Every week, Naijaonpoint spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Boma Dokubo, a 30-year-old creative strategist, model, founder, and advocate from Bayelsa State. Miss Grand Nigeria 2023 and now representing Oyo State at Miss Universe Nigeria 2026, Boma talks about being drugged by someone she considered a friend, rebuilding her career, starting her own agency, and everything life did to her in the three years between her two crowns.
My full name is Boma Dokubo, and I am 30, which I still can’t believe I’m saying out loud. I’m from Bayelsa State. I was born in Lagos but moved back to Bayelsa when I was about six, so that is really where I grew up. At 12, I moved to Rivers State and spent a few years living with my oldest sister, then moved back to Bayelsa. I went to university in Edo State, and immediately after university, I moved to Lagos. So different parts of Nigeria have shaped very different versions of me.
I was actually quite a popular child, which is funny because I don’t think I admit that to myself enough. I’m the sixth of seven children, but people in church, around our compound and in the community would call my parents Mama Boma and Papa Boma. I wasn’t the loudest child, but I was the child who did everything. I won prizes at birthday parties because I could dance. I was put into the adult choir when I was about 10. I started playing keyboard around that age and picked up guitar a few years later. I was in every church programme, every dance recital, every cultural performance.
Then, around 12, something shifted. I became much more inward. I started experiencing what I now understand was probably my own share of depression and insecurity. I remember being extremely uncomfortable with my body changing. That was also when writing really began for me. I started to journal literally everything I was thinking. At the same time, I had a complete turnaround academically. From around JSS2 until I finished secondary school, I don’t think I ever came second in class.
Faith was also a very big part of my childhood. I grew up in a very conservative church environment. I was the girl in the longest skirt. I didn’t wear trousers, earrings or makeup. Even though I had always been interested in fashion and beauty, I didn’t really get to explore them until university. Music, dance, writing, academics and faith probably defined me most. But there was also this very creative part of me that took much longer to have permission to come out.
I honestly never had one straightforward answer. At one point, I decided banking was it, then accounting, partly because every time I walked into a bank, everyone looked so smart and successful. But at the same time, more than anything, I was Boma the musician. I was singing, writing, making covers, and starting to see that art could become something more than a hobby. I also somehow stumbled into baking and turned it into a really successful little business that helped me financially through my final year at university.
The engineering I studied was much more my parents’ choice than mine. Their argument made sense: I’m from Bayelsa State; I was good at maths and physics; petroleum engineering was a professional course; and oil and gas were lucrative. And ultimately, they were paying my school fees, so I thought, fair enough, let’s do it. Pageantry was absolutely never part of the plan.
My older sister had done pageantry, Miss Nigeria, but I was quite young and mostly just remembered seeing pictures. I never imagined it for myself. Growing up with four sisters, I genuinely thought I was the least attractive girl in my house. My sisters had what society would probably describe as softer, more feminine features. I had much stronger features and strong cheekbones. Beauty felt like something that belonged to my sisters.
I had already been modelling for a few years before pageantry even came up. I met another model who was also a pageant girl, and she casually suggested I should consider competing. My immediate response was basically, definitely not me.
Then, I had just left my corporate engineering job. I was exhausted and depressed, and trying to figure out what came next. A few days after that conversation, I thought, What exactly do I have to lose? And that was genuinely how pageantry entered my life.
The first pageant I had originally applied for was Miss Universe Nigeria. But while preparing, I started to realise through conversations with my coach and chaperone that I probably wasn’t financially or emotionally prepared for that competition at the time. Then the opportunity came for me to represent Nigeria at Miss Grand International instead. Which sounds reasonable until you remember that I had never done a pageant before.
I was literally learning how to walk in six-inch pageant heels, how to catwalk, how to move in an evening gown, how to walk in a bikini, and how to present myself as a queen. And then suddenly, I was preparing to fly across the world and compete against more than seventy women. I had barely a month. It was one of the most ridiculous decisions I had ever made, but once I said yes, I knew I was going to give it everything I had.
I finished in the Top 20, won Best National Costume and placed highly in the Grand Voice competition. Those things meant so much to me because they became evidence that I could walk into something completely unfamiliar, feel terribly unprepared and still rise to the occasion.
Behind that first crown, there was a woman trying very hard to prove that her life wasn’t falling apart.
I had just left a job that looked perfect on paper because I was deeply unhappy there. My family didn’t even know at first. I had spent years hearing that I was too emotional, that I took things too deeply, and I had genuinely tried to become less like that. I tried to stay in jobs I wasn’t passionate about. I tried to exist in environments that did not fill my spirit because that seemed like the sensible thing to do.
But I’m an artist. I feel things deeply. I think deeply. And eventually, I had to accept that constantly fighting that part of myself was making me miserable. So when pageantry came, there was a part of me that desperately wanted to succeed at something after making this terrifying decision to leave the life everyone expected me to live. People saw the crown. They saw the looks, the preparation, the international stage, the achievements. But underneath it, there was a woman trying to rebuild her confidence in her own choices.
At the time, I think I was trying to prove a point to the world. The biggest difference now is that I think I’m trying to prove one thing to myself.
