When Janet Afolabi Hosted Yoruba Queens 

When Olori Janet Afolabi, the Queen of  Apomu Kingdom said last year that she will not rest until she brings development to her people, many who didn’t know her took the vow with a pinch of salt. Today, she is making good on her vow by taking her milk of kindness beyond the corners of her kingdom.

Recently, the CNN award-winning journalist met with her counterpart, Olori Ronke Ademiluyi Ogunwusi of Ile-Ife and they both played host to about 120 queens of traditional kingdoms from across Nigeria who converged at the Palace of Ooni of Ife for the first-ever Royal Queens Conference in Nigeria.

The conference was organised by the Queens under Olori Ogunwusi’s Queen Moremi Ajasoro Initiative and Olori Janet Afolabi Foundation. The two royal queens convened the conference with the theme “The Impact of Oloris (Royal Queens) In National Development” to commemorate Black Women’s History Month and to discuss the impact of royal queens in their kingdoms and national development.

A former newspaper publisher, Afolabi was a keynote speaker at the conference. She highlighted the many challenges facing various communities today and how their husbands are at the forefront of solving those problems. She urged the queens to rise and support them.

The Apomu Queen told fellow queens to identify major challenges in their domains, do a problem analysis and strategise on how to solve them. She stated that if queens take up various impactful projects in their communities, such impacts can easily be felt at the national level.

She went on to encourage her fellow Oloris to start small, saying nothing is too small for them to start with. She gave an example of how she personally taught some of her husband’s subjects in Apomu English Language for free and also fed the students with snacks.

According to her, she started with 10 students, but the number has increased to over 150 students. Afolabi also empowered some sets of traders with a loan of N20,000 each and asked them to pay back N5000 monthly so others can benefit from the loan scheme.