Born Kefee Obareki in Sapele, Delta State, she had all the
signs of stardom stamped on her: a beautiful voice, a restless spirit and a
ting of controversy. She started quite early and by eight, she was already in
the church choir. Even as a teenage chorister, rumours were spreading that she
was sleeping with the choir director, Alec Godwin ─ the pastor’s son. The
rumours nearly broke the church as the pastor was accused of protecting his
son. It was all rumours, Godwin would reveal years later, but it did not stop
the two of them from eventually falling in love and getting married, against
the wishes of Kefee’s mother, Ejirooghene. Godwin recalled, when the marriage
eventually headed for the rocks, that Kefee’s mother told her something on the
day of their wedding which remained a mystery to him. According to Godwin,
Kefee came out of the conversation looking sad and “did not sleep with me for
three days”. The marriage lasted from 2005 to 2008, and the divorce was as
dirty as it could be. Godwin told an interviewer the beginning of their crisis:
“It all started on March 16, 2008, on a Sunday morning. There was a programme
in Abuja and she was supposed to go and minister in church. She said there was
no need for me to join her and that I should just drop her at the airport and
come and pick her up when she came back. I agreed. “But when she came back from
Abuja, I started noticing some changes. Kefee never liked staying at home
alone. But since she came back, Kefee could afford to stay alone and she was
always with her phone. It was strange. For the first time, Kefee would walk
away while we are recording.
She would be away for at least an hour and nobody
would know where she was. She was always telling me she was playing games on
her phone or that she was holding family meeting with her mom on the phone. I
never really bought those excuses. “After about two or three weeks, I had to
investigate her phone. It was all about her phone. As she slept one night, I
went through her inbox and the first message I saw was sent to her by a man
called Uche. It reads, ‘How can you continue to stay with a man you say you
don’t love?’ She replied with, ‘I have to take this step by step. We can’t rush
this. I promise I will get out. I love you.’ I read a lot of things about babies
in the text messages. It was obvious that she had told him we didn’t have a
child. He kept telling her how he was going to give her twins from their first
intercourse.” Kefee, a graduate of public administration from the University of
Benin, denied all the allegations, and the divorce papers at the Enugu
magistrate court were quite scandalous. She said her reasons for wanting a
divorce were that Godwin was “always demanding anal sex and he bedwets”. She
accused him of womanising, sleeping with her friends and even the girlfriend of
his friend. She also accused him of always beating her up, such that she had to
learn Taekwando in order to defend herself. Above all, money. She said Godwin,
who was the producer and promoter of her music career (she released her
chart-busting Branama album on Alex Music), was ripping her off. Godwin denied
all these accusations. He said he never asked for anal sex and was always
faithful to her “because I met her a virgin”. He said the allegation of
bedwetting was meant to ridicule him and bring him down. He also denied ripping
her off. He accused Kefee of denying him sex, “always crying when I touch her
and at some point, she suggested I get other girls to sleep with so long as I
don’t leave her”. The divorce was eventually granted and after a particularly
difficult period of moving on with her life, she fell in love again. This time
with on-air personality, Teddy Esosa, who ─ by the way ─ was her former
husband’s good friend. They secretly got married in 2012 (pictured). She seemed
to have found perfect happiness and her career was revived again. Her rise has
been phenomenal and now now goes on performance tours in different countries.
Kefee had this to say about her new husband in an interview last year: “My
husband is a very nice guy and I am actually writing a book about my first
marriage. The bottom line is that I am happy and if you ask me, this is the
first time I am getting married… We’ve known each other for a long time, and
when he felt it was time, he proposed to me. The rest is now history, like they
say.” The death of Kefee on Friday morning followed weeks of speculations that
she had come out of the coma after collapsing on a 14-hour flight to Chicago,
United States, for a performance. The cause of her ill-health was initially
reported as pregnancy-induced high blood pressure but it has now been confirmed
as “lung failure” by her UK-based manager, Adeline Adelicious Adebayo. She
reportedly never came out of the coma, despite a message being posted on her
twitter account claiming she was back to life. She had been in coma for six
days before ─ when she was much younger. The mother said on a TV programme two
years ago: “As a devoted Christian, our family always fasted every Friday.
Then, one day, Kefee slumped and was unconscious for six days. Considering that
I had lost a child before, I couldn’t bear the pain of losing another one. I
would roll on the ground, crying and praying that God should restore my child
to good health.” Luckily, she came back to life, but the miracle was not to be
repeated this time around, sending her fans into tears and sorrow.
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