Veteran Nollywood Actress, Folashade Omoniyi-Adewale, popularly known as Lepa Shandy, has given reasons she has not been active in the Nollywood Industry in recent times.
Starnews Nigeria reports that she spoke to
the Punch Newspaper in an exclusive interview published on Saturday about her career and related issues.
According to her, she has not been active now in the industry because she is currently devoting her life to her family.
She said,” the last movie produced by me was before I left Nigeria but I have done just two movies since I got here. They weren’t my movies, anyways. I partook in two of my friends’ movies since I got here but right now, I’m devoting my life to my family. One thing I like about my industry is that there is no retirement. You can take a break and come back anytime.
“If you are a good parent, your focus should be on your children. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t live your life but whatever you do, when you start having children, you should focus on them. What legacy do you want to leave behind for them? When I realised that my daughter is growing and all of that, I needed to protect her future and so on, I had to take a pause. Understanding parenting sacrifice and all that, I had to put my job on hold for now. What I need now is a home.
“Most women, especially in my industry forget that you live your future now. You plan for your future now. You can decide to achieve anything but I’m an advocate of home first, despite that I came from a broken home. If you are a man, you need a woman when your children would have all gone and are on their own. As a woman, you need companionship. When you have the opportunity to protect your home, you should take it. Marriage is not always a bed of roses. It’s about tolerance, not even love. Love can varnish any day. That’s why I decided to build my home first and love will come later,” she added.
When asked about the challenges she faced in the industry, she said, “there are many challenges, spiritually, physically, emotionally and so on. Once you get into the industry, let me not even say movie industry, you must be prepared for the negative and positive aspects of it.
“The first negative aspect is bad press. If I told my husband that I was going to grant this interview, he probably might either say no or he would say that I should be careful about what I would say because one might say something and they will write something else.
“I was the one that made my husband to know that the headlines of newspapers are about sales. These people want to sell their paper, so, they would want to use a catchy headline but it’s not everyone that would go further to read the story in the paper. For some, once they see the headline, they carry the news just like that. I was the one that gave him that lecture.
“Bad press can make or mar you. People that are patronising us and our fans want to know everything about us. So, if the press decides to just churn out only the bad things about us, it might not go well and that’s why depression is all over. You guys are just selling your things without knowing what’s going on. It mustn’t always be negative. Say something good about people, at least.
“Secondly, this is a general one and I think I handled it the best way I could think of. They call it sexual harassment but I won’t call it harassment because it takes two to tango. If a man decides that he wants to go out with you, you have the right to say yes or no. That is what I tell people when they say that they were sexually harassed. I usually ask if their hands and legs were tied or they actually consented to it.
“There’s no girl in the industry that will say that she didn’t go through that. It is then left for the person to decide. Do you know that there are people who can’t say no? There are some people like that, especially when they meet someone with sugar-coated tongue.
“When I had my first job interview, I was asked out by my potential boss. Well, I won’t say I was sexually harassed. I was just about 18 then but I said no to him and that, of course, meant ‘no’ to the job but it happens and it’s very rampant in the industry.
“Another challenge is that you lose your privacy totally. It then depends on you to be who you are and that’s what I do all the time. I try to be me. There are so many of such issues but I just try to take the most important ones.
“I had an experience one day that I was coming from a location early in the morning on Ikorodu Road, precisely between Ketu and Ojota. There was a traffic situation that day. One of the area boys just recognised me and went to call others. I won’t forget that day in a hurry. The others came and surrounded my car. I thought of giving them something from the cash envelop I got from location but I gave a second thought that they could just take everything if they sighted the envelop.
“People in cars around saw me and were saying, “See Lepa Shandy,” instead of coming to my rescue. It was a soldier that was behind my car that helped me. The man had to follow me to Ojota under bridge, to make sure I was safe. It’s a pity the way it is in Nigeria. If you recognise your celebrity, just say hello and go but area boys will harass you, requesting for money from you as if you are earning your money for them.
“The money is not really coming from the movie industry but people will not understand. It is the goodwill that will give you the money. Now, endorsement is rampant, but then it was goodwill. With your name, you can open doors that you never expected can open. Like me, apart from acting, I do contracts, I have a company. It’s my name I use to get the contract, so, that’s where the money comes from.
“Social media is another one. Social media is good and it’s bad, I must tell you. Without social media, maybe some people would have ended up in a psychiatric hospital but the negative aspect is also killing people. For instance, when I moved abroad, I didn’t want people to recognise me and I don’t also like staying around our people because they don’t mind their business.
“I sometimes don’t use make-up so they won’t recognise me. I just disguise. There was a day I heard a guy singing Baba Ara’s song in a shop, I had to run away because I thought he’d recognise me. Most of our people are very funny. When I was going through my divorce, someone was recording me and I had to go to the person to say I saw what he did and I asked him to delete it.
“Thank God my lawyer was with me and my brother, who is an army officer. I don’t know if it’s a journalist or someone that wanted to just record and post online. It’s not even about posting it online but the reaction that it will generate from people online.
“When I got a property, someone asked me why I didn’t post on social media and I said why should I do so? I don’t have to do that if every other person is doing that. A Yoruba adage says that “Ti Isu eni ba ta, a ma n f’owo bo ni”. It means that if God blesses you, you don’t have to blow your own trumpet.
“Most people that are making noise on social media don’t have anything or some are from homes that they’ve not seen that kind of life before. It’s not everything you must post on social media and that’s why you see a lot of Yahoo boys and ritualists who will do everything to make sure that they achieve that too. Many people live fake lives on social media.”
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