First Lady Fatima Bio Loses Southwark Council Flat in London
Tolulope Aina Southwark Council has evicted Sierra Leone’s First Lady Fatima Jabbe-Bio from a London council flat following reports by The Times and OCCRP that she continued to live in a taxpayer-subsidized property despite living in the presidential lodge in Freetown.
The action follows a joint investigation published in May 2025 into the first lady’s property holdings, which included the purchase of high-end homes in Gambia.
Council housing in the United Kingdom is designed to provide below-market rents to people in genuine housing need, with eligibility typically based on low income and limited savings.
The council said it moved to reclaim the flat after the newspaper revealed that Jabbe-Bio kept the Southwark home while her husband was Sierra Leone’s president.
In an interview with the BBC, Jabbe-Bio confirmed that she had kept the apartment in London and that her British-citizen children lived there.
The former Nollywood actress, who moved to London in the early 2000s and to the Southwark flat in 2007, claims she pays for the property herself and denies any wrongdoing. When her husband became president of Sierra Leone in 2018, she relocated there.
Southwark Council did not provide full details of the eviction, but did state that it had acted in response to the investigation’s findings.
The case has prompted renewed scrutiny of how social housing allocations are monitored, as well as the larger issue of public officials or their family members having access to subsidised housing while living abroad.