Oluwo of Iwoland, Oba Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe
By Our Reporter
The Oluwo of Iwoland, Oba Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe, is currently being taunted by some dirty pasts.
These have made him uncomfortable in the last few weeks.
The monarch popularly known as Adewale Akanbi has been revealed by the United States Department of Justice documentation as a ‘Convicted Conman’ found guilty by the for his alleged credit cards activities, forgery and identity theft crimes while in the United States of America.
In a series of documents from the United States Department of Justice it was stated that Oba Akanbi was deported from the U.S to Nigeria in 1999 after his conviction for aggravated felony- an offence that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 or both.
Prince Harry and Oba Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe
He was deported after using the name Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe to enter the United States. Oba Akanbi again tried to gain entry into America through Peace Bridge land crossing border from Canada but was arrested on March 11, 2011 after using the name Adewale Akanbi with June 21, 1967 as his date of birth.
The mornarch was subsequently held and committed to prison custody until December 19, 2011 when he was deported to Canada where he has a resident permit.
“On about March 11, 2011, in the Western District of New York, the defendant, Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe aka Prince Adewale Akanbi, an alien who had previously been deported and removed from the United States on or about May 18, 1999, subsequent to a conviction for commission of an aggravated felony, did enter, attempt to enter and was voluntarily present and found in the United States without having first obtained the express consent of the Attorney-General of the United States or his successor, the Secretary for Homeland Security, to reapply for admission to the United States.
“All in violation of Title 8, United States Code, Section 1326 (a) and 1326 (b) (2),” a document signed by William J. Honcho Jrn, former United States Attorney, read.
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It would be recalled that in an earlier letter to the Osun State Government dated June 17, 2020, the Association of Iwoland Indigenes in Diaspora through their lawyer, Peter Adeosun, raised a number of allegations against the monarch, calling for his removal for gross abuse of office.
They said Oba Akanbi’s character did not befit a person of his status and calibre as he always moved around with armed thugs, miscreants and hoodlums to harass, intimidate, molest and attack persons whom he perceives as enemies.
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“Your Excellency, it is our brief as evidenced by various correspondences made available to us by our clients that Oluwo Abdulrasheed Akanbi has been conducting himself in manners which are antithetical to that of a monarch in any clime and very unbecoming of a Yoruba Oba.
“It is therefore disheartening to our clients that the Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Akanbi (hereinafter referred to as Oba Akanbi), a Yoruba king who is supposed to be the custodian of Iwo culture and values has been misrepresenting the interest of Iwoland and this is becoming rather shameful,” the lawyer wrote to the state governor.
The Iwo indigenes also accused Oba Akanbi of being an ex-convict, who served time in United States jail for credit card fraud, drug trafficking among other criminal acts.
In a separate letter to the traditional ruler in response to the one received from the Iwo indigenes association, Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice of Osun State, Oluwafemi Akande, asked Oba Akanbi to react to the allegations raised by his people before the next line of action was determined.
It was reported in a section of the press that the development sent the young and flamboyant monarch into panic especially after his style of leadership and mode of operation became a source of concern for some members of the public and indeed fellow traditional rulers across Yorubaland.
And when Prince Harry and wife, Meghan visited Nigeria recently, the flamboyant Oluwo of Iwoland was all over the place.
Taking to the microphone, Prince Harry gestured towards the Nigerian royals ranged before him, playfully calling them his ‘in-laws’.
It brought laughter from his audience. ‘I’ll skip the protocol because at this point we’re all family,’ the duke added, to more guffaws.
On reflection, though, maybe it wasn’t such a big joke after all.
The House of Windsor may have cut the Sussexes adrift but in Lagos penultimate Sunday wealthy rulers bearing gifts and titles were effectively competing to claim Meghan for their own royal families.
But as the duke and duchess would do well to note, not everyone who came paying homage was all they seemed.
The Mail on Sunday reveals that one of the kings is a convicted fraudster who was twice kicked out of the United States.
After some other kings have given gifts and poured encomiums of their visitors, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, the 56-year-old Oluwo of Iwoland in Western Nigeria, then took centre stage.
Microphone in hand, he turned to Meghan – who was walked down the aisle on her wedding day by King Charles – and said: ‘Thank God you are one of us.’
As the Sussexes stood before the seated guests, Akanbi made a show of presenting them a series of gifts including necklaces and bracelets and robes fashioned from handwoven fabric.
And staking his own people’s claim on the duchess, he bestowed on her the Yoruba name Adetokunbo meaning ‘royalty from across the seas’.
Flamboyant even for Nigerian royalty, Akanbi drives a canary yellow McLaren supercar and is known as the Funky King.
His wife Queen Firdaus has described him as playful and jovial and says she fell in love with him at first sight. As her husband joked with Harry, she chatted to Meghan and at one point the two women posed for a picture which Queen Firdaus later posted on her Instagram account.
While it is tempting to imagine Firdaus making a glamorous addition to Meghan’s inner circle, the Sussexes might wish to think twice before inviting the royal couple to their Californian mansion – not least because Akanbi is barred for life from entering the US.
