Oluwo of Iwo – A King without borders

By Abdullahi O Haruna Haruspice

Nigeria is rarely short of rhetoric about unity. Most of it evaporates upon contact with reality. Yet at the Razornews Inter-Agency Cooperation Lectures and Awards in Lagos, an unexpected voice cut through the familiar din. It did not come from a politician seeking applause, nor from a bureaucrat defending budgets. It came from a traditional ruler—one who, on this occasion, discarded the podium entirely, opting instead to speak with a disarming informality that proved more subversive than ceremonial.

Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, the Oluwo of Iwo, did something unusual for a Nigerian public figure: he refused to be provincial. In a country where identity is often reduced to which corner of the map produced one’s parents, the Oluwo offered a worldview that would not have been out of place in the courts of Cyrus the Great or Ashoka—ancient rulers who understood that authority need not be territorial to be legitimate.

The Oluwo’s thesis was simple enough:
The man born in Sokoto is no more responsible for his birthplace than the man born in Bayelsa. Geography, he argued, is the least interesting thing about a person; yet it is the axis around which Nigeria has spun its most persistent divisions. What truly astonished the audience was the clarity with which he articulated this. Nigeria’s tribal mistrusts, he suggested, endure not because they are natural, but because they are convenient.

Then came the line that defined the afternoon:
“I am a king with no provincial boundaries but boundless boundaries.”
It was a remark delivered without theatrics but with enough conviction to momentarily suspend the audience’s cynicism. In his kingdom, he insisted, the Fulani herder and the Yoruba native enjoy equal legitimacy. In a country where the politics of belonging is often weaponised, this was a radical proposition.

Unlike many royal homilies, the Oluwo’s intervention did not lean on nostalgia or myth. Instead, it offered a blunt, contemporary logic: people who insist on viewing others solely through the lens of tribe or religion are not defending culture—they are obstructing progress. His argument, shorn of sentimentality, amounted to a quiet indictment of the Nigerian habit of suspicion.

For this writer, observing him was unexpectedly absorbing. There was something refreshingly uncalculated in his candour—rare in a public space where even sincerity tends to be rehearsed. One might not expect to find a lesson in civic nationalism delivered by a monarch whose title predates the modern state, yet here it was.

If this seems an overly generous interpretation of a single afternoon’s speech, it is worth noting that Nigeria’s most resonant political ideas often emerge from unlikely quarters. The Oluwo, with his unhurried logic and gently provocative worldview, may well represent one of them. His appearance in Lagos was, for this observer at least, the most intriguing discovery of the year.

Whether his vision extends beyond his domain is uncertain. Nigeria is a country that reflexively resists such idealism. Yet if more of its leaders—traditional or otherwise—embraced his notion of “boundless boundaries,” the country might inch closer to the nation it claims to be.

Infectiously musing