From the outset, I must declare my interest. I was not only a great admirer of the late former Vice President, Dr Alex Ekwueme (October 21, 1932 – November 19, 2017), I was also fortunate to be his devoted friend. To be associated with a man of such gravitas, learning and consequence was a tremendous honour. In fact, I estimate his friendship as an inexpressible pleasure and consolation for more than thirty years. Those fortunate to be close to Dr. Ekwueme would testify that he was a man possessed of undisputed, if quiet, brilliance. He was so at ease in his wealth of wisdom and rare knowledge that he was absolutely approachable, even self-effacing. A stubborn optimist and warm personality, he was deeply jovial and radiated a certain fellowship and bonhomie.

Never a man of rough edges or surly habits, Dr. Ekwueme held himself to such high ethical standards that he was faithful to his word and commitments, whether that commitment was made to his social peer or a subordinate. His signature traits included an infectious humility and unstinting clarity of expression.

Over the years of interacting with him, learning admirable lessons from him, I often reflected on the ease with which he turned friendship into a veritable gift. He was constant in his solicitude for his friends’ well being. Thanks in a large part to him, I came to realize the sheer beauty of friendship, often a relationship between two persons who do not share genes, yet have interests that intersect and entwine. Indeed, he taught me that few things in life are more prized than friendship, loyalty, love, and service. Epitomizing these qualities, he loved life completely and lived it intensely. His protean nature was revealed through his eclectic relationship with music. He loved Mozart, Bach and local music.

When Dr. Ekwueme made a promise, he kept it. He did so not only because he understood the meaning of responsibility, but also because he was a man of extraordinary ethical capital. He spent much of his life working selflessly to improve the lot of those dealt a harsh hand by life or circumstances. He carried out that impressive work through the Alex Ekwueme Foundation. I was elated when he invited me to serve as a director of the foundation. In that role I saw first hand the meaning and majesty of “quiet” philanthropy – the transformation of other people’s lives without drawing attention to oneself as the giver. Dr. Ekwueme was particularly sensitive to the pain of people consigned to the margins of society. His ability to understand the nature and scope of suffering, and to empathize with the downtrodden, was some of his most memorable attributes. Those qualities are bound to endure, reminding those who knew him – as well as those who will come to know about him – that he lived a life that mattered, a life that was significant, and a life that recognized that true greatness lay in striving to make a difference in his society.

Every enlightened person should hope to leave a mark, to try their best to make the world slightly better than they found it. Dr. Ekwueme fulfilled that ambition many times over. His legacy in politics, an arena where egos often trump dedication to service, is peerless. If democracy is to function, a high percentage of those who hold public office must be honest, honourable and courageous people. Their office and service should enrich society and advance its interest rather than enriching themselves. He sought to address injustice and to bring his vast intellectual acumen and ethical funds to bear on governance.

In 2002, I had the privilege of being the chief launcher at the presentation of his memoir titled From State House to Kirikiri. On the occasion, I enthusiastically declared, “unlike many, he did not go into politics in order to rig for himself an easy life. Instead, he set out to use the ameliorative powers of government to make a difference”. Those words bear echoing, for Dr. Ekwueme was an advertisement for the kind of noble-minded, visionary, and focused leader that our country sorely needs.

Many men and women aspire to greatness, yet few ever succeed in capturing the imagination and spirit of their times. The ones who do become truly unforgettable, and they achieve a kind of immortality. I have no doubt that Dr. Ekwueme has earned his place among the small pantheon of those who, despite huge odds, challenged their fellows not to settle for a mediocre nation, but to imagine and work towards a loftier one.

While it may be too soon to undertake a full assessment of Dr. Ekwueme’s legacy, it is not hasty but altogether proper to underscore the fact that the former VP has been widely lauded, in Nigeria and beyond, by numerous newspaper editorials as well as his colleagues in architecture, business, politics and law. The unanimity of the laudatory verdict offers us a shape of the judgement that history is bound to render.

May His Excellency, Dr. Alex Ifeanyichukwu Ekwueme, GCON, rest in peace.

My most enduring personal memory of Alex Ekwueme was at his brother Laz Ekwueme’s 60th birthday in January 1996, which began appropriately with a performance at the University of Lagos auditorium, with Laz himself conducting his Chorale as part of the events. At the end of the performance, his brother, Dr. Alex Ekwueme made a personal request for a performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” and he was obliged.What struck me was the effect of the music on the man – the intensity of his expression and absorption of the movements of the song. 

Schubert arranged “Ave Maria” as a movement of seven songs, taken from Walter Scott’s epic poem, “Lady of the Lake,” and the denouement is in that moment, when the character, Ellen, at the lead of the far-removed harpist, raises an invocatory prayer to the Virgin Mary, summoning her to help, as the protagonist goes off into battle against the king. 

