By Henry Akubuiro
Currently, Tarere Obaigbo wears the crown of Mrs Nigeria —don’t confuse it with Miss Nigeria. Her pageant category is for young, married women who still have what it takes to flaunt, and she has it all.
Tarere is a property marketer by profession and runs a spoken word project, The Gathering Africa, where poets and other artists converge for creativity regularly. “What we do is to empower spoken word adults who can write, draw and perform,” she tells The Sun Literary Review in a mellifluous voice. We are chatting at Chocolate Royale, Victoria Island, Lagos, and you quickly notice she is more fetching than her runway pictures.
The beauty queen isn’t limited to the aforementioned roles, though. She also works with Ecoprolive, an environmental team of volunteers who move around Lagos streets picking water bottles for a cleaner city. Mrs Nigeria is also involved in the Food for All Initiative with a goal to feed 5,000 people per year. “This project has been going on for three years,” she says in a silky voice.
From a tender age, Tarere has been involved in beauty pageants, and has won some, including Miss Pulse.ng (2013), Best Model Nigeria, Miss Express Yourself, and Miss Progress. “But this is the first one I have won as a married woman, because, after getting married, I withdrew from pageantries, because, for most of them, the criteria was you shouldn’t be married,” she recalls.
What support does she get from her hubby as a beauty queen? She laughs a little bashfully. “My husband is a very supportive man. He is my friend. He is my partner. Initially, he thought I was joking when I wanted to enter the Mrs Nigeria pageant; but, when I brought the form for him to sign the consent, he knew I was serious.”
Tarere will be representing Nigeria in Sri Lanka in November this year at the global stage, and she is already planning big for it. Right now, she is working on three pet projects to boost her chances of winning the global crown. The first is empowering creative Africans. The second is cleaning Lagos, while the third is the FWA initiative, which entails feeding a multitude, especially during festive seasons in Nigeria, like Christmas and Easter.
One of her major events comes up on the 1st of October, 2021. She explains the focus, “What we will be doing is walking a long distance in Lagos to create awareness on saving the environment, of which the event will involve planting of trees or helping the less privileged.”
Apart from Lagos, she will be interacting with other states, like Edo, where she comes from. “I was Miss Edo State during the pageant,” she reminds you, but she is married to an Anambra man. Probably she would add Delta State among the states she will be interacting with. However, Lagos is her strong point, for it is where she resides.
If you are thinking Tarere is stinkingly rich because of her feeding campaign, you had better jettison that, for she really needs your help now. “We usually get donours. Last year, when the Coronavirus pandemic started, we had people who donated bags of rice, money, seasonings and water, while others donated their time cooking and sharing food. It’s not all about donating money; people assist in different ways,” she says.
For the forthcoming event, she is hoping to get sponsorship. Brands that are looking to interact with young ladies or interact with young wives are welcome. She will gladly, too, welcome cooking and travel brands, those concerned with education, among others.
Tarerie is a poet. She started writing in JS2 to get over a frustrating moment in class. Her dad, who is a writer himself, encouraged her to keep it up. She didn’t despair afterwards, writing both during unhappy and happy spells. Her spoken words programme is less than a year old, but she is happy she has been making progress, organising it bimonthly since January at the Affinity Arts Gallery in VI, Lagos.
“The response has been massive. Poets, singers, painters and even actors come to the event to perform. For many, they have not had such a platform before. Until now, they used to visit YouTube to see that. Now, they are coming around to perform and participate and get inspired,” she says gaily.
Her mission is to grow a community that every writer, poet, thinker, musician and artist would be glad to belong to. Luckily for her, she has been getting sponsors for The Gathering Africa events. “That’s why people can come to the event for free and the performers are empowered with tokens,” she adds.
She is a fan of Chimamanda, Aori Obaigbo (her dad) and Oscar Wilde, for “he was very defiant; he knew who he was, though he had a tragic end.”