INTERVIEW: WHY I HAD TO DIVORCE STEPHANIE HENSHAW - REV. CHRIS OKOTIE

Rev Chris Okotie  gave an exclusive interview to City People magazine through a minister in his church, Rev Grace Funmi Paul, a member of House Hold of God for the past 25 years.

Rev Grace Paul: A blind person knows that my pastor loved his wife, Stephanie, passionately. This year before the separation, he had taken her out of the country at least three times to different places like Dubai, US and so on. He loved her, so did the congregation but the bible says that two cannot walk together except they agree. In the establishment of the kingdom of God, the rules change because the rules are made by God and not by man. So, it didn’t have to do with what pastor wanted to do, because left to him, his love will keep him struggling and going at it but if God gives him instruction he has to follow it through.

City People: If I get you correctly, it was Jesus instructions for Pastor Chris to part ways with Stephanie?

Rev Grace: Let me give you a precedent. In the bible, there’s a queen called Queen Vershti of Persia. The king invited his wife and said – come woman, I want to show you off to my people and the woman had an attitude. She had pride issues. It was at that point she said to the king “Excuse me, I am making up, how can you be humiliating me by telling me to come and sit down so that people can be looking at me.” So she refused and the people of the kingdom rose up against her, and they said the king must let her go, and that was how Esther came in. That is the principle of The Kingdom. In the two cases of my pastor’s former wives, it was an abdication of roles. One was a physical abdication, and the other was a spiritual abdication. In the matters of the Kingdom of God, when you abdicate your position, your position will be taken over, because the calling my pastor has, he is not called to work alone

CP: In Stephanie’s case, was it a case of spiritual or physical abdication?

Rev Grace: Her case was spiritual abdication, but either ways it amounts to the same thing, because the scripture states clearly that if unbelieving departs, let him depart, you are not bound.

CP: Any efforts to patch things up?

Rev Grace: Spiritual things can not be patched up. When there are two people who are not the same kind, it is not a matter of patching up.

CP: So is the congregation happy that the pastor is single again and is there any plans to replace Stephanie?

Rev Grace: The congregation is not in the position to replace Stephanie. My pastor is a full grown man, and he knows what he’s doing. In the case of our pastor’s first wife, she insisted that where she wanted to do her church work was in the US. As for Stephanie, I cannot be intruding. As much as I am authorised to do what I am doing, I can’t disrespect my pastor and Stephanie. If I begin to give you some details, they would amount to disrespect. My pastor has insisted that they want to keep it private.

CP: Pastor Chris once said that the instruction to marry Stephanie was from God

Rev Grace: If you know my pastor, he is a passionate person. They had a long time relationship before they got married. My pastor is particularly careful about beautiful women because he knows that the devil desires them. So when a beautiful woman has issues in church, he ministers to them, and because he does that, people jump to the conclusion that he sleeps with them, which is not true. Just like Queen Ure, pastor has never had an affair with her, will never have an affair with her because they are not of the same kind ( What does ‘not of the same kind’ mean?). Ure was pastoring her own church, until she became bored.”

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K'SOLO'S MARRIAGE ENDS AFTER SIX MONTHS

Top music producer K-Solo married Kikelomo Akinkunmi in November 2011. By May 2012, the marriage was over. The wife told City People in an exclusive interview that the marriage ended because K-Solo was in it for money and also because he assaulted her so much she lost the pregnancy she was carrying when they got married.


Here's what Kikelomo had to say:


K-Solo and I met on Facebook in April 2011 and continued our friendship on Blackberry. We eventually met face to face at a show in Eko Hotel in Lagos. I am not really based in Lagos. I am always in Warri, Port Harcourt, South Africa or Cameroon. I am always traveling because of my business. But because of K-Solo I started coming to Lagos frequently after we started dating.

By August of 2011 we started having issues. He was actually scamming one girl. One Leilani Ifeoma in Houston, Texas. Apparently they have not met physically, they met on the internet and she was also into entertainment so K-Solo started scamming her, collecting money from her and promising her marriage. The day I got to know I was in his house. He left his phone and stepped out, so I picked the call and I told her I am K-Solo's wife and the lady said it wasn't possible because they were planning to get married. When I asked him about her, he said please don't mind her, and later said he was sorry. But when I continued to demand for answers, he started beating me despite the fact that I was pregnant. He carried a lamp and threw at me.

Before then, when I met him, he told me he wanted to shoot a video for his song 'Ni Igboro; and said he didn't have money for it. I gave him N515, 000 for the video shoot. I gave him another N100, 000 some weeks before the video shoot. All through this I didn't know he had a girlfriend that he had been living with for seven years. Each time I go to the studio, I see her there with a K-Solo tattoo on her arm. When I asked him who she was, he said she was his sister's daughter. I later found out that when I gave him the money for the video shoot, he used half of it to celebrate a birthday for Bimbo.

