To challenge the Ooni is, in strict legal logic, tantamount to questioning the Grundnorm itself, which is a juridical absurdity.
By PELUMI OLAJENGBESI Esq.
As a legal practitioner who has studied questions of legitimacy, sovereignty, and the jurisprudence of cultural institutions, I find the recent ultimatum reportedly issued by the Alaafin of Oyo to the Ooni of Ife over the conferment of the title Okanlomo of Oodua on Chief Dotun Sanusi, a respected Yoruba son and accomplished businessman, to be, with respect, wholly gratuitous and constitutionally unsound. Beyond its surface provocation, it constitutes an impermissible assault on the very foundation of Yoruba heritage and seeks to revive a jurisdictional contest which neither law nor history sustains.
In law, we are trained to ask whether an action is intra vires, within lawful authority. The Ooni of Ife acted squarely within his lawful, ancestral, and cultural prerogatives. These prerogatives are sui generis, inherent, and incapable of usurpation by any other stool. They are not the product of conquest or temporal power but derive from the very normative foundation of Yoruba civilization.
In jurisprudence, Professor Hans Kelsen taught us that every legal order derives its validity from a Grundnorm, the basic norm from which all other norms flow. In the Nigerian state, that Grundnorm is the Constitution. In Yoruba civilizationIn Yoruba civilization, Oòdua itself constitutes the Grundnorm, the unalterable source of legitimacy, with the Ooni as its custodian and living embodiment. To challenge the Ooni is, in strict legal logic, tantamount to questioning the Grundnorm itself, which is a juridical absurdity.
This is logically right because the idea of Oòdua predates colonialism, nationhood, and the coinage of “Yoruba” as a linguistic and ethnic identity. Oòdua is primordial, ancestral, and civilizational. It denotes descent from Odùduwà, the progenitor of the entire people who trace their origins to Ile-Ife. Every Yoruba monarch, including the Alaafin, holds legitimacy only insofar as his crown symbolically connects back to Odùduwà and Ife.
While the term “Yoruba” is a relatively modern construct, popularized in the 19th century by Samuel Ajayi Crowther and later anthropologists to describe speakers of a common language group. It is an ethnolinguistic label, not a civilizational covenant. To collapse the sacred identity of Oòdua into the colonial linguistic framing of “Yoruba” is to mistake the branches for the root.
Every student of Yoruba history knows, tradition and scholarship unanimously affirm Ile-Ife as the cradle of existence of the Yoruba people, the primordial seat where Oduduwa, progenitor of the race, laid the foundation of legitimacy from which all kingdoms, including Oyo, derived their authority.