On Friday 15 September 2023, at the commissioning of the 34.85 km Oyo–Iseyin road by Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde, former President Olusegun Obasanjo took the microphone, noticed that several seated traditional rulers had not stood when the governor was being recognised, and proceeded — in front of cameras — to command them: 'Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down.' The royal fathers, including senior Oke-Ogun obas, complied while video rolled.
The video circulated within hours. The Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrosheed Akanbi, called it an 'ignoble act' and a humiliation of the institution of Yoruba kingship. The Yoruba Obas Forum (YOF) — the formal body of Yoruba traditional rulers — convened and demanded a public apology from the former president, framing the incident as a breach of the constitutional and customary dignity of the Obaship. The Yoruba Council Worldwide added its weight to the demand. Several Oyo monarchs themselves broke their initial silence in the following week to register protest.
Obasanjo's defenders argued that the obas should have stood as a matter of basic courtesy to the elected head of the state government, and that the former president — himself a chief of the Owu kingdom (Balogun of Owu) — was within his rights to enforce protocol. His critics countered that, whatever the protocol question, the public humiliation of senior Yoruba monarchs by a non-monarch on television was itself a more serious breach. The episode crystallised a long-running tension in the Fourth Republic between elected officials and traditional rulers over precedence, particularly in the South-West where the obas retain very high cultural authority but no constitutional executive power.
## The longer arc — how the monarchs lost the room
The Iseyin moment is downstream of two earlier amputations of the Nigerian monarchies, separated by 75 years.
First, the colonial extinguishing of executive sovereignty (1885–1914). The British did not encounter a continent of stateless tribes; they encountered, and broke, the commercial counterparties who had become commercially dominant — King Jaja of Opobo, deported in 1887; Nana Olomu of Ebrohimi, exiled in 1894; Oba Ovonramwen of Benin, sacked in 1897; the Sokoto Caliph killed at Burmi in 1903. The Caliphate's emirs were retained as paid colonial agents under Lugard's indirect rule; the southern monarchies were retained as 'Native Authorities' under Warrant Chief and Ordinance regimes. By 1914 every sovereign monarch in the territory had been formally reduced to a stipendiary of the Crown.
Second — and this is the Obasanjo connection — the 1976 Local Government Reform. As military Head of State, General Obasanjo signed the *Guidelines for Local Government Reform 1976*, which formally created a uniform local-government tier across the Federation, abolished the residual statutory revenue and judicial functions of traditional rulers, and reduced the obas, emirs and obongs to a constitutionally advisory role. Section 7 of the 1979 Constitution (carried forward into the 1999 CFRN) codifies the local government tier and is silent on traditional rulers; they appear in no executive provision of the federal constitution. Houses of Chiefs at state level retain ceremonial weight; they are not organs of government.
The Iseyin incident is what that 1976 reform looks like 47 years later in a public square. The man who, as Head of State, signed the document that reduced the obas to advisers, stood in front of a row of them in 2023 and told them to stand up and sit down. The obas complied. They had been, for the previous four-and-a-half decades, the dignitaries he had constitutionally made them.
The story is recorded here as the most televised episode in the post-1999 contest over the dignity and political standing of the Nigerian traditional institution — and as the visible terminus of a 138-year process that runs from Jaja's deportation through Lugard's indirect rule and Obasanjo's local government reform to the Oyo–Iseyin road.