Award-winning Nigerian actress, Sola Sobowale, has revealed why she left the acting scene for twelve years only to return to the screens in 2016 flick, ‘The Wedding Party’.
In a recent interview on #WithChude, the ‘King of Boys’ star disclosed that she had to sacrifice her acting career for her children as she left Nigeria to go monitor their education in London.
Sobowale said, “I left the shores of Nigeria for a purpose. Children did not ask to be born. The moment you decide that you want to have children, then you must be ready to take full responsibility for those children. They’re beautiful creatures. You don’t bring them to this world to suffer; you don’t.”
She continued, “You don’t bring them to this world for anybody to take care of them. You brought them, then stay with them and do the work. My father was a retired principal, my mother, a retired headmistress. May their souls rest In peace. I know what they did for me and for my siblings and I know what is called education, that is the only legacy you can give your children.
“I know the university. I know how they select people from abroad in premier universities, up to state before going to private universities. And I looked and said my children they either go to University of Ibadan, Ife, or UNILAG. But unfortunately, today there is strike, tomorrow another strike. A course of three years, they will end up doing six years and I said no.
“If I can be paying this much for primary and secondary, I’m not going to throw that away at a university, so let my children leave Nigeria. That was why I moved my children out of Nigeria to London.”
She observed that her children changed after spending a month in England since they had lost contact with her.
According to her, she then made the decision to travel to the country and monitor their education.
On her role in King of Boys, Sobowale said: “I keep telling people, “I don’t see myself, you are my mirror”. To me, I think a particular project is fantastic and others think it is another, It can’t be the same. I have never done anything as big as that. You know you can do something and that opportunity never came, and out of nowhere someone somewhere gave you the opportunity. Not only that someone met me and said, but she also said she wrote it for me. I was like, “so you believe in me?”, because when I met the one and only Kemi Adetiba and she said, “this is what you are going to do”. I looked at her, and my first question to her was, “Are you a gambler?” because what she brought to me was huge, massive. “This is a woman you haven’t met before asides from meeting her during The Wedding Party. You have this much belief in me?” and I said, “Okay, give me the baton and let’s run”.
