LAGOS, NIGERIA -- Oluwafemi Oleowo '14 heads back to campus today after a harrowing 6 day period of being stranded in his home country. Oleowo, [pronounced o-lay-o-woah] the prince of a small municipality in southern Nigeria, decided to take a last minute trip to his kingdom to catch up on the state of affairs, meet with government officials, and most of all get some well deserved R&R. Proving once again that royalty are just people like the rest of us, while planning for his trip, the Prince neglected to transfer money to the right accounts to ensure that he had enough for his return trip. "I honestly couldn't believe it," Oleowo writes to us “the stress and excitement of midterms, housing day (Dunster Pride!), and the possible insurrection against my father really got to me, and the transfer totally slipped my mind.” Being the resourceful young royal he is, as soon as Oleowo realized his mistake, he immediately started a remarkable email campaign, broadcasting his story to 48 of his private friends and over 10 HCS listservs and offering 100,000 USD out of his American accounts for the successful transfer of a mere 5,000 USD to his Nigerian based assets. Part of the money would be used to purchase a flight to Logan Airport, but, really, because of the way "all international banking accounts are set up", Oleowo mostly needed the money in order "regain access to [his] American funds" as he eloquently explains in an email sent over the Harvard Republican Club list.
Surprisingly, his email campaign was not immediately fruitful. The Prince recalls only sending out a few emails at first, expecting people to "respond right away," but by the end of the third day he noticed that not many people were opening his emails at all, and those who did were not replying. "At this point, I was sure I needed to change my strategy," Oleowo writes, “In my early emails, I was very humble about my status, describing myself either as an 'important person' or an 'aspiring despot,' but people weren't responding to that. In my second round of emails, I made sure the word "prince" showed up at multiple locations in the subject line." Even with this ingenious tactical maneuver, Oleowo received even less read receipts and still not a single response.
Salvation came for the young prince when 2 days ago, in a last ditch effort to make it to campus before his PS11 midterm, he sent a fax to a friend who had been staying with his grandmother over the weekend. Oleowo's friend, William "Bill" Gully jr. '13 was long gone at this point, but his grandmother was more than happy to transfer all of her savings into the future king's account in order to get him back to Harvard. In our interview with Gully, he let out an exasperated chuckle as he told us that his family "tr[ies] really hard to keep Grammie away from technology” because "she always gets into kerfuffles." Fortunately for Oluwafemi, Grammie got to read the fax, and thanks to her quick thinking and swift action, the Prince should be back at Harvard just in time for his exam.
And as for his friends that did not respond to his email, Oleowo really lets his royal grace shine when he writes: "I think I'm just going to chalk this one up to the bystander effect. Everyone must have thought that someone else was already helping me out! I'm just glad to be heading back."