A few weeks later, the lady in the US, Ify, called his phone and I picked it up. When I told him I'd picked his call, he got angry and went outside the house to go talk with the lady. He was begging the girl and lying that I was his sister. He even asked her if she was ready to sponsor their wedding. After listening in on the conservation, I told him then and there that the relationship was over, that I wanted my N515, 000 back. Not just that, I'd spend a lot of money on him. He started begging and crying. A few days later, I travelled to South Africa.

While in South Africa, he kept calling and begging and I eventually forgave him because I was pregnant and he convinced me he was a changed man. He actually told me he had gone for deliverance. That was when we decided to get married. The only money K-Solo spent on the wedding was N15, 000 for wedding invites. I took care of everything. The cloth K-Solo was wearing, my own, his pilot suits, clothes, shoes, bag his mum wore, the feeding and drinks. I did everything. I spent over N3.5 million.

On the night of the wedding, K-Solo woke me up around 3am and said now that he's my husband, when am I going to make him a signatory to my company's account, and when am I going to change all my property to his name. I got scared and first thing in the morning I called my brother and told him what happened. He advised me to move all my documents, chequebooks out of the house, which I did. Whenever I asked for money for feeding or upkeep, he would shout at me and say 'What's the meaning of that? Don't you have more money than me? What did I marry you for?

K-Solo started beating me up after the wedding and I lost the baby I was carrying when we got married on the 26th of November.

The marriage finally crashed in February 2012 when he called me and told me that Timaya just bought a Nigerian used Range Rover sport, that he wants me to buy him a brand new Range Rover worth 7.5 million and also put N10million in his account. I told him that even if I had the money, I won't do it because I expect him to talk about how to invest money in productive business and not buying Range Rover. Moreover, I gave K-Solo N2million to pay for house rent for our 4-bedroom home at Ogba Medium estate, but he only gave the agent N1million and squandered the remaining money to buy Hublot wrist watches, Blackberry phones expensive shoes and designer wears. When I pointed this out to him, he told me that he will make the marriage miserable for me. On February 14th, after a misunderstanding, K-Solo packed a few of his things and moved to his mother's house. I left our home too but was advised to go back since our marriage was still young. Because I wanted to make it work, I took my brother to K-Solo's mother's house to apologise to him and his mum. He later returned home. But immediately he returned, he asked me if I was ready to buy him the Range Rover and I told him it wasn't going to happen.

So in March we went to Shoprite and he wanted me to buy two wine glasses that cost N2, 500 each. I suggested that we should open our wedding gifts that there definitely will be wine glasses somewhere, and he just slapped me right there in Shoprite, and as he was coming close to me I ran into the car park, he ran after me, removed his belt and started beating me. People started taking pictures of us and some guys tried to drag him away, by then, my right eye started bleeding. While they were trying to calm him down, he ran away from them and went to carry a stone and threw it at me, and I just passed out. I woke up in the hospital and what he told my family was that I fell. he started begging me and crying that it was the devil's work.

After that beating, I stopped doing everything I used to do financially in our home and he became very frustrated and aggressive. But the marriage finally packed on a particular night I came back home late from going to buy fruits for the house. Immediately I entered the house, he got up and started shouting at me. He started coming close, and I tried to leave the room, but he dragged me back, locked the door and threw the key in the drawer. He started beating me, slapping me and broke a coke bottle on my forehead. I stood up and ran to the bathroom, he followed me, took the mopping stick, broke it and started hitting my stomach and the pregnancy must come out. By then I was pregnant again. I was bleeding on my forehead, and he picked up the washing machine in the bathroom and threw it at me. I was just there bleeding and lifeless, so finally some of his boys were able to break the door and they started holding him back. The guys tried to stop the bleeding on my forehead but couldn't stop the one underneath. They tried to take me to the hospital but K-Solo prevented them. So I was bleeding from 11pm to 7am the following morning, which was when they finally took me to the hospital. By the time I returned from the hospital, he had moved his things from the house. That was when I discovered that he my trinket box with gold over N2.5million was missing and this was not the first time he stole from me. I wrote a petition to the commissioner of police and on May 29th, the police went to pick him up. The case is with the police and I told them all I want is my trinkets back and for him to sign an undertaken that he will never touch me again and threaten to kill me. He has said he's not the owner of the pregnancy, which is fine with me. I don't want him to come close to the child and the child will not bear his name.

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