Years later, the significance of that request made utter sense to me. Dr. Alex Ekwueme was at the promontory of his own epic battle with General Abacha, and “Ave Maria” was his own invocation to the virgin. 

I could associate this purely on the subjective whim of my own interpretation, but of all the things that have been said of Dr. Ekwueme in the deluge of epiphanic eulogies from many quarters, the most central have been an acknowledgement of his quiet dignity even faced with the kind of challenges that would normally set off less accomplished men, and the second is the affirmation of the consistent principle he brought to bear on public service. 

What has often not been noted in his obituaries is that Alex Ekwueme was of that generation of men inspired by the politics and philosophy of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who taught us that in our quest to make a great society and liberate our people from the clutches of poverty and ignorance, we must show ourselves as the first and perfect examples. 

Those who wish to lead must themselves be willing to serve, given that leadership is a sacred trust, a call to dispense of all other interests that negates the higher interest of the people. True leaders are the servants of their people. They are not the masters of their people. True leadership requires mental and spiritual preparation: those who wish to lead must explore the vast fields of human knowledge, and thus like Azikiwe, Ekwueme prepared himself intellectually, ranging in fields of human knowledge, from Architecture to Sociology, to Town planning, and to Law. He was basically, philosophically trained. In other words, he could interrogate, if not interpret Pythagoras, as he could comprehend the movements of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” or the lines of Enwonwu’s “Agbogho Mmo,” as well as understand the notions of Zoroaster, or even the subtler underlays of the Paulian dispatches. 

Dr. Ekwueme was therefore rooted, without ambiguity. He was as local as he was cosmopolitan. He came to the clear and inexorable understanding that there was no genetic difference between the poor of the North and the poor of the South, there was only a moral condition, and it required the transformation of the material conditions that should give each man or woman the dignity of their humanity. 

Dr. Ekwueme also clearly absorbed the Zikist idea that the individual who offers himself for public leadership under the norms of democracy, must be willing to apply the strategic patience of the Roman General Pontifex Maximus. Zik himself summed that up as the principle of “Suru-Lere” – the virtue of patience. The Igbo themselves had put it in their own inimitable philosophical frame: “Anu laa ta, echi wu nta” – if the game escapes today, tomorrow is another hunt. Such a philosophy priotizes the virtues of patience, tolerance, and compromise as the sum of political conduct. It therefore makes political action, under the democratic principle, a process rather than a zero-sum game. 

And these are, in sum, the very principles that guided Dr. Ekwueme’s political action, from when he joined the fray, first in the first republic as an NCNC candidate for the Eastern Regional House, and later in the second republic, when he became Vice-President of the Federation of Nigeria, under the elected government of the National Party of Nigeria, led by President Shehu Usman Shagari. Ekwueme wanted to be governor of the old Anambra state, and had been nominated, and confirmed NPN’s gubernatorial candidate for Anambra in 1979. 

I do personally recall this moment because I had just become very acutely alert to national politics in that moment, and the Nigerian papers, particularly the local Nigerian Statesman published in Owerri, were full of the doings of politics. Shagari had first offered the Vice-presidency to an Igbo woman, the first Nigerian to earn a degree from Harvard, who was a senior lecturer then at the Alvan Ikoku College of Education. She was quietly convinced to decline the offer. Two giants later loomed: Dr. K.O. Mbadiwe, and Dr. J.O.J Okezie. And these were, politically speaking, known quantities. Then Shagari pulled the surprise, and it has since come to some light, with the quiet counsel of Dr. Nwafor Orizu, and picked what was essentially a dark horse, a younger man, Dr. Ekwueme – who compared to the other two seemed bloodless, and wilting. 

Ekwueme had always presented the image of that groomed silence; the self-effacing, un-intrusive man, who did not have the theatre of his more boisterous brother, Laz, but who had often proved with the quiet force of his intellect and will, to be no less a force or quantity. His quiet efficiency; his organizational capacity, and his fierce sense of loyalty and obligation, have all been attested to, by those who have worked closely with him, and no less, by President Shagari himself, who could never have wished for a better lieutenant. 

Dr. Ekwueme’s record of public service stands perfectly in that adulation, by those who put him before the blind goddess of justice, who then compelled by the sheer evidence before her, led her servant at the Supreme Court of Nigeria, Justice Uwaifo to declare that Alex Ekwueme had no scintilla of corruption around him, in a government that had been roundly accused of corruption. Dr Alex Ekwueme, the honorable judge declared, is the only example of a man who entered government very wealthy, and left less wealthy than he was when he went into government in Nigeria. 

