was just 24 years old).
Because of the nature of her job, she interacted with NPA staff, customs staff and workers of shipping companies and other agencies in the ports. Being a single and an extremely smart girl, she knew many of them.
The question is: with what certificate or qualification did she work with NPA?
If she was working with a private one-man clearing and forwarding agency in 2003 when she just 24 years old, when then did she work with NPA. If she even worked with NPA, (may be one year, at best), what then is the retirement age and service year to qualify her for a gratuity or pension.
Initially, I didn’t want to include this her nonsensical claim of being the owner of ETS in this my statement but for the need to say some relevant things about our issue. I can say more to bring out her various lies but I wouldn’t bother the reader any further.
Lest I forgot, on the 23rd of January 2019, I came to the school at about 11am when the school was in session and I noticed a brand new Toyota Prado and the security man said they were prospective parents who came to inspect the school for their wards, the wards which they didn’t come with. Later, my suspicions confirmed that they were from Joy to inspect the school with a view to negotiating and buying the school. I was so furious and I called the principal that I would like to meet with all the teachers, Primary and Secondary, which I did at about 2 p.m. on Friday, 25th, after school hours. At that meeting, I addressed the staff and told them two things: First, that the rumoured offers for the sale of the school was unfounded, a complete lie from the pit of hell and that they were hearing that from the horse’s mouth. Secondly, that I owned Eagles’ Tower Schools wholly and completely and not a joint venture with my ex-wife and that she didn’t even have N5,000 in both the purchase of the land and building on it. I told them that about 3 staff who were still with us, who are the foundational staff (including the Principal) could testify to that. I told them that if I lied, God should judge me as I know her agents here would relay the proceeds of this meeting to her within the next one hour, which they did.
I also told them that over the years I’ve been telling people that we both owned ETS as we men always believe that whatever we have equally belongs to our wives but its not the same with what our wives had.
During the meeting with the staff, I kept referring to her as my ex-wife.
On getting home after the meeting between 3 and 4pm, she called me on phone and started cursing me; telling me what effrontery I had to address her staff behind her? She was emphasizing the fact that I was referring to her as my ex-wife in the presence of her staff to which I responded that why was she agitated because she herself have been introducing me to new people as the father of her children, implying that I wasn’t her husband?
Speaking further, she said she was coming to the school on Monday 28th with policemen to close down the school and send everybody home and I would then see how “your principal,” who attested to my ownership of the school would be doing her principalship.
She spoke further that by the time she finishes with me, I would know that it’s not the blocks that I assembled that we call a school. And that at the end of the day after destroying the place, I would beg buyers to pay 50 million naira, instead of the 600 million I was being offered now.
She said “kàkà kéku májẹ sèsé, àá fi’ṣàwàdànù”. But I responded and said she was now talking, as her intention was to take Eagles’ Tower Schools from me and sell it or to destroy the place and punish me for surviving all her various attempts to take my life because of the property.
As a result of her threat which I know she intended carrying out in her rage, I was deeply troubled and thought hard with prayers on what to do. So, I was led to call one of the pastors who witnessed our wedding in 2005 in her village in Delta State and my half-brother who is somehow close to her to persuade her “not to destroy the work of her hands”.
It worked for some time but she still said she would come on that Monday to address the staff too, which she did. She also said if she sees me around, she was going to disgrace me by tearing my cloth. Both our pastor and my brother advised that I should not come to the school on that Monday and I complied.
I was reliably informed later that at her meeting with the staff on the Monday, all she was saying was that I was a useless old man who was befriending the students and parents. She also said I used to befriend all the female teachers, to which the whole staff burst into laughter which she didn’t understand. But, she refused to address the issues at stake.
Lest I forgot again, she has a senior brother – Mr Mike Isichei who worked and still works in the school from day one and he knows most things about the school. We call him Coordinator of both the primary and the secondary schools. He also exercises authority on all the staff including the heads of the two schools.
After walking out of her marriage in 2015, she was still coming to the school regularly till 2018. But since September of that year and since 2019 and 2020, she comes occasionally. And, in this year 2021, she had been to the school only two times (January and February).
But, on the finances of the schools, she holds tight to them as the only signatory to the accounts. Over the years, she has been running the account at her whims and caprices and there was not a single December that she had ever paid the December salaries untill after resumption in January, safe for December 2007, when I was still subsidizing the staff salary from my employment. It was not until few years ago that I heard that she is in connivance with the schools’ accounts officer in First Bank Plc were operating a finance company with the school fees paid by parents. (*This criminality must be investigated)
Starting from 2018, she started owing staff up to three months’ salaries and 2020 was worse because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2019, the school had been losing staff and some of them go out to destroy the school.
