23 YEARS AFTER, FORMER MINISTER AND WIFE WELCOME BABY

 Patience, indeed, is a virtue. But for patience and providence, it
beggars understanding how a couple - a Nigerian couple at that, with
all the family interferences and all - would stick by each other,
through the maelstrom of childlessness while hoping that one day, God
would answer their prayers. It has taken 23 years, but today, in the
household of the immediate-past Minister of State for Commerce and
Industry, Humphrey Abah, palpable joy hovers and pervades the
atmosphere. Humphrey's 49-year-old wife, Mary, was recently delivered
of a baby after two decades of waiting on the Lord.

Understandably ecstatic beyond words, the lawyer cum banker told a
national daily: "When they told me I was pregnant, I screamed and
cried in the hospital and everyone present rose up and gave thanks to
the Lord. Since then, the story has been one testimony after another.
But that was not all, when I was to put to bed, I was told there might
be complications as a result of all the operations I had done. They
said that might make it a very difficult and dangerous birth. Yet, the
Lord saw me through. It feels great and I thank the Lord for wiping
away my tears and making me a mother at last.

"It is a dream I have had since I married at the age of 27. Now, I am
more than 49 years old, it has taken a long time but the Lord has done
it for me. I have shed a lot of tears. Our story is like that of
Abraham and Sarah. I am already in menopause but I told God that if He
did it for Sarah and gave her womb the strength to conceive, then He
would give my womb the same strength. Even when doctors in London told
me in 2011 that nothing could be done, I knew that it is only Him (the
Lord) that could help me. I focused on the Lord and He did it for me."
Humphrey Abah was until the recent cabinet reshuffle Kogi State's
representative in the Federal Executive Council.

Cooled from this day life and style