By Sima Essien
A few months after the death of Nigerian business magnate Chief Michael Ibru in 2016, sixteen of his children were in court, suing and countersuing each other over a multi-billion-naira estate, with one daughter even demanding paternity tests to determine who was entitled to a share at all. The empire he built over a lifetime became, almost overnight, a battlefield. It is a scene playing out in families across the world in various forms: the moment a patriarch's death turns love into litigation, and legacy into leverage.
This pattern of fracture is far from unique to the Ibrus. The Williams family, headed by revered constitutional lawyer Chief Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams, has been locked in a bitter battle over an estate valued at roughly ₦26 billion for close to two decades since his 2005 death, marked by allegations of forged signatures and diverted shares, litigation so entrenched that even a committee of retired justices and senior clergy failed to broker peace, and a feud that had already passed down to a third generation by the time eldest son Ladi Williams died in 2021, still unreconciled with his brothers. Elsewhere, the sons of former Kaduna governor Nasir El-Rufai, now incarcerated, are similarly estranged, with one publicly excoriating the other over loyalty and betrayal—a rupture playing out while their father is still alive, and one that portends far worse once an actual estate is on the table.
Usman Oladipo-Akanbi's Heritage of Loss captures this sort of reckoning in a single, devastating line, uttered by one of its characters: “But a man's greatest inheritance is not always what he leaves behind in a bank account or on a piece of land. Sometimes, it is the good name that follows him into the grave and refuses to die.” Across nine tense, tightly wound dramatic parts, framed by a depth-filled prologue and epilogue, Heritage of Loss stages this turmoil, asking its audience to weigh what is truly inherited against what is merely owned.
Akanbi writes from a position of considerable literary and institutional authority. He is the National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), one of Africa's foremost literary organisations and the country's leading professional body for writers. A poet, prose writer, and playwright, he is also the author of Verdant Verses (First Runner-Up for the ANA Poetry Prize in 2009), Weevils on Grains, Tales Across the Plains, Connecting With My Past: A Midlife Memoir, Labake Isale Eko and Other Plays, and Suppletunes in Tightangles. His body of work reflects a sustained engagement with the human condition, society, culture, and the complexities of contemporary life. Heritage of Loss is no exception, arriving as a work that blends social critique, moral instruction, and literary appeal in equal measure.
The play opens on a note of foreboding rather than mourning. Its prologue establishes the danger that Láyíwọlá is already in, staging a dreadful, supernatural battle that unfolds over his quiet decision to respect his late father's wishes—a choice that, we come to understand, will cost him dearly. As the play settles into its fuller shape, Akanbi immerses us in the grief-smothered aftermath of a patriarch's passing. As the eldest son of the Ọláníran family, Láyíwọlá is burdened not only with the sorrow of losing the most influential figure in his life, but with a second, unwelcome tragedy close on its heels: a push by other family members, led by his father's long-time friend Bàbá Onílẹ́méjì, to overrule the dead man's explicit wishes concerning his wealth, chiefly, the bookshop and printing press business he had spent years building before his demise.
Over the course of the story, Láyíwọlá comes under sustained, relentless pressure from Bàbá Onílẹ́méjì, who wants the business sold off entirely, abandoning the father's directive that it continue running in the family's interest. Even Láyíwọlá's own siblings, Ayọ̀ and Tèmi, join the chorus urging him to let the sale go through. In this, Akanbi sets up a clash between two entirely legitimate, entirely irreconcilable value systems: one that insists on honouring the wishes of the dead and preserving legacy intact, and another that sees virtue in letting old ways die, particularly when a more capitalist mindset promises progress and personal enrichment. This juxtaposition does more than serve the plot, it also holds a mirror up to a genuine fault line in a hyper-capitalist society like Nigeria's, where the pressure to liquidate, modernise, and monetise often comes dressed as common sense.
What makes the play resonate beyond its immediate family drama is how unflinchingly it examines the cost of standing firm. Akanbi forces us to sit with what it actually means to hold onto one's values and traditions when doing so marks you, in the eyes of others, as proud, slow, dull, foolish, and regressive. Láyíwọlá's position is painted as a genuinely difficult and isolating stand, made more so by the fact that even his wife, Fúnmiláyọ̀, sides with those arrayed against him. Yet Akanbi does not offer a wholly grim picture. Allies do surface (his Aunty Moní and Uncle Rabiu stand with him) as a reminder that not all of society has surrendered to expedience.
