This column this week is a slight deviation from our usual focus on couples waiting on the Lord for children

Tuesday, January 26, 2016, is Spouses Day, a day set aside to celebrate and honour our spouses. It is a day when we should not only tell our spouses we appreciate them, but prove it. Celebration of our spouses should actually be a daily and continuous activity, but this day is specially meant to draw attention to the need to appreciate our spouses. But how do you celebrate and appreciate your spouse in a marriage where either one or both spouses are lonely? One challenge some married people contend with is loneliness. It comes in many forms. We have grass widowhood.

A lady in a high brow catholic parish died recently. She was only 48. Yet at that relatively young age, she had put herself in different positions of service within the church that almost everybody—the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the cleric and the laity—remembered her. And like Lydia in the Holy Book, almost everybody had good things to say concerning her. As she was in the church, so she was at home and with close friends. She had made herself so relevant in people’s lives that many remembered one kind deed, one kind gesture or the other. Hers was a life that was short but impactful.

At 80, one expects a person to be on marital holiday, to be enjoying the fruits of his labour but this is not the case with Isiaka Oladipupo, an octogenarian who for the first time in his life time got married to a 70 year- old woman Sunbo Olanrewaju. Isiaka met his heartthrob about two years ago and today, they are together in a matrimony though in an uncompleted building at Bayeku, Ikorodu.

It was Josh Billings that said that “occasions are rare; and those who know how to seize upon them are rarer”. Josh Billings is the pseudonym of the 19th century America humourist (comedian), Henry Wheeler Shaw whose philosophical comments in plain language became popular after the American Civil war. That quote introduces my “guest” who is a rare gem that sees rare opportunity and at the opportune time seizes it. This time he has ventured into the downstream sector of the petroleum industry. Should one resist such a man as Africa’s richest man? Aliko Mohammed Dangote, who I will prefer to address as Mr. Africa makes this edition of the Oil and Gas Summiteer.