The making of Nigeria’s first female IBO, WBC titles holder

Female boxer Elizabeth Oshoba’s meteoric rise to becoming the International Boxing Organisation female super-featherweight and World Boxing Council silver featherweight champion is one of the fairytale stories of the Nigerian sports sector, writes PETER AKINBO

The journey of about two hours from Ikeja, the Lagos State capital, to Tigbo-Ilu, a sleepy community in Ogun State, was nothing but eventful.

After diverting after the toll gate on the Sango-Otta-Abeokuta expressway, it was a bumpy and dusty ride to Iyana-Ilogbo and then Tigbo-Ilu.

At Iyana-Ilogbo, a commercial motorcyclist, popularly known as Okada, asked our correspondent, “Where in Tigbo are you going?”

“Smart Boxing Gym,” I replied him.

“Your fare is N400,” he stated with a tone of finality.

And the journey to Ilogbo began. In 25 minutes I was at the Smart Boxing Gym on Ewekoro Road, where the story of Elizabeth Oshoba, Nigeria’s first female boxing world title holder, began.

Oshoba was born on December 23, 1999, in Agbado, Lagos State, where she had her nursery and primary education before her family moved to Tigbo-Ilu in Ogun State, where she obtained her Senior Secondary School Certificate at the Ilogbo-Asowo Community High School in Ilogbo-Ota, Ogun State.

Last January, Oshoba defeated Italian Michela Braga via split decision at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark, to snatch the World Boxing Council silver featherweight title in stunning fashion.

From the beginning of the action, Oshoba bossed and dominated Braga clearly, with the judges’ scores — 88-82, 87-83 and 90-80 all in her favour.

With the historic win, she became the country’s first female boxer to win a world title, improving her record to seven wins and four knockouts.

Inside the gym, three boxers were being drilled by coach Semiu Lateef.

Lateef, also opened up to our correspondent after my introduction, going down memory lane on how he groomed Oshoba for almost a decade, on her way to becoming a force to reckon with in global boxing.

“I watched her when she started training, and I saw that she had the bravery and confidence,” Lateef told The According.

“If I sent her to her seniors for sparring, she never declined. She always did her best to try to win against them and that’s when I decided to put extra focus on this girl.”

Oshoba’s parents, who initially laughed off the idea of their daughter taking to boxing, ended up being her biggest supporters, Lateef told our correspondent.

“Her parents turned out to be people who kept up with her and if they didn’t see her, they would call and ask about her, since her parents showed interest, it made me pay more attention to her because her parents didn’t leave it to me alone and that made me happy.

“If I asked her to bring N1,000, her parents would bring N500 or N800, and I would add the rest. So, it gave me confidence to continue with her,” he said.

Our correspondent then visited the home of the Oshobas on Araromi Phase 2 in Tigbo-Ilu. It’s a simple home with walls painted grey and green walls, four chairs, two tables and a TV in the living room.

The Oshoba’s parents have three daughters and a son, Raphael, with the pugilist the last child.

Ironically, Oshoba’s boxing journey might not have been, our correspondent learnt, on arrival at the Oshobas.

At age 12, she half-heartedly stepped into the world of boxing, encouraged by her older brother, Raphael.

Raphael saw his sister’s potential early but Oshoba was scared stiff. She couldn’t imagine receiving blows when she didn’t even know how to punch or defend herself.

“Raphael told me he saw one girl who looked like me boxing and said he wanted me to try boxing too,” Oshoba said.

“But I told him I didn’t want to box. I didn’t know much about boxing and didn’t even know girls could do it. It seemed very risky. I was scared about getting hit in the face.”

However, Raphael said he had made up his mind not to give up on his sister taking to boxing. And after some reluctance, she bought the idea.

“She just laughed at me when I first told her. She said she couldn’t box because she didn’t want her face disfigured. But I encouraged her and she later accepted the idea partially.”

Her parents Mr and Mrs Yakubu Oshoba also laughed off the idea when Raphael tried to convince them that Oshoba had the potential to become a great boxer.

