Kie Kie : Don’t Waste Your Time Trying to Be Somebody Else

Kie Kie :   Don’t Waste Your Time Trying to Be Somebody Else

Bukunmi Adeaga-Ilori professionally known as Kie Kie is a multi-talented TV personality, actress, content creator, model and fashion icon. She also positions as a brand influencer and uses her fans to promote and improve the value of her clients. In this interview with Tosin Clegg, Kie Kie talks about her brand and career

Growing up for me was very exciting

My siblings are amazing and I have amazing parents. I also went to the best schools, secondary school was in Ibadan. For my university, I went to Bowen University, studied Mass Communication and later on read internet and digital marketing for my masters. Thereafter, I went for fashion qualifications at London College of Fashion. So, yes I would say that growing up was beautiful and right from the time that I was a child, I’d always said I wanted to be a communicator hence I read mass communication.

I’ve always been the one that would talk a lot, I’ve always been extremely expressive so I’m not surprised, my parents and family are not surprised that I’m where I am today. Right from Sunday school to my teenage age, I’ve always been on the drama to debate units, I’ve always been active in the creative wing you know, the choreography group and all of that stuffs. So yes I’ve always been that girl who had talents and luckily, I have parents and siblings who had supported those dreams from the very beginning.

I have a few principles that guard how I live my life

Number one thing is ‘never ever live in somebody else’s shadow’. God is such a creative being and he has created us all with specific set of skills, so don’t waste your time trying to be somebody else. Just look within and be yourself, you might not be good enough today, but you know what they say about practice? It makes perfect. Number two is, ‘it’s okay to fail; it is very very okay to fail.’ I believe that failure is part of your journey to success. So you must fail, because there are great lessons that come with failure. So, embrace your failure, regroup, apply more wisdom from what you must have learnt from the failure and it will always be better. And finally, they say ‘opportunity comes but once’ but I say “prioritize opportunity, but when you miss it, don’t let it weigh you down”, because I believe strongly in Christ and I know that he alone makes everything good in his own time.

My own TV show

I grew up hoping to own my own TV show but I didn’t want it to be the regular show, so at that I said ‘how do I make this different?’ I introduced humour into my fashion content because I have such a strong passion for fashion. At first, I was afraid because I’ve never seen anything like that on TV in Nigeria, but it was good to have shows like the fashion police but I wasn’t sure how Nigerians will take that direction and I mean the rest they say is history. The acceptance is wild, it is amazing, it is encouraging and beautiful. Now you see, for movies, people kind of saw my character in the fashion shock show and just felt this girl has so much energy and vibe, she will be a great actor, and then I started getting calls for movie roles.

So I never set out to be an actress, I never went for auditions, but the directors just reached out to me and say oh, I’ll like to work with you on XY project. Thankfully, I’ve received a couple of scripts, when I vibe with the script I take it, if I don’t, then unfortunately, I wouldn’t take the script. And for skits now, it’s the same thing. We just have this amazing content creators, this amazing skit makers just say “omo this girl is crazy let me feature her”.

But, another thing that really highlighted my strength and depth of expression is going to be during the lockdown that I started what I hashtag Kiekie Bants and I’ll talk about lots of relatable topics and people love to listen to me, and then they say, “oh kiekie carries her audience along”, “oh kiekie is a vibe”, “kiekie na cruise”. These are all the things that formed my journey into movies and content creation.

My conviction comes from the flow

It comes to me naturally. I naturally express myself. I naturally coin humourous words. I naturally come up with funny scripts and content ideas, I naturally come up with great fashion designs. It all comes to me naturally and that is just a proof to me that it is who I am and all I just did was to embrace it. The journey is going good and I’m loving every single step of it. To be honest, I always say that when it comes to inspiration for content creation, I do not necessarily take credit for the quality, value and standard of work I put out there, because, trust me, it just comes to me! it comes to me! Like, I’m just seated and a silly mad ass idea comes to my head. I have full folder of voice note of ideas, a folder of videos where I just express ideas as they come to me.

So, I’m not necessarily inspired by anything actually, I don’t have to be in a particular space, I don’t need to look at a particular thing, I don’t need to read a particular thing, I don’t need to watch a particular thing, it just comes to me naturally, and that, I’m super grateful to God for, because they just come. But in all of this, I function best when I’m happy. Luckily I’m mostly happy.

Working with other creatives

It has been enlightening, it has been educating, expressive and most importantly a learning curve. A good experience for me as content creator myself. There’s nothing as joyous as working with people that are of like minds. You see people demonstrate different levels of creativity and you’re like ‘ahn ahn this is sick but for me, it’s amazing.’ So far, I’ve done a lot of works. If I have to put a number to it I’ll need to settle down to count but I’ve done a lot, I can’t just count it off my head like that.

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