Udy Umondak has done it all, seen it all and got a t-shirt, as the saying goes: acting, fashion design, first ladyship, television.Now, after six years of regaling audiences with profound stories of persons who triumphed over some of the most daunting challenges through her television talk show His Word Made Flesh; Udy Umondak, former First Lady of Akwa Ibom State is set to begin to air her latest television program, The Udy FactorShe chats with MORENIKE TAIRE after a private viewing.Who are you targeting with this new program?Udy UmondakEverybody, as long as you need information because the theme of the program is to impart information. If you don’t need them you just bank it. You never know when somebody might come your way who could use thatinformation.You are towing a lot of uncharted territory. Does that scare you or empower you?It empowers meHow?Yesterday’s controversy is today’s facts. This information is there, it’s just that nobody has ever put them in the public space. A lot of people are ignorant of them; most people don’t want to talk about them. For meit’s very encouraging to be the one to bring these issues.Are you not afraid of controversy?I believe that if you do something and it is not controversial then you are not doing anything. People will beable to get information that way.You have experts talking about a wide range of topics. How easy has it been sourcing them?My former program- his word made flesh- really put me in a situation where people would walk up to me and talk to me on issues so it’s based on some of the issues I got to hear on the program. Some are based on the way I sit down and watch things going on in our society.In my mind I believe there are ways that things should be done. There are ways we talk about things but we don’t carry them out.We keep talking about 35% affirmative action and the only position they ever give a woman is ‘woman leader’. It’s as though a woman is never good enough for the position of a party leader. What is the role really of a woman leader, is it to organize aso-ebi?Those are the kind of things I look at and I come up with a question. How much of the affirmative action have we successfully had and when I say successful, how many of those positions have actually empowered women in decision making cadres?Some of the people who have watched it have encouraged me and they have also opened up on topics like erectile dysfunction and have praised me for helping them realise that they were not being bewitched by their wives and girlfriend.You seem to have a natural gift for getting people to talk about themselves. How does that work?I talk about myself a lot because when you talk about yourself it’s not gossip. I believe when you talk aboutyourself it encourages people to talk about themselves and that was why with the Word made flesh I started the first episodes with me- my struggles, my pains.You cannot want to have people talk about themselves without you first talking about you. And I think that there’s a thing that God has given to me that people look at me as their friend. There’s this thing that you have that just makes people gravitate towards you .They look at you and even if they don’t know you they just see you on television, the way you laugh with people who laugh and they feel that that this is my friend. That’s basically it.There seems to be an obsession with entertainment on television these days. What’s your take on this?The thing is that looking at a lot of the programs I always want programs that add value to my life. I always think that people should be able to take one thing out of watching my program. If I cannot take one thing out of watching a program then that is not a good program.I don’t watch things that cannot add value. God always gives me a vision of a project that will add value, leave people better than I met them, encourage people and make people realize that whatever it is you are going through, it’s a natural thing that someone somewhere has gone through and that empowers you with information to know how to get out of that situation and do something about it and stop worrying andstop stressing yourself knowing that you are not alone and knowing there is a solution.Has it ever occurred to you that this could be what Nigerians really want- entertainment?Nigerians like entertainment but what percentage of Nigerians? Entertainment is fun so it’s that entertainment that will be used to draw people and hit them with information but anybody that watches that entertainment program and learns from it will definitely come backWhere exactly do you envisage taking the Udy Factor?I want to empower as many lives as possible with information because we have very interesting topics. The corruption in all of us! We look at government and we always think government is corrupt but here we are not looking at government, we are looking at ourselves.How your husband gives you money to buy foodstuffs and you end up buying aso ebi. The messenger, whocollects money just to move a file from one table to the next table. The man at the airport who says ‘bring money’. We want to look at all of us- look at our lives, look at the things we do and take the program to a point where they will be quoting: I know- I heard it on the Udy Factor! People quote CNN.
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