As I said earlier, ETS was a highbrow school in the locality. We had rich parents who sponsored their children and wards on excursions being organized by the school. The trips started in 2010 and, as at 2014, our students had visited Ghana, South Africa, England, Dubai, USA and Canada. They visited England and USA more than once. Whenever they travelled, they were always accompanied by her brother Mike, the Coordinator.
She now doesn’t come to the school regularly for many reasons, chief of which is her conscience and the shame of seeing the staff she was always owing salaries, while the same staff see her flamboyant way of life since she left me. She celebrates every of her birthday with top musicians in different locations every year and she’s on all the social media. This a is woman that does not have a single friend that could attend the big wedding I did for her in 2005. The wedding was dominated by my family, friends, church members and few of her people from Lagos and the villagers in Idumuje-Ugboko in Delta State.
In the last few years, various people have talked to her to mellow down and to see reason, all to no avail. In April 2018, I had to call a meeting of respected elders in our community and I narrated all our affair with documents to talk to her, but it is still the same. I have called her siblings to meetings many times to talk to her to release the running of the school to me, since she’s not all that interested in running them in the last two years, all to no avail.
People use to ask me if she didn’t have respectable family elders I could report her to, and my response had been that I could not say she didn’t have elders but the fact remains that, after our wedding, she fenced me and herself from the family claiming that the family abandoned her and her four other siblings to her mother when her father died while she was still in the womb of the mother. The mother also died in 1996 when she was 17 years old. The death of her father made her the last born of the five children (two boys and three girls). However, she is the breadwinner of the family as she was the one that bought cars and Jeeps for the other four. She was and is still the one that pays their different house rents. So, you can understand how much they couldn’t dissuade her from her self-aggrandizement.
I have talked to her at various times that she should consider my suffering and leave the school for me to run, now that she has made it big from the money of the schools i.e. a society woman, all to no avail. I should not fail to mention that in the course of buying the land and building the school, I sold seven landed properties, four of which she herself helped me to sell to build school buildings and to pay bank loans.
My readers should not forget the fact that I said at the beginning that she did not contribute one kobo to buy the first bare land in 2005 over the six months’ grace period I was given. Also during the construction and equipping the school, she couldn’t contribute even one kobo.
On two occasions in 2020 before COVID-19 lockdown, I stooped down in the presence of her vistior and her brother and hit the ground three times each and said the earth should judge between me and her if only she had up to N5,000 in buying the land and up to N5,000 in building and equipping the schools. When I did this traditional ritual, she was embarrassed at the presence of her visitor whom she now said was her boyfriend and I dropped a copy of the “Caveat emptor” on his laps. When she gathered herself, she stood up in a rage and said did I know the name they called the EARTH? to which I responded that I don’t know what they call it in her coven, but I know that the righteous God owns the land and that He will soon judge the two of us. She then charged at me and hit me with her shoes, forcing her brother to persuade me to leave the office for her so that I would not be forced to retaliate.
This art of stooping down to call the EARTH to judge between us was repeated on the assembly ground in the presence of few students and staff to her embarrassment but all to no avail.
I now making this serious matter public for two main reasons:
1. For the public, her friends and extended family members to know what is between us with a view to advising her to sheath her sword in her best interest because our God is a God of justice and blessed are they who wait on Him. (Isaiah 30:18). Our God is also a God of vengeance.
2. For the sake of the three beautiful children (two boys and one girl) because of the law of Karma and the biblical injunction of visiting the sins of parents on their children.
Even, if she succeeds in killing me, the God of justice will still judge her.
Also for the record, I am twenty years older than her and she calls me daddy and strangely she was the one that approached me to befriend her and lured me to marry her. This is an open secret which she herself made known to close people in the first five or so years of our marriage.
Again, for the record, she had asked me to go to court if was agrieved to which I responded that I would still do. Although she has told me that a popular lawyer and a former NBA President and a SAN from the old Ondo State was toasting her years back.
I also refused to go to court for lack of fund and my resolve to wait on God’s judgement and for this. For further information of my readers, I have no other work in the last six years than to pray and be prayed for by many men of God while I have been very vigilant to see that I am around the school regularly to frustrate her various attempts to sell the school behind me.
It should also be on record that she had sacked three different security staff at different times because she suspected them of leaking to me her various fetish acts of bringing charms and strange visitors to the school. Rather unfortunately, these are the security people she employed herself.
In early 2019, it was revealed to me by a prophet and one of my daughters that Joy was planning sending hired assassins to me and when I got this information, I made a little noise about it and also told one of her close friends that I was not doing any business with anyone and I have no issues with anybody for that matter and that if I am assassinated, all should know that it came from Joy so as to inherit the school.
