Davita Lamai is the woman the country sees standing beside Zlatan Ibile, and knows almost nothing about.

She is 29. She was born in 1997.

Most of her life has been spent in the United Kingdom. She attended New Hall School, a Catholic boarding school in England, from 2007 to 2012.

She went on to the University of Kent, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Sciences between 2016 and 2019.

Then she went back. In 2025 she completed a Master of Public Administration at the University of Birmingham, and Zlatan was in the hall to watch her collect it.

She posted the programme on her own page and wrote two lines. "Proud of myself," she said. Then, "Two degrees hotter."

That second sentence tells you something about her. She does not present as a woman who needs the frame to be about somebody else.

Her working life is in customer success. She has spent over a decade in customer-facing roles, and since February 2024 she has been a senior account manager at Great Place To Work UK, based in London.

Before that she was an account manager at the same firm from 2022. Her work is the unglamorous kind that companies pay for, keeping big clients, fixing what breaks, and making sure the people who pay stay.

Some profiles describe her as a fashion entrepreneur.

What the public record actually shows is a corporate career in London and a children's clothing label she is still building, called Nai and Lo by Lamai.

The label is aimed at children from newborn to about twelve. It is not fully in the market yet, which means she is doing what most founders do quietly, building before announcing.

She is also a mother of two.

Her first son, Toluwalase Shiloh Ainoghena Omoniyi, arrived in March 2020, when she was 23. Her second son, Benaiah Oluwaseyitan Amanosi Omoniyi, came in 2024.

She carries Zlatan's surname, Omoniyi, on her public pages, and the family has been photographed together often enough that Nigerians feel they know the boys.

Her own story with him started in London in 2019, and she did not go looking for a celebrity.

It was Zlatan's first trip to the United Kingdom, and he did not understand the banking system. He asked a friend who wanted to talk music to come to him, and the friend arrived with Davita.

She helped. She took him to change hotels and sort his money. She drove him around for hours in her small car to the places he needed to be, and they talked on the phone for longer than the errands needed.

He asked to see her again. She told him she would have to check with the person she came with. Then she checked.

Her own account of the beginning is the one people remember. He was too shy to ask for her number, so he sent someone else to collect it. "People will not believe it," she said, laughing, while he covered his face.

She has said she was wary of dating a famous man. He made her feel safe, and he said "I love you" first.

Eight years later, the same man describes her as the final piece in the story he believes God is writing for him, and praises her for being hardworking from the day they met.

She has her own version of love, and it is not the flowers version. She has said she does not need gifts to feel loved, because she understands him, and that understanding carries more weight than any present.

She is also the reason some of his messiest moments never became public. Zlatan has said she has never taken their quarrels to Instagram, and that he has seen how a partner can make or break a man in his line of work.

She has a presence of her own when she chooses to use it. In January, a style feature on BellaNaija called her look a CEO one, a white double-breasted blazer with a frayed midi skirt, while he stood beside her in charcoal pinstripe.

The woman who once had to be asked, through a friend, whether a stranger could have her number now has two degrees, a career, a family and a brand of her own.

Her name is on all of it.

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Editorial note: The writer of this article does not claim to know Davita Lamai personally. The information regarding her background and career, as published on Global News Arena, is based entirely on independent internet research.

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