A hard lesson for the Ekweremadus

 Last weekend, I joined a conversation where a group of nine was discussing the travails of the Ekweremadus in London. I made the group an even ten, but stayed out of the discussion to mentally record the points I could extract from the impassioned debate. It was a heated discussion where commonsense repeatedly clashed with legal technicalities to breed utter confusion and outrage. Unfortunately, there was only a lawyer in the group, and he did his best to moderate the high-pitched disputations. However, eight voices drowned out his lone expert counsel. The group of eight was eager to discountenance the technicalities of the law as explained by the lawyer to dwell on what they considered commonsense.

The lawyer explained that the UK Modern Slavery legislation appears to target criminals who make profit out of selling, as well as desperate individuals willing to buy, body organs outside legally recognized channels. He however also told us that getting an organ outside the prescribed channels is not necessarily a crime, for as long as a donor is willing, and the agreement does not involve payment. Eight dissenting voices wondered whether the prosecutor did not contradict himself through the statement he made after the trial.  The prosecutor said the young man was not a willing donor, given that he was not aware of why the indicted doctor and couple facilitated his trip to the UK. One dissenter now asked the question: Why did the prosecutor also argue that the Senator paid the young man for a transaction that he was not aware of? Others charged that it is not possible for the young man not to be aware of why he was being assisted to travel to London by a doctor and an influential senator.

Then other questions tumbled in.

What was given in his visa as the purpose of travel to the UK? Or did the British High Commission write that the man was on a tourist trip, even after reading the Senator’s letter that specified otherwise? Why did the jury believe that the young man did not know what he was going to do in London, after he himself presented a letter from the Senator to the British High Commission specifying his purpose of travel? Is it possible that he did not know even after going to pose for pictures with an unknown patient at a hospital? And he did not know even though he was “recruited” in Nigeria by a medical doctor for the task? What got the group was that a jury believed that a street wise young man trusted that a Nigerian Senator he did not know from Adam will pick him out from the streets of Lagos and foot his bill to go and work in London as an act of philanthropy!

My mind was not on this great debate when I left the group. What attracted me powerfully were the lessons from the Ekweremadus’ London misadventure. As of this moment, I can count four such lessons, each more fundamental than disputations about legal technicalities of the UK Modern Slavery law.

The first is future relationship between Sonia Ekweremadu and her parents who are jail-bound. The parents and the doctor that tried to help her were convicted but not Sonia. The daughter whose cries for help landed all three in hot soup is walking away free into the sunset, but she is not free. She is still in a life or death situation, and then something else much more frightening. She will most likely receive treatment through the regular channels, and we pray that she lives. However, as awful as this sounds, letting her go while jailing her parents appears like a bigger punishment. This will become apparent when she is cured; she will spend every moment wondering why she cried to her parents in her distress. She has received the biggest burden by that freedom.

David Nwamini Ukpo, the young man whose cry to the police has seen off the Ekweremadus to certain  jail, has just accelerated the class war raging in Nigeria. This war was escalated to the 2023 general elections by the ObiDient Movement but lost with the declaration of Gov. Bola Tinubu as president-elect. In this war, many young people are blaming politicians in Dr. Ekweremadu’s class for making it impossible for the country to work. There is a tendency to lump people in this class and indiscriminately label them as rogues and scoundrels. In their various relationships with members of this class, young people believe that all is fair in war. David Ukpo will probably fulfill his ambition to japa, but he will spend every moment of Ekweremadu’s jail time wondering if he did the right thing in what appears to be a desperation to make a new life in the UK. He will find that there is not much to enjoy if one travels to the UK with low level skills. And then, what will become of him if his hosts reject his asylum application and have him deported?

Then there is the lesson of this perpetual cry and fussing by we Nigerian parents over our adult children. The Ekweremadus story tell us that this may be counterproductive. Some parents who activate full emotional love in raising their children to succeed in Nigeria do sometimes reap tears and regrets. This is not about the health situation in discussion but about every other thing that we do as parents to push our children to succeed This includes bribing our way to allow them make progress in school, or to obtain prizes that they did not earn. Oyibos have a better appreciation of what a child needs when they come of age; they are let go to find their way through life. Excessive fussing over an adult child may lead to errors in the child’s value orientation, and could result, as in this case, to something more shocking.

