Revealed: Nigerian king who Harry hailed as his ‘new in-law’ is conman deported from America... twice
After duke and duchess are feted by monarchs on their ‘non-royal tour’
TAKING 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,’ Harry added, to more guffaws. On reflection, though, maybe it wasn’t such a big joke after all. The UK royals may have cut Harry and Meghan adrift but in Lagos last Sunday wealthy rulers bearing gifts and titles were effectively competing to claim Meghan for their own royal families.
But as the couple would do well to note, not everyone who came paying homage was all they seemed.
The Mail on Sunday reveals today that one of the kings is a convicted fraudster who was twice kicked out of the United States.
The venue for what one guest described as Meghan’s ‘unofficial crowning’ was a flashy fifth floor restaurant in the coastal megacity’s latest boutique hotel. Hardly the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace but there was a red carpet, fanfare trumpets – and no shortage of ceremony.
Monarchs journeyed from all corners of Africa’s most populous nation to honour the 42-year-old former Suits actress. In Nigeria different regions continue to have monarchies, now with ceremonial roles rather than constitutional powers, representing the groups that existed before colonisation.
From the oil-rich Niger Delta region, representing the Itsekiri people, came a dashing figure in red robes, Ogiame Atuwatse III, also known as the Olu of Warri kingdom. Married to a billionaire’s daughter, he drives a Bentley and, much respected, is one of the country’s richest kings.
Like 40-year-old Ogiame, another king – the Obi of Onitsha, Nnaemeka Achebe – had travelled far to meet the duke and duchess.
Known for his wisdom, benevolence and humility, the 83-year-old conferred on Meghan the chieftaincy title ‘Ada Mazi’ which means ‘the daughter of the Igbo ancestral palace’.
Maybe this was chancing it a bit. Meghan has revealed only that she is 43% Nigerian. She hasn’t specified to which ethnic group she belongs, presumably because she doesn’t know.
When asked during an episode of her Archetypes podcast if she was Igbo or of the Yoruba people, she didn’t reply.
Not to be outdone, meanwhile, 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 Harry and Meghan 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 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 exwife 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
He turned to Meghan and said: ‘Thank God you are one of us’
‘He attempted to stick his staff into my eyes’
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 $313,000, (€287,000) an ‘aggravated felony’ to which he pleaded guilty – and ultimately left him facing the prospect of 20 years in jail and a $250,000 (€229,000) 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 $313,000 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 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 $74,000 (€68,000) 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 $1,900 (€1,750) fine was waived ‘because of an inability to pay’.
Deported to Nigeria in April 1999, he was banned from reentering 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.
He pleaded guilty and in a fivepage 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 was living on the streets by the age of 12 and, at 17, was sent to an institution ‘where he was chained, beaten
‘He was chained, beaten and had to learn Arabic’
and forced to learn Arabic’. Akanbi blamed his wife saying she had convinced him he could re-enter the US 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 US 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.
If Harry and Meghan were seeking to expand their money-making ventures in oil-rich Nigeria, privately educated Ogiame Atuwatse, the Olu of Warri, would be a valuable contact – and a welcome addition to their social circle.
He earned a degree in international studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2006, followed by a masters in management.
In 2014 he married the daughter of late billionaire Hosa Wells Okunbo in Chelsea, London, with the bride wearing a stunning couture dress by Italian-Argentine designer Ines Di Santo.
Their reception was held at the Victoria and Albert museum, Kensington. Avid Anglophiles – Atuwatse worked for Shell in London – the couple attended King Charles’ first Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey last year.
His reign has not been without incident, however.
A few days before his coronation, the Warri crown was stolen from his private chambers.
Two rival clan chiefs who opposed his ascension were later accused of the theft. Atuwatse, who has been lauded as a ‘fresh, young blood’ by Nigerian media and has promised to improve the rights of women in a country where girls are still married off as young as 12, laughed off the theft.
He ended up using a silver crown for his coronation and now wears one of gold, replacing the stolen original which was made of coral.
The Obi of Onitsha, meanwhile, one of the oldest reigning tribal rulers in Nigeria, might also prove a valuable social and business conduit for the Sussexes.
A distinguished career as head of the Shell in Nigeria was followed by a number of directorships on various boards.
He is chairman of chemical giant Unilever’s board of directors in Nigeria and spent many years in London, where he enjoyed a spell as Shell’s ‘ambassador at large’ based in the UK.
Harry and Meghan, meanwhile, who fell in love with Nigeria, have promised to return at the earliest opportunity.
‘From now on they would do well to be take heed of the Igbo’s equivalent of the “once bitten twice shy” saying,’ said a guest at last week’s function.
‘It is that one who has been bitten by a snake lives in fear of worms.’
‘One bitten by a snake lives in fear of worms’