Kingmakers: From the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì to Contemporary Nigerian Politics

I put two things on the same table one morning: a week of printed Nigerian political coverage, and Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas, open at the chapter on Bashọ̀run Gáà. The stack of newsprint kept reaching for one word — kingmaker — sometimes as praise, sometimes as accusation. Johnson used the same word, but he meant a job. In contemporary Nigerian politics the term describes a person who can deliver a nomination. In eighteenth-century Ọ̀yọ́ it described an office with a title, a council seat, a ritual duty, and a written-in-custom procedure for removing a ruler who had failed.

I did not count the headlines. I stopped when the point was obvious.

The relationship between the two uses is not invention and not straight inheritance: the modern word is borrowed from a real institution, and it has kept the institution's authority while dropping the institution's accountability. That is the whole comparison, and everything below is the evidence for it.

The one case: Bashọ̀run Gáà

Ọ̀yọ́ was a Yoruba empire in what is now southwestern Nigeria, at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its ruler was the Aláàfin (ah-LAH-feen), and the Aláàfin did not simply inherit. He was chosen from among the eligible princes of the ruling houses by the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì (aw-YAW MEH-see), a council of seven principal chiefs of the capital, headed by the Bashọ̀run (ba-SHAW-roon). The Bashọ̀run's seat was not advisory decoration. He convened the council, he consulted Ifá on the state's behalf at the annual Ọ̀run festival, and he spoke first.

Gáà held that seat in the middle of the eighteenth century. In Johnson's account he raised and destroyed a succession of Aláàfins — several in a span of years — until the empire's highest office existed largely at his pleasure. The arrangement ended around 1774, when Aláàfin Abíọ́dún assembled enough provincial support to move against him, and Gáà was killed. Johnson, writing from Ọ̀yọ́ oral tradition in the 1890s, treats the episode as the empire's constitutional wound rather than as court gossip. A saying still current among Yoruba speakers renders the lesson as a warning: behave like Gáà, and you will end like Gáà.

What makes the case worth an hour of anyone's morning is not the violence. It is the mechanism Gáà abused. If the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì judged that an Aláàfin had lost the confidence of the state, they could send him an empty calabash — in some accounts, parrot's eggs — with a formula whose sense was that the gods rejected him, the earth rejected him, and the people rejected him. He was then expected to take his own life. The council could not appoint a ruler and then forget him. It carried the outcome.

And the council itself was checked. The Ògbóni (aw-GBOH-nee) — a senior society bound to Onílẹ̀, the owner of the earth, and known as Òsùgbó in some Ègbá towns — had to concur before the calabash could be sent. A kingmaker in Ọ̀yọ́ answered to a body whose authority came from the ground the town stood on. Versions differ on how the concurrence was obtained and how often it was withheld. They do not differ on the principle: nobody in the arrangement acted alone.

The office, seen from four traditions

Ọ̀yọ́ was not unusual in this. Across the region, the selection of a ruler was routinely somebody else's named job — and the arrangements differ in ways worth keeping straight.

A few of those entries need a sentence each.

In Benin, the Uzama N'Ihinron (oo-ZAH-ma) are the kingdom's oldest order of chiefs, and their leader, the Oliha, crowns the Oba. Accounts of the number vary because titles were added over time — the standard telling has an original five later brought to seven. What is striking is the dynasty's own origin story: in the Edo account, it was the elders of the city who sent to Ilé-Ifẹ̀ for Ọ̀ranmiyan, whose son became the first Oba of the present line. The kingmakers precede the king in Benin's own telling of itself. The order still exists; the Benin court still holds these titles today.

Among the Asante of Ghana, the line runs through women. Akan succession is matrilineal, and the Ohemaa (oh-heh-MAA) — usually translated "queen mother", though she is more precisely the senior woman of the royal matrilineage — nominates the candidate. The elders may refuse her nominee; in the standard description she may put forward others. A ruler is enstooled, not crowned: the stool, not a crown, is the seat of office, and the blackened stools of past rulers are kept as the presence of the ancestors. Above all of them sits the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, which Asante tradition holds contains the sunsum — the soul — of the nation, and which no person sits upon. Removal has its own word, destoolment, and its own procedure.

In much of Igboland, the comparison breaks in the most useful way: there was often no king to make. The much-quoted line Igbo enwe eze — the Igbo have no king — is a real saying and an overstatement. Nri had the Eze Nri, a ritual ruler whose authority was religious rather than military; Onitsha, Arochukwu and other communities had monarchs. But across many towns, authority was distributed among the ọha (the assembly of adult men), the age grades, the ọ̀zọ̀ title society, and the ụmụada, the daughters of a lineage, whose collective judgement carried real sanction. Ala, the earth deity, and her priest held the line that no council could cross.

What actually stood behind the office

The reason these arrangements belong on a site about belief, rather than only in a political science syllabus, is that the belief was the enforcement.

In Yoruba towns, a selection is confirmed by Ifá. A babaláwo (bah-bah-LAH-waw), a diviner trained in the Ifá corpus, is consulted, and a candidate the oracle does not confirm is not installed. This is present practice, not historical curiosity: Ifá divination is a living system, and chieftaincy processes in Yoruba communities still involve it, alongside state-recognised procedures and, frequently, court cases.

In Ọ̀yọ́, the Ògbóni's authority came from the earth. A council that could unmake a ruler had to have its judgement seconded by the one party that could not be lobbied, flattered or replaced. In Igbo communities, the same function sat with Ala: an act against the earth was nsọ ala, an abomination, and no assembly's majority could vote it acceptable. Among the Asante, an enstooled ruler swears an oath, and destoolment charges are framed as breaches of it — the offence is against the ancestors present in the stools, and the elders are the ones who must say so out loud.

Strip that layer out and the office becomes something else entirely. Which is roughly what happened next.

The colonial break

British indirect rule needed chiefs. Where they existed, they were enrolled; where they did not, they were manufactured. From the early 1900s, colonial officers in southeastern Nigeria issued warrants to selected men, creating "warrant chiefs" with powers no local tradition had ever granted anyone. In communities that had governed by assembly and title society, a single man now held a document from an outside power.

The response is one of the best-documented episodes in Nigerian colonial history. In 1929, in Ogu Umunwaanyi — the Women's War, in the Aba and Owerri areas — tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women mobilised against warrant chiefs and the prospect of taxation, using the established sanction of "sitting on a man": collective, sustained public shaming outside a man's compound until he answered. British forces fired on crowds and killed dozens of women. The colonial administration afterwards revised the warrant chief system.

The point for this comparison is narrower than the history. Under indirect rule, the kingmaking function moved. It stopped being a titled seat inside a community, answerable to that community's ultimate authorities, and became a signature from outside. The office survived the change in name. Its accountability did not.

The borrowed word

Since the return to civilian rule in 1999, Nigerian political commentary has used a vocabulary of patronage: the patron who funds a campaign, secures a party ticket and expects a return once his candidate is in office. The phenomenon has its own substantial academic literature, its own court cases, and its own periodic public quarrels between patrons and the people they helped elect. Journalists reach for the older, grander word too, because it carries weight that "party financier" does not.

The borrowing is not accidental, and it is not entirely dishonest. Something real is being described: Nigeria's presidency and its state houses are genuinely won through networks, and pretending otherwise would be its own distortion. The word arrives, though, wearing the dignity of the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì — a public office, held under a known title, answerable to a body that could remove its own appointee.

It is worth adding what Nigerian law now says about the traditional side of this. Ọba, Emirs and Obi hold constitutionally recognised traditional offices but are barred from partisan politics, and their influence today is moral and communal rather than electoral. The old kingmaking councils have not moved into party politics. Their vocabulary has.

Where the connection ends

This is the part a careful reader should not blur.

The old office's real power was subtraction. The Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì's defining instrument was not the appointment; it was the calabash. The Asante elders' defining instrument is not enstoolment; it is destoolment. A patron who can install a candidate but has no recognised procedure for removing him holds only half the office, and the more dangerous half.

The old office answered upward to something it could not negotiate with. Ògbóni and the earth in Ọ̀yọ́; Ala among the Igbo; the ancestors in the stools among the Asante; Ifá's confirmation across Yoruba towns. Modern patronage answers to a private agreement between two people, enforceable only by their appetite for a public quarrel.

The old office was public and named. The Bashọ̀run was the Bashọ̀run. Everyone in Ọ̀yọ́ knew who sat on the council, what the seat entitled him to, and what he could be blamed for. Informal influence is powerful precisely because it has no title and therefore no job description to fail against.

And the metaphor quietly insults the institution it borrows from. When "kingmaker" becomes a synonym for manipulation, a genuine constitutional office in Yoruba, Edo and Akan history gets rewritten as a lesson in cynicism. It was closer to the opposite: an answer, worked out over centuries, to the problem of what a people do when their ruler fails them.

Where scholars disagree

The Ọ̀yọ́ portrait above rests heavily on Samuel Johnson, whose History of the Yorubas was completed in the 1890s and published in 1921. Johnson was an Anglican clergyman of Ọ̀yọ́ descent, writing from oral tradition decades after the empire's collapse, and with a clear purpose: to show that the Yoruba had a lawful constitution. Later historians — Robin Law's study of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire is the usual reference point — read that constitutional account critically. The disagreement is not about whether the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì existed or whether the calabash convention was known. It is about how routinely the convention was actually applied, and how much of Johnson's tidy scheme describes practice as against an ideal that Ọ̀yọ́ held about itself. Both positions are respectable. Anyone claiming certainty here is reaching past the evidence.

Names and terms

• Aláàfin — the ruler of Ọ̀yọ́, chosen from eligible princes of the ruling houses.
• Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì — the council of seven principal chiefs of Ọ̀yọ́ who selected the Aláàfin.
• Bashọ̀run — the head of the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì; Gáà held the title in the mid-1700s.
• Ògbóni (Òsùgbó in some Ègbá towns) — a senior Yoruba society bound to the earth, whose concurrence checked the council.
• Ifá — the Yoruba divination system, consulted through a trained babaláwo; a living practice, not a historical one.
• Uzama N'Ihinron — the senior order of hereditary chiefs of the Benin Kingdom; the Oliha crowns a new Oba.
• Ohemaa — among the Akan, the senior woman of the royal matrilineage, who nominates a candidate for the stool.
• Enstoolment / destoolment — the Akan installation and removal of a ruler; the stool, not a crown, is the office.
• Sika Dwa Kofi — the Golden Stool, which Asante tradition holds contains the sunsum, the soul, of the nation.
• Ọha — in many Igbo communities, the assembly of adult men; one of several bodies sharing authority.
• Ụmụada — the daughters of an Igbo lineage, whose collective judgement carries sanction.
• Ala — the Igbo earth deity; offences against her are nsọ ala, abomination.
• Warrant chief — a man given authority by British colonial warrant, often where no such office had existed.

Back to the table

By the end of the morning the two stacks had stopped arguing with each other. The newsprint was describing something that exists. Johnson was describing something that was built — deliberately, over generations, with the removal clause written in first.

A Yoruba proverb often quoted in Nigeria holds that an elder cannot be present in the market and let a child's head sit crooked on the load. The elder's standing is the elder's liability. That was the bargain in the calabash, in the stool, in the concurrence of the earth: the right to choose a ruler was inseparable from the duty to answer for one.

The old office was never the power to make a king. It was the power to unmake one.