“Yes, I laughed when her brother first told me,” Yakubu said. “But then, I also had an interest in sports since I was young, so, I gave it a lot of thought and realised God also speaks through children. So, I decided it may be worth it.”

Mrs Juliana, Oshoba’s mother, added, “I also laughed when they told me and I told the brother, ‘Since you’ve started receiving blows now, you also want Elizabeth to be receiving blows too?’

“But I later said no problem; women are also fighting boxing, so, there is nothing strange to it and if she wants to, why not?”

Her first day at the Smart Boxing Gym was another intriguing story. With her mind not fully made up at the time, the family devised a means to get her to the club.

Oshoba said her father tricked her, telling her they were going to get some fuel nearby but while Yakubu narrated the story, it drew comparisons to the Biblical story of Abraham taking Isaac to the sacrificial altar.

“One day, I asked her to get into the car and she asked, ‘Daddy, where are we going to?’ I told her not to worry but she asked again. I said, ‘Just enter the car and let us go.’ And that was how I took her to the boxing gym,” he told our correspondent.

“When we got there, I told her, ‘This is where we are going, your brother has asked me to bring you here.’ She saw other girls there boxing and she couldn’t quit; that was how the journey started.”

Harsh boxing lessons

Oshoba admitted that was the turning point of her life and career inside the local gym.

“The gym was very basic, it had just one heavy bag that was filled with sand,” she said. “But since the girls were doing it, I decided I could do it too. I had the mindset that if they saw me outside, they could just beat me up and go free. And of course, I won’t let that happen,” she said.

But her fears were confirmed during her first sparring sessions against her seniors.

“I was beaten mercilessly by my seniors at the gym,” Oshoba said with a smile. “But I was eager to do it because I knew I was going to learn something, and I told myself afterwards that I wasn’t going to stop and I will become a champion one day.”

For someone who wasn’t keen on boxing initially, there was no going back once she caught the bug.  Coming from a poor background meant Oshoba had to trek long distances to and from the boxing gym after school hours.

The girl Raphael said was ‘just like’ Oshoba, when he tried to convince her into boxing, turned to be Toyin Adejumola, a multiple gold medallist at the National Sports Festival.

Adejumola would also go on to clinch the West African Boxing Union female middleweight title on February 3, just days after Oshoba claimed the world title, a testament to the level of grooming and training at Smart Boxing Gym in Ilogbo.

Adejumola said while Oshoba did not have a boxer’s physique in the beginning, she always had the attitude.

“I was her senior when I first met her. I didn’t even see the physique of a boxer in her but what I saw was someone with a heart that always told her ‘I can do it.’ We never had any issues, she and I would spar together and after training, she would tell me the mistakes I made during our sessions and I would also tell her the mistakes she made,” she said.

It would take a little over an hour for an adult to walk the distance from Ilogbo-Asowo Community High School to Smart Boxing Gym and Oshoba, while only 12 then, embarked on this journey regularly, with only her bag shielding her from either sun or rain, till she graduated from secondary school in 2016.

On weekends, she would walk about 30 minutes from her home to the gym but she wasn’t deterred.

“Rain or shine, Elizabeth would walk from school with her bag held over her head after school,” Oshoba’s childhood friend and sparring partner Ibrahim Opeyemi told The According.

Both up-and-coming boxers would jog very long distances from Ifo in Ogun State to Abule-Egba in Lagos, which would take them about hours.

“There were times she would get tired but if I didn’t stop, she wouldn’t either. And I didn’t  stop because I wanted to keep up with her mental strength.

“These signs were what gave me the confidence that she would be the best amongst female boxers in Nigeria because she worked hard a lot. It’s not just luck but her hard work and dedication that led her to where she is now,” Opeyemi added.

The pugilist’s boxing skills soon caught the eye at the Ilogbo-Asowo Community High School in Ilogbo-Ota after a fight broke out among students, her then Physical & Health Education teacher Jimoh Gafar, who still teaches at the school, told our correspondent.