In other words, Ekwueme remains Nigeria’s moral beacon – that example of the distinguished and incorruptible public servant, who has continued to elude this nation since the locusts came to town. Alex Ekwueme’s moral courage came through when he stood up to General Abacha and his ploy to succeed himself with the formation of the G38 in 1997. Ekwueme led the G38 to say, “heck no!” and was ultimately prepared for a showdown. 

I should now confess, that I ran a number of couriers between Ben Obumselu and Bola Ige, from Lagos to Ibadan, in that triangle of action, and it was clear that a showdown was indeed in the offing with Ekwueme at the center of it against the military regime. Perhaps that was why they stopped him too, when it came to crunch time. 

I was in that stadium at Jos, reporting the PDP convention for the Newsweek Magazine, with Marcus Mabry late in 1998. We had been taken that night to see General Obasanjo where he was sequestered in the lap of luxury in Jos, holding court. It was very quickly clear to me, that Obasanjo who had just been released from prison was suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, and his responses to basic questions were incoherent. Later on, I was also taken by Professor Obumselu, whom I met at the Hills Station Hotel in Jos, to see Dr. Ekwueme. Obumselu was the Director of Planning and Operations for the Ekwueme Campaign, and was running the numbers for the campaign. There was a clear difference. The surroundings were different. Ekwueme was of course surrounded by Chinweoke Mbadinuju and Igwe Mbaukwu, but he was clear and articulate, and Marcus Mabry in spite of himself did say, “that’s your best chance in Nigeria.” But later that night, while we were hosted at the Jos home of General Lawrence Onoja, and in the company of Alhaji Isyaku Ibrahim, who was a major Ekwueme backer, we got the news that a lot of money had gone round at about 2:00 a.m., spent by the key military backers of General Obasanjo. The rest is now history. In spite of the bright and articulate speech of Asiodu, or the moral significance of Alex Ekwueme, the PDP went to the dogs: they gave the party’s nomination under fraudulent conditions to Olusegun Obasanjo. And that, very clearly in my mind, sealed the fate of Nigeria, for this country was handed back to the locusts. 

The result is clear: violence, corruption, religious and ethnic tensions. Any nation or party that would choose an Obasanjo over an Alex Ekwueme was doomed to misery. Ekwueme was the cornerstone of Nigeria’s fourth republic, but he was that cornerstone that was ignored. And we are still paying for it.

ALEX Ekwueme, Nigeria’s venerable vice president from 1979 to 1983, gave up the ghost in a London hospital last November 19. It has taken me a whole two months to write a tribute in his memory because I have yet to reconcile myself fully to the reality of his departure. The relationship between us has been such that all those who know me, including those who do so only on the social media, would attest that I can brook insults to my person but not to Ekwueme.  I have been receiving condolence messages since his death, as though my biological father has just died.

Our relationship had a metaphysical touch. He died on November 19, 2017, exactly one year after my mother, whom I loved passionately, left this planet. He died at 85. My mother also died at 85. At my mother’s funeral on January 6, 2017, Ekwueme led us in a Catholic prayer for the dead, complete with some expressions in Latin, though he was Anglican. It was a prayer for the repose of the soul of the dead but also reminded us of our mortality. “Thou art dust”, as the priest, borrowing the words of the Bible, tells the Catholic faithful on Ash Wednesday to inaugurate the Lenten Season, “unto dust thou shall return”. In his memoirs, Bola Ige, another Anglican and the late old Oyo State governor who studied classics at the University College in Ibadan, recalled that he and Ekwueme participated very well in Catholic religious ceremonies in kirikiri Prison where they were held for years following the military coup of December 31, 1983, because of their knowledge of Latin. An architect and lawyer with degrees in sociology, history and town planning, Ekwueme was a quintessential Renaissance Man. His love of learning and civilized conduct knew no bounds.

Everyone knows that the former vice president was ever calm, reserved, taciturn and Socratic. In December, 1994, when Ekwueme was chairing the famous All Politicians Summit at Eko Hotel in Lagos, General Sani Abacha sent soldiers, led by a major who was his chief intelligence officer but now late, to disrupt the conference. As the soldiers, pretending to be thugs, started to beat up participants brutally, everyone ran helter-skelter. Only Ekwueme remained calm, watching the hullaballoo with philosophical equanimity. The dignified comportment must have frightened the soldiers who left him alone but went after Olu Falae and Arthur Nzeribe, among others.

