Kingsley “Kellyrae” Sule has emerged victorious from Big Brother Naija’s ninth season following ten weeks of intense drama, tactics, and games
At the Sunday, October 6, 2024, BBNaija season 9 finale, Kellyrae defeated Wanni Danbaki, who finished in tight second place with a 3.47% vote difference, and Onyeka, who emerged as the second runner-up.
The professional singer from Delta State will receive N100M in rewards, which includes a brand-new SUV and an N60 million cash prize. Having gathered 35.95% of the vote, he was declared the season’s winner. This victory was gained by his calculated strategy. During a season where the housemates were introduced in pairs, Kellyrae selected his recently married wife Kassia to be the other member of his pair.
This was the first time a married couple appeared on the show as contestants. This is also the first time a married competitor has won the grand prize, even though we had witnessed a married person, Mike Edwards, come quite close to doing so. Even though the pair has been together for eleven years, many Nigerians believed that their time in the BBNaija house would wreck what they called a young marriage, given that they had only been married for seven months before to the show’s premiere.
The majority of viewers would have wagered that the DoubleKay couple would have been among the first couples to be evicted because of their marital status if a poll had been conducted before the show began to see how far they would go this season.
Kellyrae and Kassia’s plan to keep their marriage a secret in the house produced one of the biggest plot twists this season of the show, and in a couple of weeks, a status that typically jeopardizes participants’ chances on the show served as their selling point.
In a calculated move, the couple concealed their marriage from other housemates, forming bonds with them without feeling the need to cling to one another in order to prevent them from forming relationships with men or women. Toby Forge, an ex-housemate, even declared his love for Kassia before he was sent out; she politely declined his advances but established limits. Even though other roommates suspected them of being involved, the two made sure that there was no evidence to support their accusations.
Kellyrae said that he wanted people to be free with them and not target them because they were a couple when BBNaija host Ebuka Obi-Uchendu urged him to explain why he and his wife chose to conceal their marital status.
As a pair, Kassia and Kellyrae never finished last in the voting polls, not even during the first live eviction shows or the last one. Their fan base continued to support them even after the game shifted to an individual race until the penultimate episode, when DoubleKay management decided not to run for Kassia in order to prevent votes from being shared in the finals and allow Kellyrae to win for the pair
. Their weeks-long commitment has yielded results.
Their disputes, individual skills, general interaction, and free-spiritedness, along with their romantic moments that made the viewers and other housemates fall in love with them as a couple and as individuals, all contributed to their becoming well-liked by many.
This season was the most difficult to predict, though, and the polls indicate why—unlike past seasons when the victor was obvious. That being said, he was declared the winner on Sunday, October 6, 2024, and received the N60 million cash reward. Kellyrae became a member of the BBNaija Winners’ Hall of Fame in just a few weeks.