“In 2015, I remember some students fighting and she wanted to separate them, but one of the girls turned to face her and I saw the way she quickly stood and moved. I called her and asked her if she was learning how to box,” he said.

“She was very shy, but she later told me she was learning the sport. I was happy and told her to ‘keep it up, if you decide on it, you’ll be someone great in the future.’”

Gafar, however, added that Oshoba never bullied any other student because of her boxing advantage.

“She was always a very peaceful person, since the first day I knew her, I never saw her fight,” Gafar added.

“No one in school, except maybe me or one or two others, knew that she boxed because she hid herself and was very playful with everyone.”

No easy road to success

Quite often coach Lateef and his boxers, including Oshoba, made the trip to Lagos and back on training and bouts. A trip to and from Lagos costs about N3,000 per person, but having to pay for several of his boxers could be a herculean task, thus the coach and his boxers lapped one another inside buses just to achieve their aim, but they were subjected to embarrassment by bus conductors and passengers alike during some of those trips.

Despite facing numerous challenges, including financial constraints, Oshoba’s dedication remained unyielding. Her relentless pursuit of excellence, coupled with her indomitable spirit, propelled her towards success in the boxing arena as she kept winning competitions across Lagos and Ogun states.

When it was time to make her debut at the National Sports Festival in 2018 with Lagos State, where she had been training, Oshoba, according to Lateef, was told to “wait for your time, your seniors have to go first.”

She then represented Rivers State at the festival in Abuja, where she competed in the lightweight division, and beat all her ‘seniors’ from Lagos on her way to claiming her first gold medal at the national sports showpiece event.

In 2019, she transitioned to the featherweight division and won bronze alongside Adejumola at the 2019 African Games in Rabat, Morocco, her first international competition and medal for Nigeria.

Two years later, she was at her second festival, this time in Edo State, winning gold in the featherweight division.

Her upward trajectory continued up until the National Boxing Championships in the same year when she claimed a gold medal plus the Best Female Boxer award.

Her parents were fervently praying for her success while she was slugging it out inside the ring with her foes.

“Whenever she fights, I and her mother would fast and pray and I thank God for answering our prayers,” her dad Yakubu said.

However, the true test of the family’s prayers came in 2022 just before the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, UK.

“A day to the trip to Birmingham, I was called out, after I had already packed my bags. I was about to head out when I was told the COVID-19 test I had done a week before came out positive, meaning I wasn’t able to travel with the team.

“I told them, ‘But I did this thing a week ago, why is it just before the trip that you are saying I tested positive?’ Among all the athletes, even the ones who got decamped, I was the only one that tested positive. It was after my teammates got to the UK and started posting pictures that I started crying,” Oshoba said.

A second test was done, but it also came out positive. At that moment, Oshoba needed her parents’ support, which she got.

“We had to keep encouraging her, that they would conduct another test, and that it would be negative. Whenever she became emotional, we calmed her down with prayers,” her mum Juliana added.

As fate would have it, the third test came out negative and that was how Oshoba travelled with the last batch of Team Nigeria athletes a day to the start of the boxing events.

She was the first to fight despite getting there last, going by the schedule.

“I fought two days after I got there, so I was just like ‘let me just do it if I win or I don’t win.’ And God willing, I won my first fight, although it was not easy,” she told our correspondent.

Oshoba followed it up with other wins to claim a silver medal, Nigeria’s best medal in boxing at the Games, as three others won bronze medals.

In May 2022, before the Commonwealth Games, Opeyemi and Oshoba sparred together, with the former posting a video that caught the eye of UK-based businessman, Sean Murray, a manager at Neilson Boxing.

“I posted it (sparring video) on Facebook and under the post, Elizabeth commented, and then the man (Murray) tagged her and commented, and from there he texted her. She then explained it to me and I asked her to get his WhatsApp number and that’s how they kept talking,” Opeyemi said.

In an interview with BBC in 2023, Murray said, “I could see the talent there, so that’s what started the ball rolling.”