Strangely, Ekwueme always displayed extravagance, if not exuberance, towards me. This display of affection was as inspiring as it was humbling. Towards the end of September, 2015, when I emerged from a private meeting with Governor Willie Obiano of Anambra State in the governor’s dining room and met Ekwueme who was already seated in the governor’s living room preparatory to his participation in a public forum of Anambra State leaders, the elder statesman screamed repeatedly with child-like innocence on seeing me: “The one man riot squad!” It was a name he gave me when I joined his campaign to become Nigeria’s president in 1998. He almost temporarily ignored ex-Governor Chukwuemeka Ezeife as well as Labour and Employment Minister Chris Ngige as he began to lavish praise on me. Obiano could believe neither his eyes nor his ears.

The encounter is reminiscent of an incident in Jos, Plateau State, in January, 1999, when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) held its first elective national convention where the PDP chose Olusegun Obasanjo, rather than Ekwueme who practically founded the party and led it admirably, as its presidential flag bearer in the 1999 general election. Ekwueme was occupying one of the two rooms at Station Hotel reserved for Chinwoke Mbadinuju, then the Anambra state governor-elect, and sent for me for a confidential briefing. As I was leaving their suite, Mbadinuju called me out me and spoke to me in a whisper: “Ide (Ekwueme’s traditional sobriquet) gave an instruction that he would not see any person except you and Ochiora (Mrs Beatrice Ekwueme’s sobriquet) while he is working on his speech to the convention tomorrow. I understand you and I are from the same local government area. Ide has a very high opinion of you, so I want to know you better”. Mbadinuju, journalist, lawyer and former political science associate professor at the State University of New York, was Ekwueme’s special assistant until 1983.

I still remember my first close contact with Ekwueme. It was in December, 1993, at the VIP Lounge of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos where Bart Nnaji, who had just finished serving for three months as the Minister of Science and Technology in the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim National Government, and I had gone to receive his family visiting from the United States for the Christmas holidays.  Ekwueme was travelling out of the country and I went to thank him rather casually for his recent robust statements on Nigeria’s future.

I was shocked that immediately I mentioned my name, he began to reel out my articles in the British press, including one on the modernization of NITEL’s operations and mentioned not only the number of telephone lines which had switched from analogue to digital but also the very issue of African Review of Business and Technology and even the pages. All the figures were correct! It was self-evident I was in the presence of a genius. Our discussion quickly moved to his recent political advocacy. As I made to join Nnaji and his family, Ekwueme spoke to me solemnly: “I would like your generation to know that if this country is not restructured, it will not know peace, let alone progress”.

The 1994/5 Constitutional Conference provided an excellent opportunity for Ekwueme to campaign vigorously for the country’s restructuring. Despite the intimidating excesses of some parochial elements in the conference and elsewhere, Ekwueme stuck to his gun that the country be broken into six geopolitical zones, that the presidency rotate among the zones, that a person be elected as president for only one term of five or six years, that each zone produce a vice president, that the derivation principle in national revenue be increased from 3% to 13%, and that the governorship rotate among the three senatorial zones in each state. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, recognizing that these proposals were inevitable for national cohesion and unity, persuaded northern hardliners like Buba Galadima to accept them. Only the recommendation for multi-vice presidency was rejected.

It has taken the death of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to dramatise to the Nigerian people Ekwueme’s foresight and wisdom in advocating six vice presidents, including one from the zone of the incumbent president who would complete the remainder of the tenure of the president should he or her die in office or be impeached or resign voluntarily. When President Yar’Adua died in 2010 and was succeeded by Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, many northerners felt cheated because they believed a northerner should be in office for eight years, all the more so after Obasanjo had served eight years.  As things stand today, a very incompetent president would demand reelection as of right, otherwise the geopolitical zone where he comes from will feel shortchanged. I have in various contributions argued that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Head of Service, Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives can be considered as Vice Presidents for purposes of succession. The arrangement will help reduce cost and avoid multiplication of duties and power conflict.

It is regrettable that Afenifere leaders made the abandonment of the 1995 Constitution by the Abdulsalami Abubakar regime as a precondition for mainstream Yoruba participation in the 1998-9 transition to civil rule programme, dingeniously calling it a military product whereas the Abacha regime made no contribution to it. It is more appropriate to call it the Ekwueme Constitution because the defining features of the 1995 Constitution were the handiwork of the fallen former vice president. It is a supreme irony that the same Afenifere leaders who practically forced the Abubakar regime to bring back the 1979 Constitution with one or two changes have energetically been denouncing the current constitution as a military imposition.

Nigeria’s redesign is imperative. Those currently advocating restructuring are, however, marketing it poorly because they are presenting their case as an ethnic or sectional or religious agenda which naturally scares those on the other side of Nigeria’s primordial fault lines. They should learn from Ekwueme who laid out his vision as in the overriding national interest. He was a nationalist through and through.

My household and I are very proud of our association with the great man, one of Nigeria’s best ever. We will always honour his memory.