Finally, it is difficult to write dispassionately about the Ike Ekweremadu matter, knowing that he is going to jail for rallying to save his daughter from certain death. . Death is inevitable and everyone involved in the matter, including this writer, will come face to face with it someday. That also includes the young man who reported the couple, the police that prosecuted them, the judge and jury members that found them guilty, and all those who played a part in any form or manner, to the outcome.

We all respond to the certainty of death by doing all we can to postpone the day. Where we go, what we eat or drink, what afflicts us, and physical encounters can lead us to the inevitable date with destiny. I will illustrate and end this with a story.

Sometime in 2018, I went with a friend to see a mutual friend of ours in a private hospital. We found our friend in a pool of his own mess. I became emotional but my friend, a medical doctor, appeared unmoved by the sight before us. When we left the hospital room, he said something that still resonates with me to this day. He told me that death begins to knock at our door the very day we are born. It is from this date that we start counting minutes, hours, days, months, and years before we die. In other words, life is like a continuum, calibrated with time that imarks the distance between one birth and death. Everything we do to be alive along the continuum are nothing but attempts to postpone what is inevitable, namely, that the grim reaper eventually catches up on all humans.

According to my friend, people will no longer fear death the moment they realize that this fear is futile – no amount of fear or desperation will make anyone live forever. Those who come to this knowledge live life in a different way than the rest. They know that, like the Biblical Solomon put it, everything is vanity. They also know that what endures is the memory that we leave behind when we embark on this journey of no return. Without positive memories, it will be as if we never existed. The soul fades away without anyone knowing, for generations to come, that it once inhabited this space.

The Ekweremadus’ current travails is a lesson on how excessive fussing over our adult children can lead to parental mistakes. It also shows why, when it is a matter of life and death, parents should take a back seat, doing what they can but following the lead of professionals in offering assistance. It does not matter that any of the parent is a professional. There is a reason why doctors are not allowed to perform surgery on members of their nuclear family. Lawyers also say it is unwise for a barrister to represent himself in court. Thus, hiring a lawyer and a doctor to handle this entire process could have achieved a different outcome. But how could anyone have known this yesterday? Experience is not a teacher but an examiner; it gives the test first and shows us the answer after we have made our mistakes.

What happened to the Ekweremadus is a tragedy of monumental proportions. All good hearts must feel for the couple and the doctor who are set for sentencing shortly.

If 59 Awolowo Road Could Talk

I beg leave of you to pause my reflections of Biafra 2.1 to acknowledge the passage of a big masquerade in Nigeria, Chief Abdulaziz Chivuzor Ude, the Odu n’eje Ogu of Abor in Enugu State. His chieftaincy title, Odu n’eje Ogu, translated means “Lion that fights battles for Ndi Abor.” 

His people of Abor in Udi Local Government Area of Enugu State, had good reasons for giving him the title. We heard that the education of majority of bright Abor youths was sponsored, in Nigeria and overseas – by the venerable chief. 

Although Enugu born and bred, he was very much at home in Lagos, the commercial and cultural capital of Nigeria as he was in London and New York where he maintained palatial homes. And boy, did he have a first-class education – from Oxford (UK) to Columbia (US) after finishing as the first head boy of the famous CIC high school in Enugu, his home state.

Nevertheless, for majority of Nigerians, Abdulaziz Ude was like The Great Gatsby, the fictional character created by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is true in at least one respect: Not much is known about this almost reclusive billionaire, beyond his extensive and breathtaking acts of philanthropy. Even northern Muslims were taken aback by testimonies of the man who converted to Islam and remained a faithful disciple of the religion till the end. 

From what we have been able to read in the media, many Nigerian Muslims did not know him even thought they heard his name quite a lot in the Mosques – arising from his quiet contributions packaged from the little corner of Lagos called Awolowo Road. 

59 Awolowo Road was a bridge builder.

At the end of the day, two questions remain hanging in the air about him: how did he make his money and why did he convert from Christianity to Islam? 

It is possible that, in the nearest future, these questions will be answered in a satisfactory manner. However, we know that there is a most likely location where the answer may be found. Not in books. Not in tapes. Not in whispers or gossips. But in the four walls of a house.

The house in question is 59 Awolowo Road in Ikoyi, Lagos Nigeria. This 2-storey building can be said to represent the global headquarters of late Chief Ude’s extensive business empire. It is also a home of dreams that flowered and dreams that died. But one thing remained constant throughout the time that big dreamers thronged the building, longing to see the dream-maker. The godfather never slept, waiting patiently to welcome and empower the thousands who yearned for a chance to restore happiness to their lives. 

