Between 2014 and now, Nollywood actress Sola Shobowale has either died a couple of times or served jail time. Or she has swept the streets of London, and worked at old people’s homes to survive.  All of them turned out as crap–except the one she debunked before, but now confirmed. 

In an April interview with Teju Baby Face, Shobowale went down memory lane, and shared her experience living abroad between 2004 and 2016 when she returned.

Baby Face had asked her while she referred to herself as an ‘elevated omo odo’, meaning  a first-class servant. 

She started off with her migration story, and how she got a job in the UK.

“When I started work in that office, there were Nigerians, Jamaicans, Ghanaians, and all of them know Sola Sobowale. But it was confusing because my tag read ‘Olu,’ and not Olusola,” she said.

Then curiosity got the better of a Nigerian who walked up to her, and identified her. Shobowale gave him a run around for a while, but later confessed to the guy who she is.

“Wash, carry, clean…. That was what I was doing,” she told Baby Face. “When I started this ‘elevated omo odo’ thing, I started from the grassroots. Then I went to the college. I got my NVQ 2,3,4, to a team leader.”

But when that story first bubbled up in 2014, Shobowale denied it flat out.

“I did not sweep London streets to survive,” she told City People. “I didn’t do nanny either….”

Baby Face didn’t ask her the difference between a nanny and an ‘elevated omo odo‘, though.

The actress however said while she fetched and carried in the UK, the rumor mill kicked into overdrive in Nigeria.

Her arrest, amputation, and decapitation in Saudi Arabia first made the rounds. “Then I told them in Saudi that I’m a star in Nigeria. And because of that, I said they shouldn’t kill me, but they refused and killed me,” she said, kidding while debunking it nine years ago.

“I came from England again sometime for a meeting at the National Theatre and a colleague of mine saw me and marveled.”

The colleague told her everybody knew Shobowale was serving time at Holloway Prison in England.

” I said yes!” Those people recognized me and gave me a break to come home so that when I’m done here in Nigeria, I will go back to the prison in UK,” the actress said then.

About that time, another report surfaced: Shola Shobowale pushed coke in America, and ended up in prison. But she said she was living with her children schooling in America at that time.

Most of her responses in the earlier rebuttals have never changed up till now as she struggles to clear her name.

But as work goes, Shobowale believes where there’s muck— there’s brass. 

“Owo igbe kii run ( meaning money will always be money),” she said in Yoruba in the City People interview.

“What I cannot do for money is prostitution and drug smuggling,” she told Baby Face.