Yoruba Nollywood actress Atinuke Kazeem, widely known as Mama No Network, has opened up about why she left her marriage to fellow actor Adeola Soremi, popularly called Lanko or Baba Lanko, and why she will not go back.
In a recent interview on Agbaletu TV, the comic actress said Lanko has asked her more than once to reconcile, but she has turned him down. She told her family she would rather remain unmarried than return to the marriage.
“He do say we should come back together but I can’t. I even told my family that even if I don’t get married, I am very okay because there are so many reasons I can’t go back to that marriage. Lanko is a chronic womaniser,” she said.
She recounted discovering, through a third party, that he already had another wife and three children he had never mentioned.
“In between everything, someone just told me that, ‘Do I know Lanko?’ I said yes. Then the person told me he has a wife and even three kids with her, and he never told me about it, and that’s how I just left the marriage.”
Mama No Network also said that after they began living together, Lanko tried to stop her from continuing her acting career. She described long absences that surprised her.
“Even after some time, he told me I can’t go into acting after we started living together. It got to a point he won’t come home for two months, one month, and I got surprised that is it that hard in the movie industry.”
In a 2024 interview with Biola Adebayo on Talk to B, she said the pair once worked together on films, that Lanko later wanted a new wife after success came, and that he instructed producers not to feature her in the same projects as him after they parted. She also spoke then about infertility struggles during the marriage, including extreme measures that affected her health, and said he eventually stopped coming home. The couple had a son together. She remarried in May 2023.
Lanko has given his own version of events in separate interviews. He has alleged that the marriage, which involved a high-profile wedding around 2014 turned violent, and that she once attacked him with a cutlass, leaving scars. He has also said his current wife was once an apprentice brought by Mama No Network, and that he and the current wife have four children.