For a while after Miss Grand, I genuinely thought I was done with pageantry. It was incredible, but it was also hard. But over the years, after everything else life brought, loss, grief, drastic career transitions, healing and rebuilding, I started to miss what pageantry represented to me. There is something about pageantry that gives women permission to shine very loudly. You can shine in fashion, in how you speak, in your career, in advocacy, in creativity, in the way you represent where you come from. It creates this very interesting space where womanhood itself is allowed to take up room.
And then, when I actually began seriously considering Miss Universe, that familiar voice came back. Who do you think you are? You’re not prepared enough. Life has happened to you. You’re too broken. You don’t have what you need. Suddenly, I realised that the message I keep trying to put into the world, that you get to decide whether your circumstances have the final word on your life, was a message I needed to live myself again.
So this time I’m proving a different point. Not to the world but to myself. What has happened to me does not get to define me. I can be afraid and still move. I can feel unprepared and still show up. And I am allowed to begin again.
What She Said: My Perfect Boyfriend Had a Wife and Three Other Girlfriends
I’d like to start with the traumatic experience that actually happened three years before Miss Grand Nigeria, in August 2020.
I was drugged by someone I considered a friend at the time, someone I had met through the industry. I was drugged without my knowledge or consent, and the effects were extremely severe. I experienced hallucinations, lost consciousness and became very unwell afterwards. For a period of time, I struggled to function normally and had to receive psychiatric care. Recovery took a long time and affected both my mental and physical health. That period after the abuse was when I got some of my project management certifications. It was when I pushed myself into getting a job at a multinational engineering company. I was very quietly rebuilding my life after what had been the most devastating period of it.
It wasn’t until Miss Grand that I was encouraged by my chaperone to speak publicly about the abuse. My family also had concerns about me becoming, for lack of a better expression, …er girl for abuse. They wanted me to approach the conversation gently, and I understood that. I also didn’t want everything I had rebuilt afterwards to disappear behind this identity of being a victim. So I spoke about it in subtle ways. I spoke about getting from the girl who genuinely did not know if she would make it through another day to becoming this woman who could stand on an international stage representing her country.
And then life did what life does.
The three years after that have been a lot. There has been loss, grief, depression, drastic career transitions, questioning around faith, building my own agency, becoming a creative strategist, returning to writing after not writing for a very long time, building two publications, new relationships and the reevaluation of old ones. I got into long-distance running, which completely changed the way I thought about discipline. And then there was turning 30.
So these three years have held extreme pain, loss, grief and sadness, but they have also held an extraordinary amount of growth, lot of healing, a lot of self-reflection, learning to love myself, learning to appreciate myself and learning to have the courage to build the things that actually matter to me.
Healing has never looked particularly beautiful to me. And I don’t think it has been linear either. There wasn’t a morning when I woke up and thought, okay, I’m healed now. For me, it has looked like telling myself the truth. It has looked like a doctor’s appointment. It looked like rebuilding a career when I didn’t feel particularly confident about anything. It has looked like learning to trust again, forgiving myself and others.
Sometimes healing has been prayer. Sometimes it has been journaling. Sometimes it has been running. Sometimes it has been sleeping. Sometimes it’s been walking away from a relationship. Sometimes it’s admitting that I don’t have the capacity for something.
I think social media sometimes presents healing as becoming this perfectly evolved person who has transcended everything that hurt her. That hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been becoming someone who knows what hurt her and still chooses to participate fully in her own life.
Absolutely.
I think strength used to mean something very different to me. I’m naturally a hard worker. I’m disciplined. I’m extremely passionate. And for a long time, I thought that was a strength. Just keep going. Endure. Push through it. Overcome it. But the older I get, the more I realise that strength at its core has much more to do with honesty and authenticity. Strength is having a true relationship with yourself. Strength is accepting who you are and where you are. Strength is sometimes rest. Strength is being honest about your capacity.
And I think particularly as women we’re taught an enormous amount about endurance. Endure the relationship. Endure the work. Don’t be emotional. Be the strong woman who can take anything. I don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes strength is standing up for yourself and saying, I will not accept this. Strength is saying, I don’t have the energy for this right now. Strength can be taking a step away from something that doesn’t inspire you, fuel you or feel aligned with who you are.
Once I realised that having an honest relationship with myself became more important than proving to everybody else that I was strong, the very definition of strength changed for me.
I started cultivating a personal relationship with God quite young. I was exposed to Christianity early, but I was also naturally inquisitive, so faith became something I wanted to understand personally rather than simply inherit. One of the most profound things I have realised as I’ve gotten older is that my relationship with God and my relationship with myself are far more connected than I used to understand.
Somewhere along my healing journey, I had to confront this question: how could I claim to love God while being cruel to myself? How could I speak about the value God placed on me while constantly speaking to myself as though I had none? That changed what spirituality looked like for me. There were parts of my faith that had become performative. I could pray for hours, but then speak terribly to myself afterwards.
So spirituality started becoming much more practical. Sometimes it looked like journalling. Sometimes it looked like taking myself on a solo date. Writing love letters to myself. Taking a bath because I wanted to care for my body. Resting. Being honest with God instead of trying to sound perfect when I prayed.
Faith taught me to pray, yes, but also to get up and act on the gifts I’d been given. That period of radical self-care and quiet creation was the seed for ALBA Studios: the first time I began to structure my creative identity into something tangible that could belong entirely to me.
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