KellyRae: How 33-year-old artiste’s strategy with wife won BBNaija S9

After ten weeks of intense drama, strategies, and games, Kingsley ‘Kellyrae’ Sule has been crowned the winner of the ninth season of Big Brother Naija, winning against Wanni Danbaki, who came close second with 3.47% vote difference and Onyeka emerging as the second runner up at the BBNaija season 9 finale on Sunday, October 6, 2024.

The professional singer who hails from Delta State will be going home with N100M worth of prizes consisting of N60 million cash prize and a brand new SUV. He won the season after amassing 35.95% of the total votes. His strategic approach earned him this win. In a season that had the housemates come in as pairs, Kellyrae chose his newlywed wife, Kassia, as the other half of his duo.

This marked the first time we saw a married couple as contestants on the show. Although we had seen a married individual, Mike Edwards, came close to claiming the crown, this is the first time a married contestant has taken the ultimate prize. Married barely seven months before the show started, many Nigerians soon projected that their stay in the BBNaija house would ruin what many termed a marriage in its early stages even though the couple have been together for eleven years.

If you had run a poll at the start of the show to predict how far the DoubleKay duo would go this season, most people would have bet that the duo, due to their marital status, would have been one of the first duos to be evicted.

In a matter of weeks, a status that usually compromises contestants’ chances on the show served as their selling point as Kellyrae and Kassia’s strategy to hide their marriage in the house led to one of the biggest plot twists on the show this season.

In a move devised by the couple, they hid that they were married from the housemates, bonding with other housemates without necessarily clinging onto each other to stop them from making connections, whether it was with women or men. Before his eviction, Toby Forge, an ex-housemate, even professed love to Kassia, who amusedly entertained his advances but set boundaries. Although housemates suspected their involvement, there was nothing to prove their suspicions, and the duo made sure of it.

When BBNaija host Ebuka Obi-Uchendu prompted Kellyrae to reveal why he and his wife decided to hide their marital status, he mentioned that he wanted everyone to be free with them and not target them because they were a couple.

From the first live eviction shows to the last eviction show, as a duo, Kassia and Kellyrae never saw the bottom of the voting polls. Even when the game changed to a race for individuals, they were equally supported by their fanbase until the penultimate episode, where the DoubleKay management had chosen not to campaign for Kassia so votes would not be shared in the finals and Kellyrae could secure the win for the couple. In a matter of weeks, their sacrifice has paid off.

From lovey-dovey moments that had both the viewers and suspecting housemates falling in love with them as individuals and as a couple to their fights, their individual skills, overall interaction, and free-spiritedness, all these elements secured them a place in the hearts of many.

However, unlike previous seasons where the winner was clear, this season was the hardest to predict, and the voting polls show reasons why.  Regardless, on Sunday, October 6, 2024, he was crowned winner and got to take home the N60 million cash prize. In a matter of weeks, Kellyrae has joined the BBNaija Winners’ Hall of Fame.