The news broke this week with the startling bluntness of a gavel on oak: Oba Joseph Oloyede, the Apetu of Ipetumodu in Osun State, sentenced to fifty-six months in a United States prison. The charges? A $4.2 million COVID-19 relief fraud. The monarch, who pleaded guilty in April, will not only serve close to five years behind bars in Ohio but will also repay more than $4.4 million to victims of his scam. His home in Medina, Ohio – an otherwise quiet suburb – now stands forfeited to the American government.
It is the sort of headline that stiffens the spine, pricks the conscience, and feeds the stereotype. A Nigerian monarch – one who should embody the dignity of ancestry and the moral force of tradition – is instead listed among convicts for criminal ingenuity. The image is painful, not only for the small town in Osun that in 2019 wrapped his coronation in pomp, but for a country that already wrestles with a stubborn reputation for duplicity and fraud.
But Oba Oloyede is not an isolated cautionary tale. The annals of recent history hold other names, other crowns, similarly soiled.
In 1998, in Boston, a certain Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi – now known as the Oluwo of Iwo – was arrested for attempting to cash a stolen Boeing cheque worth nearly a quarter of a million pounds. Convicted (15-month jail time) and deported, he returned more than a decade later to U.S. soil, this time with wife and child, attempting to sneak past immigration with forged papers. Again, he was caught. Again, deported. Twice bruised, twice expelled, forever banned. Yet today he sits atop a Yoruba throne, offering counsel to thousands, draped in the legitimacy of tradition. Overwhelmed with shame, the town’s kingmakers sought valiantly to dethrone him – a strangely futile effort. Till date!
Then there are the “princes” and sons of the palaces – sometimes literal, sometimes in the flamboyant styling of internet fraudsters – who have been paraded by American and European prosecutors as architects of elaborate scams. He was sentenced to 33 months in a federal prison. In 2021, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed charges against a self-described Nigerian prince, the son of a traditional ruler, for bilking the elderly through email compromise schemes. Though not himself a crowned monarch, his bloodline ties the scandal to the palace.
These are not everyday stories. The overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s monarchs live quiet, often austere lives, managing land disputes, presiding over cultural festivals, and attempting to coax some dignity out of an environment that often bypasses them. Yet the few scandals that do emerge cast a long, ugly shadow. They touch the sore spot of our national psyche: the ease with which fraud seems to seep into every class, every calling, every sanctum.
Traditional rulership was once our moral compass. In many communities, the king was priest, judge, and father; the crown symbolised restraint, justice, continuity.
Personages like Oba Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi, the Ooni of Ife who strode both throne and state house with rare dignity; Oba Adeniji Adele of Lagos whose tenure in the 1950s radiated grace and balance; the scholarly Emir Muhammadu Sanusi I of Kano; or the Olowo of Owo, Oba Olateru Olagbegi, with his famed cultural splendour – these were monarchs who entrenched grandeur, charisma, reverence, and adoration. Even into the 1970s, the stool was still a repository of dignity and cultural ballast. But in the relentless scramble of modern Nigeria – oil windfalls, electoral violence, state capture, and systemic corruption – the aura of the palace has dulled. To now see its scions in foreign dockyards, chained to charges of fraud and deceit, is to feel the last safe space slipping….
By : Femi Akintunde-Johnson. Culled from Thisday Newspaper.
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