This is My Life 'FUNMI IYANDA'

What was your motivation for starting your programme on NTA?
I had worked on TV before the NTA show. I had done Good Mornng Nigeria on NTA for 3 or 4 years. Then I did
MITV Live. That programme was stopped. That was when I did my stint with Tempo as a freelance journalist. I
knew that I was going to go back because I had developed a love for telling stories and raising issues through the electronic media. What I did was that I took that short break to do some work with the then governor elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, when I was with the Tinubu'sInauguration Committee. By the time that assignment was finished I didn't want to do anything in politics. I wanted to go back to media, particularly to television. Then I
wanted to do a breakfast show. This was because when I looked at everything on television, most of the breakfast shows did not target women, older and young people. They were mostly hard core politics. In as much as that is important there are many layers to our stories and I felt that we should try and tell those stories. It was just an innocent desire to do a breakfast show that the entire family can sit down and enjoy in the morning.
Soon afterwards youwent into discovering people that had stories to tell. What led you on that path?
I just was doing my breakfast show. I do have some sort of social news leaning. People could connect with a lot of the stories we were doing back then. Maybe I was a bit naïve and young. Some of the things I shouldn't say I would say on television. I would just be open and truthful. And I think that people connected with that. After a while people started coming to the TV station with problems for me to solve. I couldn't walk away from some of the stories and so quietly behind I would do what I could do to help people. In fact those who worked with me then knew that my job really started after the camera stopped rolling because I could spend two or three hours listening to people as they come mostly women, old women, young women and so on.
Can you recall an example of one or two of those people, what they told you and how that pushed you into helping or advising them?
There was a particular woman who came that morning and her thumb had been cut off. Her husband had beaten her and cut off her thumb. She had four children and the man had kicked her out of the house. She was
just crying. She said she would kill herself. I didn't know how you turn away from a person like that because she had nowhere to go to as at that time. Incidentally we often had to go to the family because I remember that we
actually went back to the husband. There was no free house or shelter for women as at that time. We tried to
negotiate with him sort of, to take his wife back and then take some sort of counseling. We also had counselors on the show at that time. I remember that Dr. Famuyiwa was there who used to help us with some of the people who just sometimes needed someone to direct them. And what we did was set her up in some kind of petty trading and she went back to the husband and kept her eye on the family. People had all sort of stories. A lot of them were medical, people had cancer and then a lot of them were children. What I then did was I went and spoke to the then governor of Lagos state. I asked that could we have a standing agreement that if I brought anybody to them they would help. I would have done a background check. I realize that there is a lot of need. But this particular person if we didn't intervene he would probably die. And so since that time Dr. Alesh told me
that do you know how many people have come from you altogether? I said I didn't know. He said over five thousand people. The government did help. The agreement still stands up till now. In the past two months, we have sent three cancer patients, young girls who had breast cancer. The government has paid for their operations. This was a few months ago. It is ongoing.