Akarigbo Immortalises late wife, donates hostel in her honor to Police secondary school

SAGAMU — Grief, when a monarch has the means, doesn’t always stay private.

The Akarigbo of Remoland, Oba Babatunde Adewale Ajayi, has just turned his own loss into a public asset, commissioning and handing over a 640-bed hostel worth more than ₦200 million to Police Secondary School Batoro, Sagamu, and naming it after his late wife, Olori Dr. Linga Ajayi.

ValidViewNetwork can confirm that this is not the Akarigbo’s first brush with formal governance credentials rather than pure ceremonial standing.

Oba Ajayi holds a science degree from the University of Ibadan, is a chartered accountant, and earned a law degree from the University of Calabar before ascending the throne in 2017.

He is a monarch, in other words, who arrived at kingship with an accountant’s eye for where money actually goes.

Here’s where the “academic scrutiny” the story invites gets interesting.

Police Secondary Schools across Nigeria are notoriously underfunded, barracks-adjacent institutions serving the children of officers who are themselves among the most poorly resourced arms of the state.

A private, monarchical hostel donation to such a school isn’t just a nice gesture; it’s a quiet indictment of how far public infrastructure funding has fallen short, that a traditional ruler’s personal philanthropy is doing what a federal or state capital budget line should have done years ago.

The naming choice as its own statement

According to reports gotten by ValidViewNetwork, naming the hostel after Olori Linga Ajayi rather than after himself is a deliberate act of memorialisation.

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Monarchs in Yorubaland have long used infrastructure as a permanent register of family history, the way older generations named market stalls or wells after ancestors.

It ties personal grief to public utility in a way that ensures her name outlives both of them in the daily life of students who will never have known her.

What this doesn’t fix

ValidViewNetwork gathered that one hostel, however generous, does not solve the structural funding gap facing Police Secondary Schools nationwide.

If anything, gestures like this one should prompt readers to ask a harder question: how many more royal fathers, corporate donors and NGOs will it take to plaster over gaps that consistent government capital allocation was supposed to close permanently? ValidViewNetwork reports.