Akanbi, who while born a prince hasn’t always lived in splendour, is allegedly a convicted conman whose own people have called for his dethronement.
Four years ago, a letter from a lawyer representing the Association of Iwoland Indigenes in Diaspora (AIID) accused him of ‘conducting himself in manners which are antithetical to that of a monarch in any clime and very unbecoming of a Yoruba Oba’.
It said he assaulted another monarch Dhikrulahi Akinropo of Ogbagba during a ‘peace meeting’ to settle a land dispute. But Akanbi said that Akinropo had interrupted his speech and tried to attack him with his golden staff of office.
‘He started calling me unprintable names, pointing his staff of office at me while attempting to stick the staff into my eyes,’ said Akanbi. ‘I heavily rejected it with a force he could not withstand.’
Much worse was to come from others, though, including his ex-wife Chanel Chin, the daughter of a Jamaican reggae star, who has called him a ‘devil’ and publicly accused him of sexual assault.
The letter from the AIID to a state governor accuses Akanbi of shamefully ‘misrepresenting the interests of Iwoland’ and causing so many ‘controversies’ that it is hard to ‘imagine he ascended the throne’. It says: ‘Our clients have several reported cases of intimidation, harassments and acts of subjecting the poor indigenes of Iwoland to all sort of threats.’
It adds that the king made false allegations against Ms Chin, claiming she was ‘sleeping around with all sort of palace men’-which she denied in a TV interview.
In fact, adds the letter, ‘the unassailable evidence at the disposal of our clients was to the effect that…Akanbi has been the one defiling Iwoland with various shameless reports of defilements of young girls and ladies in the community’.
Court records in the US reveal an extensive criminal record. He once tried to cash a forged cheque for £247,000, an ‘aggravated felony’ to which he pleaded guilty- and ultimately left him facing the prospect of 20 years in jail and a £197,000 fine.
While the Sussexes had no inkling they were being feted by a fraudster, Akanbi’s lengthy criminal record stretches over scores of legal documents. Akanbi, then using the name Segun Adewale Adeonigbagbe, was first arrested in Boston in 1998 after he walked into BankBoston posing as a Joseph Pigott and attempted to cash the stolen £247,000 cheque from aviation company Boeing.
In a statement, Neil Hegarty of the Financial Organised Crime Task Force said he was alerted by a suspicious bank teller.
Agent Hegarty contacted the real Joseph Pigott, a successful businessman who said his mail had been stolen and that the thief had used his identity to apply for credit cards, write bogus cheques and attempt to cash real ones. The £247,000 cheque had been sent to Mr. Pigott by Boeing, which immediately stopped it when the businessman rang to say he had not received it.
Surveillance footage was used to identify and arrest Akanbi, who was later charged with a second count of forging a cheque for £59,000 using the name Thomas Eyring.
These days, back in his homeland, Akanbi sits in lavish robes on a giant throne. Visitors to his palace are required to fall at his Gucci loafers. Once he boasted in an interview that a former Nigerian president ‘prostrated before me’.
In 1998, though, he claimed he was too broke to afford a lawyer. He pleaded guilty to both charges and wrote to the judge begging for leniency.
‘Please temper justice with mercy,’ he said. ‘I am not a career criminal, it was a situation beyond my control which I will never let it (sic) happen to me again. I am really sorry for doing it.’
He was jailed for 15 months in July 1998. His £1,500 fine was waived ‘because of an inabilDeported to Nigeria in April 1999, he was banned from re-entering the US ‘without lawful authority of the government,’ specifically the Department of Homeland Security which is in charge of securing America’s borders.
While details of Akanbi’s past are murky, at some point he settled in Canada and married.
In March 2011-just a few months before a young Meghan Markle moved to Canada and began filming Suits – he was caught attempting to cross the border into America with his wife and young son using a passport in the name of Prince Adeale Akanbi.
At first he told border agents they were heading to New York to go shopping but later changed his story saying they were going to a wedding. When the guards checked his fingerprints they discovered his prior criminal convictions and deportation.
Considered a flight risk, he was held in custody and later taken to New York where he faced a grand jury in April 2011 on one charge of ‘attempting to re-enter the United States after having been deported subsequent to a conviction for an aggravated felony’.
At this point, Akanbi was facing a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and a fine of £197,000.
He pleaded guilty and in a five-page statement before sentencing he again begged a judge for mercy, saying his ‘formative years spent in Africa were very difficult’.
He claimed his father whipped him on a weekly basis.
He lived on the streets by the age of 12 and, at 17, was sent to an institution ‘where he was chained, beaten and forced to learn Arabic’. Akanbi blamed his wife saying she had convinced him he could re-enter the U.S because more than a decade had passed since his deportation.
His then-wife Rakiya Saidu, who he married in 2009, wrote to the judge describing her husband as ‘a loving and caring person.’
Akanbi was sentenced to time served, deported and banned from the U.S for life for a second time-but it evidently didn’t stop him becoming king.
Neither has his promise to reign for more than six decades been blown off course by the various allegations against him.
