Nigerian pop singer, Modupe-Oreoluwa Oyeyemi, popularly known as Mo’Cheddah, says that she once battled depression to the point of considering jumping off Third Mainland Bridge.
The 28-year-old fashion designer said older colleagues in the industry hated her when she got into the industry.
“I was coming from a naive, God-fearing family and I went into the world of adults and I was thrown into a jungle and people did not care if I was 16, they attacked me,” she said in an interview with DANG Network.
“The industry was hostile. I would be performing and they would turn off my microphone because the A-list artist doesn’t like me. There was one day I looked at my Mum and told her ‘you taught me everything about love but you did not teach me to hate’.
“I don’t know why she did not, but the truth is there is hate in the world, so I went into the industry thinking everybody loved everybody. I didn’t understand that hate.”
Explaining her abrupt exit from the music scene, Mo Cheddah said people did not understand her side of the story when she left Knighthouse records.
“The day I won the Channel O award, that was around when Twitter came out and people I knew started dragging me online. People started asking why I won the award, people starting questioning me and carrying stories around me,” she said.
“What broke me was that when I left my label. People chose to pick sides and obviously it wasn’t mine. I felt as if I had failed, especially because I had thought that business will pick up. They had so much hate for me.
“They started bad-mouthing me to people, to companies, to producers, so I was kind of blacklisted. They wanted to do everything in their power to ruin me and I felt God forsook me, sadness consumed me
“I googled ‘there is this darkness inside me’ and I saw a lot of people had it, they were talking about depression. The only reason I did not kill myself, first, I didn’t know how I will kill myself. I thought about it so many times.
“I thought of drowning myself in third Mainland bridge, at times I wanted it to be quick, so I will be praying that God should just kill me. All I had to do was understand that as long as I was at peace with this person, every other thing will be OK. I live to be happy.”
NAN reports that she left the record label in February 2012 due to irreconcilable differences and founded her own label.
Mo’Cheddah broke into the music scene at 16 years with a feature on ‘Won Beri’ and had to take a break from the industry in 2015.
She currently runs a fashion house called Mo Cheddah.co and counsels young girls through her brand.