This tension forms the moral spine of Heritage of Loss, as Akanbi gestures toward a broader malaise in Nigerian society: a society where corruption erodes public service, where internet fraudsters are glorified rather than shamed, where fraud itself is granted a kind of grim legitimacy, and where true merit and character is too often sacrificed on the altar of greed and avarice.
By the play's conclusion, Akanbi returns to and restates his central conviction: “Death cannot rob a child whose inheritance is good character.” The line belongs to one of the play's most essential figures, Ìyá Olóbì, and it is worth pausing on why she, rather than any other character, is entrusted with it. Akanbi uses Ìyá Olóbì as the moral conscience of the play, a function her vantage point as an elderly, largely unimplicated observer of the Ọláníran family's troubles makes possible. In this, she performs much the same role as the Chorus in classical Greek tragedy—commenting, warning, interpreting—and it is this device that elevates Heritage of Loss beyond domestic drama into something closer to a vessel for philosophical insight on traditional values and moral ethics.
We see this philosophical depth crystallise most clearly when Láyíwọlá himself declares, “The heritage of my father remains with me because I upheld the values he lived by, even after his death.” It is here that the play's title reveals its full, deliberate irony. Heritage of Loss is, on its surface, a title that promises exactly what the Ọláníran family fears: buildings gone, land lost, money changed hands, an inheritance stripped away piece by piece. But Akanbi is playing a subtler game. The “loss” in the title is real, and it is precisely against this backdrop of loss that the play stages its argument for what survives it. The heritage that matters, the one Láyíwọlá ultimately claims, is not diminished by the loss; it is revealed by it.
Akanbi's command of language throughout is genuinely impressive, marked by a fluidity that borders on the masterful. He moves comfortably between registers, and his use of Yoruba, particularly in the play's many proverbs, carries real wisdom, lending the dialogue a texture and moral gravity that a purely English text would struggle to achieve. The central tension of the play, staged as a contest between two coherent, opposing philosophical and social worldviews, is well served by a cast of lively, distinct characterisations, none of whom feel reduced to mere mouthpieces for their side of the argument.
If there is a flaw, it lies in Akanbi's occasional overreliance on overt moral sermonizing. At points, the play seems reluctant to trust its modern audience to recognise its own moral lessons without being told them directly, settling for lengthy monologues that read more as preachy speeches than dramatised conviction. A lighter touch (trusting the audience to arrive at the play's conclusions through action and consequence rather than pronouncement), would have strengthened rather than diminished its impact.
Even so, Heritage of Loss remains an essential text. Through its storyline and its insistently repeated themes, it demands our attention toward a rot that has eaten into the fabric of modern society, and it affirms, without apology, the need to prioritise building “something strong enough to last, something that honours the memory, life, and legacy of a fulfilled life.” The play reasserts Akanbi's skill as an observant writer working within an older, more didactic literary tradition, while also making a compelling case for the continued relevance of ethically grounded, didactic representations of the human condition. For students of literature and lovers of good drama alike, Heritage of Loss is essential reading, and a reminder that some inheritances cannot be sued for, sold off, or signed away.
Sima Essien, a graduate of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is a creative & freelance writer and content creator whose works often seek to explore the subtle complexities of family, mental health and the human condition.He has published works in Al Jazeera, The Nation, The Lagos Review, Ngiga Review, The Muse Journal and Ìtànilé. His first short story, “All Your Colours Are Often Beautiful”, won the inaugural OkadaBooks Campus Writing Challenge. He is also a recipient of the Freedom Magazine Prize, the Abubakar Gimba Flash Fiction Prize, and the TY Buratai Literary Initiativeʼs Young Adult Literature Prize 2024 (South-South Zonal Winner).Apart from reading or writing, other interests include watching movies, taking long walks and admiring the natural beauty of verdant regions.Sima Essien is an award-winning writer based in Uyo, Nigeria.
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