59 Awolowo Road was a happiness factory.

The first time I visited 59 Awolowo Road – and also heard the name Abdulaziz Chibuzor Ude – it was to see my good friend, late Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, the self-styled Motor Park Economist. Ashikiwe returned from Europe to The Guardian, the self-styled flagship of the Nigerian press, and began to tease economists and the intelligentsia with a peculiar brand of economic philosophy. For the dream maker, it may have been his love of brilliant people that brought them together after Ashikiwe left The Guardian. Or it may be because both he and Ashikiwe were members of the uppity Oxbridge Club – the exclusive Club of gentry who studied in Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the United Kingdom. 

For me, the answer lays trapped in the four walls of 59 Awolowo Road. What I do know is only what I reported in The Guardian on Sunday after my encounter with my old friend. Ashikiwe was smoking a cigar with a bottle of Cognac in front of him all the time we talked. And when I popped the question that was agitating my mind – how he could have saved enough money to go into publishing, with a fashionable address to boot, he laughed and told me that it was courtesy of an Oxbridge gentleman called Bernard Abdulaziz Chibuzor Ude. He mentioned all the names to let me know how close they were as friends. But he asked that I omit the Bernard in the name.

When I related to a friend in the newsroom what I heard, he did a double take. 

“That’s the guy on Newswatch masthead as a director!” my friend exclaimed. “That guy must be rich”

It was then that I remembered where I saw the name before. I went back to the library, brought out the magazine and began to study all the names there again, so that I will not be blindsided in future. The names that jumped at me were Ime Umana, Abdulaziz Ude, Alex Akinyele and the famous quartet who were the front-office warriors of the magazine, Giwa, Ekpu, Agbese and Mohammed. 

We knew about Umanah and Akinyele and our senior colleagues. But Ude was a big fat question mark? Who was he?

59 Awolowo Road was a house of mystery.

The answer to these questions are still not too clear today, based on the testimonies about him that we’ve read so far. What made the matter more serious for me was that I was told that my interview with Ashikiwe became a source of friction between him and his benefactor, long before The Financial Post hit the newsstands. Ude was cross that Ashikiwe mentioned his name as a sponsor of the magazine.

Hearing this, I didn’t have the courage to go back to ask my friend for a background info on the man.

Of all the tributes that have been written on the man since his passing, the one that cut very deeply with me is the statement from President Muhammadu Buhari, as released by Malam Shehu Garba. The President described  Ude as “one of the most unostentatious philanthropists in the country” someone who worked for humanity without making any noise about it. 

And then this:

“Doing goodness without bragging about is one of the greatest virtues and the late Abdulaziz Ude had passed such a test of humility with distinction.”

I had hitherto wished that somehow, it would be possible for someone to be allowed access to dig into the files at 59 Awolowo Road to answer the burning questions about the man. But after reading the President on the matter, I thought it was as well that we let matters be.

My only regret is that I never had the opportunity to meet the man. Not because he was unapproachable, as we now know, but because I never tried. 

Today, I wish that somehow I can sidle to the walls of a 2-storey building and listen as I am told the answers to the questions. But I know that there are no answers that will invalidate the invaluable stamp that Abdulaziz Ude has made on quiet philanthropy and that his spirit will ever live on the stories that his benefactors will continue to tell and retell, to build a mystic that defines what it is to become truly human in a broken world.

Restoring Otigba, Enugu's iconic statue

Hurray! Otigba Junction Statue is back!

Nigerian art lovers have teamed up to restore the Otigba (drummer) giant sculpture at New Have you heard? 

A group of Nigerian artists got together and reproduced the giant Otigba Statue at New Haven Junction, Enugu City. 

Residents watched in horror as the giant statute was torched by angry youths protesting police brutality in Nigeria (#EndSARS) in October 2020.

The statue was a major landmark placed at the T-Junction of Chime Avenue and Ogui Road. After its installation in 1980, Enugu residents promptly renamed the landmark as "Otigba Junction."

Fortunately, a group of artists quickly contracted Chris Afuba, the artist that created the monster statute, to either repair the damage or reproduce another Otigba. The concerned artists came from the Arts In My City Arts Festival, Society of Nigerian Artists, and the Art in Nigeria Project.

Afuba constructed the original Otigba in 1980 as an IMT Enugu Art School project. His was among a number of creative works that a military Governor decided to move from the school's Sculptor Garden to different landmark spots in the Coal City.  This is a fascinating story which I told jn Enugu Metro: