Oso Di Eme, Ugoeze And A First Lady Who Earns Her Titles

In the space of two days, the First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, picked up two traditional titles in the South East. On one day, the Council of Traditional Rulers of Imo State conferred on her the title of Oso Di Eme, “one who supports her husband,” in Owerri. The very next day, in Anambra, the Chairman of the state’s Traditional Rulers Council, HRM Igwe Chidubem Iweka, honoured her with the title of Ugoeze.

Mind you, in a country where traditional institutions do not hand out chieftaincy titles lightly, and certainly not to outsiders who have done nothing to earn the community’s respect, two conferments in forty-eight hours is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and patterns tell you something true.

I decided to go back and count. In the last three years, by my own tally, Senator Tinubu has been honoured with traditional titles in Gombe, where the Lamido Akko made her Sarauniyar Yaki, Queen Warrior, of the Akko Emirate in October 2025. In Enugu, where she became Ugosimba I in June 2025. In Osun, where the Ooni of Ife himself, Oba Enitan Adeyeye Ogunwusi, honoured her as Yeye Asiwaju Gbogbo Ile Yoruba in December 2025, a title that speaks for the entire Yoruba traditional sphere, not just one town. In Delta State, among the Itsekiri, in February 2026. In Niger State, the Etsu Nupe himself conferred the title of Soniyanko Nupe on her in Bida in May 2026. And now Imo and Anambra in September 2026, with the Anambra title notably said to represent all 179 communities in the state.

Line them up, and you have a First Lady honoured, by my count, across at least seven states spanning the North East, North central, South West, South South and South East, by monarchs from entirely different cultural and religious traditions, all within a thirty-six-month window. I do not think it is an exaggeration, and I say this as someone who does not hand out superlatives cheaply on this page, to describe Senator Tinubu as the most travelled and most politically engaged First Lady this country has produced. Previous occupants of that office have, for the most part, been content to remain a quiet, ceremonial presence at Aso Rock, appearing at state functions and little else.

This First Lady has chosen a different, harder path, showing up in person in the communities that are honouring her, rather than accepting titles by proxy or from a distance. And that distinction matters because a title handed to someone who has never set foot in the community and one handed to a person who arrives, does the work, and leaves something tangible behind are not the same thing at all. Consider what actually happened during the Imo visit that earned her the Oso Di Eme title. Senator Tinubu did not simply collect a beaded cap and a photograph. She flagged off the presentation of empowerment items, deep-chest freezers, maxi gas cookers with ovens, generators and industrial grinding machines, to five hundred women in each of the five South East states: Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo. That is two thousand five hundred women across an entire geopolitical zone, each handed the tools to start or expand a business, not a handout to be consumed and forgotten, but productive equipment that keeps generating income long after the cameras have left.

On top of that, she personally donated 250 million naira to those beneficiaries. This is a First Lady putting resources directly into the hands of market women and small traders in a region of the country that has, historically, felt distant from the corridors of federal power.

Anambra told a similar story the following day, and I want to dwell on it because, in my view, it is the most consequential part of the entire trip. Senator Tinubu flagged off the National Community Food Bank Programme for the South East zone, an intervention specifically targeted at child malnutrition. What made this particular stop significant is that it completed the national rollout of the programme across all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones. Mission accomplished, as she herself described it at Alex Ekwueme Square, and for once that phrase was not a politician’s exaggeration but a literal, verifiable fact.

A programme aimed at feeding malnourished children, rolled out nationwide, zone by zone, until every corner of the country was covered, is precisely the kind of unglamorous, unsexy governance work that rarely trends on social media but genuinely changes outcomes for the poorest households in the country. Nigeria’s child malnutrition numbers have been a quiet emergency for years, overshadowed by louder headlines about insecurity and the economy.

A First Lady who chose to put her office’s weight behind finishing that rollout rather than a more photogenic cause deserves recognition for that choice. She did not stop at food and empowerment items either. At the Federal Polytechnic, Oko, she inaugurated a new RHI and TETFUND ICT Experience Centre, and rather than simply cutting a ribbon and moving on, she sat with students and encouraged them to explore constructive uses of technology, specifically artificial intelligence. That is a First Lady thinking about where Nigeria’s young people will need to compete a decade from now, not merely where the news cycle is today.

She also flagged off the distribution of empowerment items from the Anambra State Government to five thousand beneficiaries, with a hundred thousand naira grant attached to each, working in tandem with Governor Charles Soludo’s state-level programmes rather than competing with them.

I was also struck by one line from her remarks in Anambra: that political leanings should be put aside when addressing the needs of Nigerians. It is easy for any public official to say something like that. It is harder to actually practise it, and yet here she was, in a state governed by a party other than her husband’s, publicly commending Governor Soludo and his wife for their policies and programmes rather than scoring the kind of cheap political points that our politicians, of every party, usually cannot resist.

That single gesture, small as it might seem, is the sort of statesmanship this country needs far more of, especially heading into an election season where the temptation to turn every public appearance into a partisan rally will only grow stronger.

There is a broader point worth making here about what these traditional titles actually represent, beyond their ceremonial value. Chieftaincy institutions across Nigeria, whatever their differences in language, custom and protocol, share one thing in common: they do not confer honour on strangers who have contributed nothing. An Igwe in Anambra, an Etsu in Niger, an Ooni in Osun, a Lamido in Gombe, each operates within a tradition that predates the Nigerian state itself, and each answers to a community that would notice, and object, if a title were handed out as empty flattery. That these institutions, from wildly different corners of the country, have independently arrived at the same conclusion about this First Lady’s contribution tells you something a press statement never could.

Senator Tinubu has, in effect, built her own quiet record across this administration, one grinding machine, one freezer, one food bank flag-off, one ICT centre at a time, in states her husband governs and states his party does not. That is a First Lady who has understood something many public officials never grasp: that titles worth having are the ones you earn by showing up, and that the surest way to be honoured by a people is to have first served them.

I would also add this, because it deserves to be said plainly. Nigeria has had First Ladies before who were graceful, dignified and largely invisible outside the walls of Aso Rock, and there is nothing wrong with that model in principle. But the country we are in today, one still climbing out of the economic difficulties of subsidy removal and currency reform, needed something more active from that office, a First Lady willing to travel into communities that rarely see federal officials up close, to sit with market women who have never held a microphone, to hand a young ICT student in Oko a reason to believe her polytechnic training connects to the future rather than a dead end.

Senator Tinubu appears to have deliberately decided that the role could be more than ceremonial, and the string of titles from Gombe to Osun to Imo to Anambra is simply the traditional institutions’ own way of confirming that they noticed.

Every one of the seven states listed above has its own history, its own kingmakers, its own standards for who deserves a beaded cap or a chieftaincy staff. That these vastly different institutions, Muslim and Christian, Hausa and Igbo and Yoruba and Itsekiri and Nupe, arrived independently at the same verdict about one woman’s contribution to national life is not something that can be manufactured by a media aide’s press statement, however well written. It has to be earned, community by community, visit by visit, empowerment cheque by empowerment cheque. On the evidence of Owerri and Anambra this week, and everywhere she has been before them, Senator Oluremi Tinubu is earning it.