As monarch I talk a lot & get embarrassed everyday

Getting to meet His Royal Highness, Oba Kabiru Alani Kolawole Agbabiaka, the Osolo of Isolo is not at all a gruelling task. The burly monarch, who sits atop the sprawling city, is, no doubt, one of the most accessible traditional rulers in Nigeria. The ancient community, a popular suburb in Lagos, is an easy area to locate. From anywhere in Lagos, you can find your way to Osolo palace. A simple request and you would be ushered into the interior because this Oba is available to everyone. It is a simply furnished interior with different types of royal artefacts adorning the walls of the expansive room.
His Highness, an imposing figure, looked smart in his royal chair. For the first 15 minutes when this reporter stepped into the palace, he was busy talking to different people who had come with different problems. “This is the way I talk every day,” he said at the commencement of this interview. But according to him, endless talking was not the only problem he has learnt to cope with since five years ago, when he came to the throne. The 50-year-old monarch has also learnt to be more generous in his spending as people would not stop bringing their financial problems for him to solve.
The worst of his daily experience, he said, is the unavoidable embarrassment he gets from his subject. But all these, he believes, are parts of the challenges that come with leadership, especially the position of a traditional ruler. So far, it has taken the mixture of diplomacy, wisdom and the grace of God for him to cope with the challenges.
The throne
You have to be thankful to God for every position you find yourself in life. As a traditional ruler, you are responsible for everything in your domain. As such you have to be very careful. You have to know what you are doing. You must always look back and remember the people that stood by you. You must remember your people all the time. You must also remember the government. Any one who does not know all these, it is imperative for him to open his eyes and learn them. So many things are involved in being an Oba. It is not something that is easy at all. But if God is with you, the people are with you and you are also with yourself and you know what you are doing, you will not have any problem at all. As a monarch, you deal with different kinds of people, many of whom are betrayers, liars, who would see black and tell you that it is white; they create trouble for you so that they can continue to eat from there. These are the kinds of people we deal with on daily basis. These people are like a leopard who can never change its skin. There is nothing you can do to change them. You just have to manage them. You have to apply wisdom and diplomacy in dealing with them. You tell them the truth and sometimes lie to them when necessary. Sometimes you flare up and let them know that you are angry so that you make them to know that you see some of the things they think that you are not seeing. It is not every thing that you take. I have seen so many things both before and after I was crowned. I receive challenges in from different angles, from my wives, my children and among my people in general. But I have also learned from those challenges. Sometimes you have to listen and pretend as if you don’t know anything. Some people would tell you rubbish while some would give you words of wisdom. You become wiser by the time you combine different ideas with your own.
The Isolo town
I am ruling over a town where we have many educated people and many wise people. There is a clear difference between being educated and being wise. Some people would bring up ideas based on their education. These ideas sometimes clash with wisdom. This has been the usual scenario here and it has always caused a lot of misunderstanding. But I don’t really see this as strange because any town that wants to prosper, there must be misunderstanding. It is now left for you as the leader to apply diplomacy in any situation. The position of an Oba is a school on its own, a place where you learn so many things.

Pre-throne sign
I can’t remember seeing any sign that I was going to get to this position. If you find out, most people that see signs of great things don’t end up achieving those things. I never even imagined it not to talk of seeing any sign. Although I met some people who prophesised that I was going to a high place, I never at any time thought of the position of an Oba.


Contest for Oba
There were six of in the list, contesting for this seat. Everybody was doing everything to get to the position. There is nobody that does not want a good thing. I had a lot of threats from people. This did not come to me as a surprise because I have always known that vying for a position like this entails such kinds of challenges. Naturally I am a fearless person. You can never intimidate me with any kind of threat because I am always prepared and your threat would not move me until you come openly to confront me. It is then that I will know that you mean business. My opponents’ supporters are not even the ones that bothered me. There were people who pretended to be my supporters only for me to find out later that they were looking for my downfall. These are the kind of people one should fear most in a situation like that. I had a handful of them but in the end God’s will prevailed. While I credit my victory to God, I must say that I had good supporters and I also had a good reputation in the community. But by and large, I credit my victory to God Almighty.
Pre-throne position
I was a businessman. At the time I was called to contest for the throne, I was the head of Okota royal family. When the throne was vacant, people think I should come out because I come from the next ruling family. It was my people that said I should come out and contest, it wasn’t my decision. But there were some among these people who still came out to contest later.
Daily experience
I talk a lot and I spend much every day. You can see since you entered here I have been talking and giving people money, yet money is not coming in. I also get embarrassed every day and it comes in different ways. Let me give you an instance. You give money to somebody to help you do something and he comes back to tell you that armed robbers have collected the money from him only for you to see him enjoying himself around with the money. By the time he finishes spending the money, you still see him here and there is nothing you can do. He would even come to ask you for another favour. Is that not an embarrassment? We also have an instance where someone would steal something in the palace and when you need that thing badly, he would be the one to lead the search team looking for what he knows could not be found. Later, you will see him using that thing under your very nose. You are embarrassed and as a leader, you must not overreact. You have to learn to tolerate things like this because you can’t stop it. It happens everyday.
If I were not here
If I were not an Oba, I would be doing my business enjoying my life and my privacy. You see as a monarch, you attend to people’s problem every now and then. It is only on few occasions when I feel like relaxing that I restrict people’s visit to the palace otherwise they would never stop coming. One thing I have learnt is that you must consider yourself first in everything you do before you consider any other person. But if you put other’s problem on your head and forget yourself, you would die early and the same people would blame you.
Hobby
I am a socialite. I love going to parties. I attend events. I am also very romantic. I have five wives and they are all happy because they all enjoy my attention. Though I now spend more time attending to people all my wives understand. As a monarch, I can marry as many wives as possible, even though I’m a Muslim. Quran does not say that we should not marry more than four wives. And aside from that, the case of an Oba is always different. As we have seen in the Bible and Quaran, God gave monarchs power to marry as many wives as possible. Look at Solomon and David. They have many wives and many concubines.

Story by Jibola Oyekunle.