Ojo Maduekwe: Exit of the philosopher king (1945-2016)

Chief Ojo Mbila Maduekwe made the first big impression on the Nigerian scene shortly after he was appointed Minister of Culture in 1999 by the administration of returnee President Olusegun Obasanjo.

He seized his moment at his maiden press conference in Abuja where he found it pertinent to react to comments which he said he heard in the media to the effect that the Ministry of Culture was not one of the “juicy ministries”, juicy ministries in the Nigerian context refers to portfolios such as Petroleum, Defense, Education, Health, Transport, etc.

Watching him then as a senior reporter with a Sociology background, I thought he was brilliant in repudiating the juicy ministry talk especially with his broader definition of Culture. His carefully skirted delivery drove home the point of how culture was the totality of a people’s way of life as against the more visible display of the arts and other forms such as dancing and clothing. What made rounds was not just what he was espousing, but the conviction that seem to ooze from his submissions. He capped it all by saying that in a country of well over a hundred million people, he felt honoured to be named a minister of the federal republic. Even more dramatically, Ojo brought a book to the conference, which he said he was reading at the time. He was driving home all the positive, powerful messages that he was not one of those who had come to government simply to “chop.”

No principal in the world will not be bought over with such a presentation by his appointee. Little wonder that under Obasanjo’s watch, he would go on to become Transport Minister, Political Adviser, National Publicity Secretary of the then ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Foreign Affairs Minister and later High Commissioner to Canada.

Ojo Maduekwe was very cerebral. He was a man of courage and a person who you could describe as very passionate about whatever he believed in. This passion of his when tampered with his temperament, could make him quite temperamental. This once in a while assaulted a level of diplomatese and critics who could not look deeper in a man often latched onto this to try to throw the usual punches below the belt. When he chose to ride his bicycle to work as a minister, I felt he was trying to bring the nation back to the basics, away from misplaced priorities, apart from trying to make that symbolic action count in favour of the health of citizens and environmental protection.

I got on well with him as a journalist, part of my job being to put him on his toes, having identified him as someone that could pass for a philosopher king at least in the Nigerian government circles. In his Mabushi home he often said to me: “Obayuwana, tell what people are saying against us” (government of the day). Then he would listen to your submissions and not fail to hit back at critics if he felt they were criticizing too simplistically or with one dose of sentiments too many.

Conscious of the moral high ground which he stood on, in his first incarnation as a minister, Ojo soon caused a “stir” as Transport Minister when he made a huge show of the fat envelop or settle down welcome gift purportedly presented to him through the senior man on the saddle by the heads of the parastatals and Agencies under his ministry. He ordered the bag of money returned if people did not want to incur his wrath or got reported to Aso Rock.

As a testament to his acumen, you can be sure Ojo would read up on most things and on anything he could not grapple with first hand. This state of mental preparedness would help him avoid being pressured or goaded to take wrong decisions. Once in 2009, we were in Copenhagen for the Climate change conference, some Nigerian officials made reference to a term that Ojo was not quite familiar with. I think it had to do with Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) or the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established under the Kyoto protocol. It was something that required a position to be taken by Nigeria. The minister calmly said: “Gentlemen let’s look at this matter tomorrow”. Twenty-four hours was enough to buy Ojo some time to do his personal research on the matter and he was quite on top of things the next day.

As a Foreign Affairs Minister, he was quite impactful. Deploying his intellectual reserves, he muted Neighbourhood Diplomacy as a foreign policy tool just as much as he tried to breathe life into the oft talked about principle of reciprocity. He coined his own term in the process-Diplomacy of consequences!

At one of the foreign policy retreats for external relations experts and the nation’s senior Foreign Service officers, Ojo spoke outside the usual code as a minister by declaring that Nigeria’s Foreign Service was not an exclusive preserve of career diplomats.

At another similar gathering, he publicly exposed the damaging situation where Foreign Service officers were directly collecting money meant for the school fees of their wards against the standard practice where such money was remitted into the account of the schools. This did not go down well with the ministry’s eggheads including the Permanent Secretary at the time. But Ojo did not care one bit about the recriminations that followed.

During the EU-Troika meeting with Nigeria in Ljubljana, Slovania in May 2008, Ojo did not let the opportunity in which President of the EU Council of General Affairs Dr. Dimitrij Rupel and his delegation apparently carried on with deliberations, as though they were relating with some school boys from Africa.

Ojo quickly got thinking on his feet, put aside a prepared positon statement, pontificated and sermonized away to everybody’s astonishment. There he was sounding like a pedagogue par excellence. One who could look into the eye of diplomats and government men on the other side of the table, lecture them about Africanism and the place of the African civilization in global history despite the blights of colonialism. He could speak his mind without blinking. He forced respect from across the table. The way he held his own, you were proud he was your country’s minister.

Yes, he lost his cool once in New York, thoroughly embarrassed by my friend Omoyele Sowore of Sahara Reporters as the online platform wanted to prove (even though mischievously) that Ojo was flying around the world doing his own wish while pretending to be serving the then ailing Umaru Yar’Adua

Sometime in 2003, all hell was let loose when Maduekwe stated that it was Idiotic for Eastern Nigerians to be demanding for an Igbo president. That statement was widely understood to mean that Maduekwe did not want an Igbo man to be Nigeria’s president and he was soundly pilloried for that. As usual, the philosopher king did not baulk but defended his statement stoically stressing that what the people ought to be asking for is a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction. That gave scholars and politicians alike some food for thought even though the misgivings were quite understandable as the Igbos felt other ethnic groups did not need to be apologetic or beg issues when they declare. But someone had to raise the bar.

I also remember the days of nervous interface between the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Ministry over budgetary allocation and Ojo’s submitted courageously that unlike many of the honourables who demanded money from ministries and parastatals in the course of oversight, there aren’t any vaults at the nation’s missions abroad over which any minister can hold the ambassadors and heads of mission to ransom. When he was told that he travelled too much, he retorted:
“That’s why I am Foreign Minister. My brief mandates me to travel. I am not the minister of local affairs and that cannot be held against me…”

When asked whether he was not bothered by the fact that he had stayed too long on the corridors of power and had enlisted on the unenviable hall of some privileged citizens known then as AGIP-Any Government In Power, he retorted: “It would be interesting if you can find out why it is that every president that has come (Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan) seem to find in me certain qualities that they think their government needs despite that this country has huge, qualified human capital? You have to also give me some credit.”

A service of songs was organised in his honour this week in Abuja, having departed this life on July 29, 2016 at the age of 71.

Arthur Oghogho Obayuwana is a former Foreign Affairs Editor of The Guardian, now curator, Civic Nigerian Blog and Communication Specialist @ ECOWAS.