The Chairman Emeritus of DAAR Communications Plc, Raymond Dokpesi said polygamy is one of the greatest errors of his life.
Raymond Dokpesi, who disclosed an interview with journalists in Abuja ahead of his 70th birthday, revealed that he went into polygamy due to internal family challenges not because of his wealth as widely speculated.
He said, “I am a Catholic and I definitely will tell you that one of the greatest errors of my life is polygamy.”
“But it is not something that I desired or something that I wanted. It was a situation that developed, I just had no alternative.
“A lot of people looked at it as if it was wealth that distorted my behaviour but the truth of the matter is that there were internal family challenges that led to the polygamy.
“I was married to a Polish woman, I wanted to remain with the Polish woman, I still desired it in my old age but she left Nigeria for reasons that she was the only child of her parents and so she had to stay with her parents and I had to stay here and there is no leave in marriage.
“And so, I shuttled down to Poland over 16 times requesting her to come back to Nigeria and stay but as the only child, she had to stay with them.”
Dokpesi Reveals How He Survived Poisoning As A Child
The media mogul said he was given a 35-year life span because of his sickness, but he was eventually cured and is happily celebrating his 70th birthday.
He said, “Well, let me say 35 years was the benchmark that was given to me because in my very early years, I was very sickly. I was fairly handicapped because I could not talk from the very beginning of my life; but very many people assumed that because I could not talk, I could not hear or I could not understand what it was.
“So, I would normally just look and see, watch things as they happened. And I vividly recall when one of my father’s very close friends came to intervene about my schooling and he condemned, outright, any effort to invest in me because I was very sickly and secondly, he had not seen any child of a northerner succeed.
“I was handicapped and that was the toughest moment in my life at that stage and at that time, I felt highly discriminated against, I felt that I was likely to be denied the opportunity to live,” Dokpesi recalled.
“By the time, I was about 12 years I was terribly sick, my mother and father took me to several places from hospitals to native doctors and churches praying, looking for an opportunity for me to survive.
“They later took me down to Agenebode, when my father had almost given up, that I was not going to survive. We went through the banks of River Niger at the time. When we got to the destination, they said I had been poisoned and the people that committed the atrocity were there present and they will be able to deliver me.”
Eventually, he was cured. “But behold, here I am, 70 years old, all those challenges put behind, I am strong, I am healthy and I thank Almighty God and all Nigerians that have given me support all through to be able to reach this year,” he enthused.
KanyiDaily recalls that last year, Raymond Dokpesi and his daughter-in-law along with six members of his family tested positive for coronavirus.
