THE HAPPY WARRIOR Ojo Maduekwe

U

Ifirst met Uche Chukwumerije in 1967. The civil war had just commenced. As a young undergraduate at the University of Nigeria Nsukka (which, with the secession of then Eastern Nigeria had been renamed University of Biafra), I felt the generational surge to be part of the action. We had every motivation to defend our new country. The initial wave of Army enlistments drew heavily from the graduating class of 1967. We (fresh undergraduates) were only to qualify much later when these first waves would have been decimated by federal weaponry. Until then, the battle for hearts and minds was the next best thing until one eventually made it into the Infantry the following year.

Our “vehicle” for engagement was called War Information Bureau. And our boss was a tall, very athletic looking ideologue of well -established writing skills by name Uche Chukwumerije! He made a great impression on all of us with his stentorian diction and regimental glances. He seemed to embody in his mien and personal organisation the primary purpose of the war which was more than pushing back federal forces. He imbued the entire exercise with a meaning that provided some nobility to the dying. He encouraged us to be creative and take full responsibility for our actions.

That tutelage prepared me for a subsequent role as an instructor in the Biafran School of Infantry after I passed out and was engaged by the Commandant Colonel Ochei. My path and that of Uche was only to cross again when I sought to rehabilitate my UNCP win into the Senate for Abia North in the newly formed PDP of a New Democratic dispensation which got me into the thicket of his own ambition for the same seat and that of General Ike Nwachukwu who later won the PDP primaries and the subsequent election.

I was appointed Cabinet Minister, and in 2003, witnessed the election of Uche as Senator. Although we did not share strong affinities of position in his first four years in the Senate for reasons that had nothing to do with his legislative performance- which, like everything Uche touched, was stellar --he treated me with a unique intellectual generosity that sensed a kindred spirit. I was indeed flattered by that. He was captivated by the subtitle I gave to an NGO which I created in 1994 (but never put to use) titled AFRICAN GOVERNANCE INITIATIVE: At The Junction of Theory & Practice. Until late last year when I saw him last at the airport, his customary way of acknowledging my greetings was for him to retort “Mekaria, you have left me at the junction”; Mekaria being my political alias.

But the opportunity came for a productive and exem- plary collaboration between the Senator and myself in the discharge of our official functions. He had just taken to the floor of the Senate a motion that sailed through calling for increased executive action to save the lives of two dozen Nigerians on death row in Indonesia for drug convictions. As Foreign Minister, I had in the previous week summoned the Indonesian Ambassador to ask for his government not to execute four other Nigerians whose execution dates had just been fixed. I was stunned to learn that the executions were still carried out in spite of my effort. But Senator Uche Chukwumerije’s successful bill encouraged me not to give up.

Emboldened by it, I went to the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and obtained a letter from him for me to carry as his Special Envoy to his Indonesian counterpart to ask for the executions to be the subject of Prisoner Transfer Agreements. That visit was reasonably successful because until recently, there was a stay that kept most of them alive.

The Senator was a public intellectual who found in politics a wide and fascinating canvas upon which to create a moral universe of equal opportunities, a narrowing of income gaps, and the systematic removal of disadvantages from lack of access to quality education. Very frank, he did not take prisoners in the combat of ideas. He understood the power of details and yet had a disarming way to cut through all the data and arrive speedily at a desirable outcome.

Loyalty was an easily discernible attribute of the Senator and he shared it equally between peers and subordinates. Never quick to condemn, he always insisted on the right of the vilified to be heard. I was a beneficiary of that when a wicked twist of what I said about the idiocy of vernacular presidency brought in its wake a well-orchestrated campaign of calumny against me, even from unexpected quarters. He spurned pressures as Chairman of Ohaneze Strategic Committee to castigate me. He preferred to visit me to ask what really happened. He was satisfied after my explanation and, added that my position was logically unassailable and was politically and constitutionally correct .Yet he wondered why I chose to be so direct on the issue. He however left with the assurance he would defend me vigorously wherever and whenever the issue came up, and that was exactly what he did.

The Senate as a place designed by the Romans for experienced politicians and patriots to gather and consider affairs of state found its match in Senator Uche Chukwumerije, my own Senator. Farewell, Happy Warrior of Abia North! Maduekwe, CFR, is Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Canada