Olowu’s Hunger Warning and the Politics Behind a Royal Rebuke
By Our Correspondent | July 28, 2026
When the Olowu of Owu Kingdom, Oba Professor Saka Adeola Matemilola, stepped before the press at his Ago-Oke-Owu Palace in Abeokuta to mark his fourth coronation anniversary, he did not deliver the usual ceremonial pleasantries. He issued a warning.
Hunger, the monarch declared, is stalking Nigeria’s schoolchildren — and if the Federal Government cannot fix its school feeding programme, it will reap the consequences in crime, instability, and a lost generation. Strong words from any figure. From a first-class traditional ruler in a politically charged state, they landed like a thunderclap.
But who is this king, how did he get to the throne, what has he actually done about hunger, and — the question on many Abeokuta lips — is this royal advocacy as pure as it sounds?
From Cambridge to the Palace: The Making of the 14th Olowu
Saka Adeola Matemilola was born on August 4, 1964, into the Otileta dynasty of Owu Kingdom — a lineage that traces its roots to Ajibosin, great-grandson of the legendary Oduduwa, the acknowledged progenitor of the Yoruba people. He grew up in the Soke Compound and, by all accounts, did not follow the conventional path to traditional rulership. He followed knowledge.
Matemilola earned a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ibadan, then crossed the Atlantic to the University of Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics. He went on to consult for Shell Petroleum in Port Harcourt as a Reservoir Engineer, later sitting on the boards of companies including Motus Technology Limited and Cypher Crescent Limited. He was, in short, a Cambridge-trained petroleum consultant and tech entrepreneur when fate — and the Owu kingmakers — called him home.
The vacancy arose abruptly. Oba Dr. Olusanya Adegboyega Dosunmu, Amororo II, the 13th Olowu and a celebrated veteran broadcaster who had spent decades producing Nigeria’s most beloved TV drama series, Village Headmaster, passed away on December 12, 2021, after a brief illness. He had reigned for sixteen years. With his passing, the stool fell to the Otileta ruling house to fill — the next in the rotation of Owu’s six royal dynasties.
The selection process that followed was contested and intense. The Otileta ruling house nominated seven candidates from within its ranks, and in March 2022, kingmakers led by former President Olusegun Obasanjo — who holds the title of Balogun of Owu, the kingdom’s paramount warrior-chief — conducted a seven-hour screening. Seven princes sat before the council. Among the most prominent were Saka Matemilola and Prince Abiodun Obadayo Soyele.
Reports from within Owu circles at the time indicated that Obasanjo, as the senior kingmaker, was favourably disposed toward Matemilola. His selection was confirmed by the Ogun State Government on July 25, 2022, approved by Governor Dapo Abiodun. Prince Soyele, the other leading contender, died a few months after the selection was concluded. In late October 2022, Matemilola was installed as the 14th Olowu of Owu Kingdom — the second Muslim to occupy the stool in fifty years — and received the staff of office from Governor Abiodun. Obasanjo himself prostrated before the new Oba in a dramatic public act of submission, as tradition demands from a Balogun before his sovereign.
There was a notable absence at the coronation, however. Obasanjo did not attend, reportedly having travelled abroad. Rumours of a rift circulated, though Oba Matemilola would later deny any estrangement, saying publicly in November 2025 that the relationship with the former president remained intact.
The Hunger Problem: What the Palace Found
Within his first year on the throne, Oba Matemilola said his palace began receiving reports that disturbed him deeply. Pupils at Abeokuta North Local Government (ANLG) Primary School, Oke Ago-Owu — within the Olowu’s immediate domain — were skipping school. The reason was not indifference. Their parents could not feed them.
The palace commissioned a comprehensive health screening at the school. What it found was damning: more than 65 per cent of pupils were either malnourished or severely malnourished.
“This was really heart-wrenching,” the Oba said at his anniversary press briefing. “If you have a child who is seven, eight, 10 or 11 years old and does not have at least the basic meal, a minimum of two proper meals a day, how do you expect such a pupil to learn in school?”
His account at the briefing echoed what he had said publicly as early as August 2024, at his second coronation anniversary, when he invited several underfed children and their parents to the palace and discovered that by 1 pm on a Sunday, the children had not eaten a single meal.
The palace response was the Olowu Hope Initiative (OHI), anchored on education, health, enterprise, environmental sustainability, and the Sustainable Development Goals. Its flagship intervention was the Meal-a-Day programme — a daily nutritious meal provided to 165 pupils every school day at ANLG Primary School. By October 2025, the Oba was visiting the school during break time to assess implementation personally.
A follow-up assessment showed measurable improvements in some children’s nutritional status. But the Oba was candid about the limits of the programme’s reach: for many pupils, the school meal remained the only food they received in a twenty-four-hour period. Parents, he explained, were stretching meagre resources across three, four, sometimes five children. When one child ate at school, the little money saved was redirected to feed the others at home.
At 165 pupils per day, the OHI programme is modest in scale — a single school — but the data it has generated is precise, personal, and rigorously documented. That is exactly the contrast Oba Matemilola was drawing when he turned his gaze from Owu to Abuja.
The Federal Programme: A History of Ambition and Failure
The National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) is not a new idea. It was first introduced under President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005, designed to provide meals to millions of public primary school pupils while supporting local farmers. The Yar’Adua administration suspended it in 2008 amid allegations of misappropriation.
President Muhammadu Buhari relaunched it in 2016 under the National Social Investment Programme. The intent was sound. The execution was chronically troubled — absent food vendors, substandard food, delayed payments to cooks, and outright corruption in distribution networks. Reports confirmed that billions of naira meant for the programme were diverted.
When President Bola Tinubu took office in 2023, he initially signalled he would revive the programme. Then, in January 2024, his administration formally suspended it — along with the entire suite of social investment schemes — citing ongoing investigations into alleged malfeasance. His Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Betta Edu, was suspended and investigated alongside her predecessor. The scandal consumed the programme entirely.
By April 2025, the government announced plans to relaunch a restructured version — the Renewed Hope National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (RH-NHGSFP) — with N100 billion earmarked in the 2025 budget and an ambitious target of feeding over 10 million pupils. As of mid-2026, that relaunch remains a work in progress.
This is the backdrop against which Oba Matemilola spoke. His criticism was pointed but precise: the problem, he said, is not the policy. The policy is correct. The problem is implementation — transparency, targeting, and continuous assessment, the three things his palace programme has tried to demonstrate at micro-scale.
The Political Question: Advocacy or Allegiance?
In Abeokuta and Ogun political circles, a pointed question has been circulating alongside the Oba’s remarks. Some observers note that Obasanjo — the senior kingmaker who championed Matemilola’s selection — has a daughter, Professor Senator Iyabo Obasanjo, who had been vigorously pursuing the Ogun State governorship under the APC. Was the Oba’s public criticism of the Federal Government’s social programmes — a Tinubu-era failure — a veiled boost for the Obasanjo political dynasty?
The political timeline is now more complicated. Iyabo Obasanjo formally declared for the 2027 Ogun governorship under the APC in February 2026 after returning to active politics following a fifteen-year absence. She registered as a member of the party and met with President Tinubu himself in Lagos to reaffirm her ambitions. But in April 2026, Governor Dapo Abiodun presided over an APC caucus meeting that adopted Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola — known as Yayi — as the party’s consensus candidate. Iyabo Obasanjo gracefully suspended her aspiration. By June 2026, she had dumped the APC and rejoined the PDP.
That political trajectory significantly complicates the “returning favours” narrative. If Oba Matemilola were positioning to benefit the Obasanjo political interest, the beneficiary of those efforts is now in a rival party and out of the APC race entirely. The accusation of partisan alignment with a particular APC faction within Ogun State is harder to sustain given the current configuration.
There is also the question of whether the criticism was aimed at the right level of government. Primary education in Nigeria is constitutionally a concurrent responsibility, but the National School Feeding Programme is a Federal Government scheme funded from Abuja. Redirecting that critique to the Ogun State government — which runs its own separate education funding — would have been less apt. Oba Matemilola’s critique was structurally accurate.
Should Obas Speak? The Deeper Question
Nigerian traditional rulers occupy an ambiguous constitutional space. They are not elected officials. They cannot be removed by voters. Their security of tenure — subject as it is to the goodwill of state governors who can approve or revoke chieftaincy instruments — makes overt political opposition genuinely risky. Several monarchs across Nigeria’s history have been deposed or suspended following public confrontations with sitting state governments.
Yet Nigerian monarchs have always spoken. From the fierce independence of the Ooni of Ife on Yoruba unity to the Eze Nri’s pronouncements on Igbo cultural matters, first-class traditional rulers have rarely confined themselves to palace affairs. The moral authority of the throne — particularly on matters of community welfare — is considered legitimate grounds for public speech.
What distinguishes Oba Matemilola’s statement is its grounding in evidence. He did not simply opine on poverty. He ran a programme, screened children, documented malnutrition rates, and spoke from a dataset. That changes the quality of the advocacy. It is harder to dismiss as political theatre when a monarch can say: “We found 65 per cent malnourished. We fed 165 children daily. Here is what improved. Here is what the Federal Government’s billion-naira programme has failed to do.”
His predecessor, Oba Dosunmu, was a broadcaster and businessman who presided over a broadly peaceful sixteen-year reign, largely insulated from political controversy. Matemilola, a Cambridge academic and tech entrepreneur, comes with a different instinct: data, documentation, and public accountability.
The 165 Children Who Change the Debate
At the heart of this story, past the politics and the palace intrigue, are 165 children in Oke Ago-Owu who eat one meal a day because a monarch decided it was not enough to mourn hunger quietly.
The OHI Meal-a-Day programme is not a solution to Nigeria’s child malnutrition crisis — it feeds a fraction of a fraction of the children who need it. But it is a proof of concept. Transparency works. Targeting works. Continuous assessment works. What Oba Matemilola is telling Abuja — and anyone else who will listen — is that the architecture of a successful school feeding programme already exists. Someone just has to run it honestly.
Whether the Federal Government hears that message, and whether the Olowu’s advocacy is entirely free of the political currents that flow through Owu Kingdom, are questions that Nigerians will continue to debate. What is not in question is this: somewhere in a primary school in Abeokuta, a seven-year-old is eating today who was not eating eighteen months ago. That, at minimum, is not nothing.
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