Let it be known that, I am still living in the same house I married her into while she had built three different big houses that I know of and also purchased a house in Chicago in the USA.
When I was retired prematurely in September 2009, I couldn’t receive reasonable gratuity as all my long-term loans from the Bank were deducted and I had to use my savings to pay for the new session for two of my children in a private university.
In the later part of 2015, when my eldest brother, Chief Famutimi intervened, I reported that Joy had stolen all the documents for the lands pertaining to the school but she said she didn’t steal them as the documents were with First Bank Plc because according to her, we were still owing a debt of some N1,400,000.00 which I knew to be a lie. Chief then said we should pay back the loan and collect the documents and bring them to him. Joy said the schools could not afford to pay the bank debt then. This prompted my brother to say that he would loan us the N1,400,000.00 and that I should come for the cheque the second day. (I have the photocopy of the cheque with me).
Immediately I collected the cheque, I handed it over to Joy to pay the bank and collect the documents from them. I think that was in December. In January, I started pestering her for the documents but she was giving me different excuses. Finally, in march 2016, she said she had collected them but she was not going to release them to me and said I should go to court.
In the course of running the schools now, (in recent times), her brother, Mike, the Coordinator and his assistants have been finding it difficult to meet all the financial obligations of the schools, most especially in salary payment because Joy was still the one controlling the bank accounts and she releases whatever amount that pleases her to them. The practice now is for the Coordinator and others to persuade willing parents to please pay cash so that they could use it to run the schools.
The maintenance of the infrastructures of this school is the main thing I do in the school because Joy and her surrogates are not interested in the future of the schools because all her interest is to continue to milk the schools.
When I identify things to repair in the schools, replace or maintain, most times, they said there’s no money on ground and most times, I am forced to look for money elsewhere to maintain the school. ALL MY EFFORTS ARE GEARED TOWARDS THE SUSTENANCE OF THE SCHOOLS AND MAINTAIN IT’S ACADEMIC STANDARD.
All the above story and the history of the school and that of our marriage are known to many people in piece-meal but the above is the totality of the summary of our relationship that are relevant to the issue at stake.
Funnily, whenever she planned or sent different people to the school to inspect the school with a view to selling them and I discovered or I accosted them (many times), she would always deny that she was the one that sent them. She would even deny it vehemently to her own brother, the Coordinator.
In the later part of 2015, in our meetings with my brother (Chief), Joy confessed that she was not the owner of the schools and that she was not contesting the schools with me.
In the course of all the trouble I have been going through from her menace, I have relied on God and the three traditional attributes of our God.
(a) I relied on what we (ADABI). I can call more than 15 different Adabi on Toy or for her. And we know that Adabi ja ju Oògùn.
(b) I can call the Earth (ILẸ̀) because she has betrayed me (Èní bá d’alẹ̀, á bá ilẹ̀ lọ). But I have not been invoking any of the above seriously because I was giving her opportunity to repent.
Finally, (c) The proverb that says: Odò tó bá gbàgbé orísun ẹ̀, yíò gbẹ ni, i.e. a river that forgets or abandons its source, will dry off.
This is the proverb I used to reply her the other day when she said I should not dare her, as the present-day Joy is different from the Joy of 2005 and she replied that: Odò t’óbá t’ojú ẹni kún, kò lè gbéni lọ, meaning that ‘a stream that got filled in your presence or developed through you, cannot drown you’ to which I replied that “only if care is taken.”
As at now, I have not been invoking any of the above seriously, but if she continues to punish and suffer me, I may have to pray it with all seriousness.
In Summary, all my years of labour are concentrated in Eagles tower Schools (ETS).
I’ve sold 7 properties, 4 of which Joy sold. Nd now, I have nothing, save the house I’m living, which I have built long before I married Joy.
Joy had built 3 fantastic houses in choice location here in Lagos and also owned a house in Chicago in USA. These are the ones I know of..
Joy should release all my landed documents to me and the school. She has shown clearly that she’s not interested in the running of a school again, but she’s just out to punish me for surviving all the attacks and plans she carried out on me.
Because she has lost interest in the running of the schools, this year 2021, she had been to the school only twice, once in January and once in February nd now we are in the last week of July/vacation.
I’m not out to destroy Joy and that’s why I refused to disclose all that she did both to me and the school.
I want her to remember all the promises she made to me before I married her and even after the marriage. She should remember the children.
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She should consider all I’ve done for her sir 2005 and where she was then, and where she is now and show me MERCY.
She should now move on with her life as she’s now into property development and sales of same. She’s also importing shoes, all of which she started in the last 2 or 3 years.
She’s now more than comfortable, while I am just trying to survive.
May the good Lord touch her conscience.
I thank all for the patience in reading this massive.
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