Who would have guessed it? Tekno and Lola Rae had the makings of just another one of musics romantic pairings. This week, they celebrated the birth of a daughter. This weeks flop goes to the Nigerians who have responded to this moment by asking why Lola Rae chose to shelve her career for months to become a baby mama.
In the last half-decade or so, the emergence of a breed of prodigious pop stars, with raging hormones, bags of fame and fast money and fans with an insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip and news, has been followed by a newly popular group of women we chose to call 'baby mamas'.
They are women who have babies with these "stars": athletes, wealthy young socialites, or most commonly, musicians. That the children are borne outside of wedlock or in some cases, a known stable relationship is usually enough to trigger the overzealous moral compass of the average Nigerian.
Thus, these women are usually labelled 'loose', flings that weren't kept in check, or less fortunately, as opportunists, gold diggers, looking to live off a few 'child support' cheques.
These definitions are comfortable when the woman is relatively unknown, for her personality or for whatever feats would ordinarily earn her respect.
When it's someone who is somewhat familar, a lovely bi-racial singer with hit records of her own and a chance to stake a claim where there are few, it's like a program that fries our motherboards.
Weeks after scoring a major nod for confronting internet fraudsters and starting a podcast, Noble Igwe retorted into an ugly place and let out what many are calling a sub. The tweet in question portends to ask why an unnamed female musician sacrificed her career for a baby while he, whoever Noble is referring to, stayed back to focus on his.
Connecting Noble Igwe's tweet to the Tekno and Lola Rae situation doesn't seem like much of a reach.
But Lola Rae shouldn't have to explain herself. No grown woman should have to say why she decided to have a child while single, or why she chose to do that with a 'popping musician'.
Even while we have conversations about gender politics, instances of thinly veiled misogyny such as this show that there is so much to be done.
Tekno and Lola Rae have a baby together. That's all we know... and for now, that's all that matters.
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