This meant that before heading to Birmingham, Oshoba already had one eye on the pros but wanted to represent Nigeria on a global stage and win a medal. Once that was done, she felt ready to follow up on her conversations with Murray, Lateef stated.

“When she came back from the Commonwealth Games, she started speaking about turning pro, that she met someone (Murray) that wanted to help her. So, she fought two professional fights in Nigeria in September before she travelled, one at the Police College and the other at the National Stadium in Lagos. She won both by knockouts,” Lateef added.

Before making the trip to the United Kingdom in October 2022, Oshoba paid a visit to Oba Olabode Thomas-Fagbayi.

“She bought me a wristwatch then and I said to her ‘Whatever you do, remember where you are coming from.’

“I told her to go all out, focus and ‘dedicate your time and have one thing at the back of your mind and that is you have to be successful.’ For me, Oshoba is just starting, she’s still going far,” the king of Tigbo-land said.

Oshoba’s first fight in the UK came barely a month after she arrived and she showed signs of what was to come, securing a first-round TKO win over her opponent in November 2022. She followed that up with two-point decision wins to get her first title chance a year later.

In November 2023, she claimed the IBO female super-featherweight title when she defeated Italian Martina Righi via unanimous decision.

Just two months later, she made history again by winning the WBC silver featherweight title.

Her crowning moment was January 13, 2024, when she entered the ring to fight Italy’s Michela Braga for the WBC silver featherweight championship and delivered a knockout blow in round 10 of their bout, securing her place as Nigeria’s first-ever female world title-holder.

After earlier knocking the Italian down in round eight, the Nigerian pugilist was well on her way to a unanimous win before she landed the final sucker punch that floored her opponent, extending her perfect record in the pros to seven straight wins.

Reflecting on her historic victory, Oshoba expressed her delight, as well as the desire for more world title fights, aiming for the prestigious main WBC belt.

“I feel on top of the world. I am very happy with this title, it is my first (world) title but I am still focused and I can’t wait for more world title fights and claim the main WBC belt,” she told The According.

Having attained the heights, Oshoba hasn’t forgotten her roots — just like Oba Thomas-Fagbayi advised —  which she credits for her success.

“I had tough training, sparred with male boxers and had to improvise a lot back home in Nigeria. I had to motivate myself a lot.

“So, I think that prepared me for the opportunities I am seeing now, all those challenges made me stronger. Whenever I remember those moments, it motivates me to give more than 100 per cent” Oshoba said.

The interim president of the Nigeria Boxing Federation, Azania Omo-Agege, hailed Oshoba following the landmark victory.

“I am not surprised that Oshoba became a champion, she has always been one and I have always regarded her as a champion too. I was very happy when I saw that she claimed the WBC silver title. She is one of our best athletes in Nigeria and I wish her good luck for the future,” he said.

Team Nigeria boxing coach Tony Konyegwachie, who took Oshoba to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, expressed happiness at her success.

“I am very happy for Elizabeth, she has always had the heart of a champion and I am sure she will win the WBC main title soon.”

Raphael, who is now a Corporal in the Nigeria Army, and can be credited with a lot of Oshoba’s successes, thinks his sister deserves all the accolades.

“To be honest, she proved herself beyond my imagination. She is the one who took herself here, yes, I may have pushed her but she never gave up,” he told our correspondent.

As our correspondent left the king’s palace, his last stop in Tigbo-Ilu, one of the palace workers handed him a rag to clean his shoes, which had turned brown from black.

“This is how you will know you have truly come to Tigbo-land,” the king said.

Although Oshoba has now left those sandy roads for the well-kept streets of the United Kingdom, just like she now trains inside world-class facilities, chasing her dreams, there’s no gainsaying the fact that her humble beginnings from Smart Boxing Academy plus her unflinching parents’ support and determination to succeed amid glaring obstacles, opened the path of success for her.

Thus, as she continues to raise the Nigerian flag after every victory, she is also putting the small but now mighty Tigbo-Ilu community on the world map.