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From Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Public Forum
Dr. Alex Ifeanyichukwu Ekwueme, the first ever elected Vice-President of Nigeria, would have been 90 years old today, October 21, 2022, if he had lived. But he died on November 19, 2017, at a London hospital at the age of 85. As the nation feverishly gears up for a general election, it has become expedient to use the opportunity of his memorial to examine some of his values, hoping that they will help to shape current political hustings. His vivid recollections in his prison memoirs, “From State House To Kirikiri,” offer us a veritable window into the nature of the man and his legacies. Ekwueme was without any shadow of doubt a man who livesd up to the exact meaning of his name. His name simply means a personage who does what he says. He could be said to be straight as a pin. An architect of the first order, town planner, educationist, philosopher, attorney-at-law, sociologist, historian, philanthropist, politician, statesman par excellence, he was above all else a human being, a very remarkable one. He literally backed up every discipline with a well-earned university degree.
He was barely three months into his second tenure as the Vice-President of Nigeria in the Second Republic of President Shehu Shagari when the military overthrew the government on December 31, 1983. “From State House To Kirikiri” is a 300-page, 11-chapter book chronicling Ekwueme’s candid account of his humiliating experiences in detention for about 30 months, to wit, from December 31, 1983, to July 3, 1986. The military goons who took over power detained Ekwueme in the following Lagos addresses, namely: Bonny Camp, Victoria Island; Temple Road, Ikoyi; Kirikiri Maximum Security Prisons; Ikoyi Prisons; Hawksworth Avenue, Ikoyi; Barlow Street, Ikoyi; Ruxton Road, Ikoyi; and Milverton Road, Ikoyi.
When he was eventually released from detention, he was ferried to his country home in Oko in the then Aguata Local Government Area of Anambra State, where he was mandated not to travel farther than his local government in the first 18 months. Then, gradually, he was allowed to venture within the state, and later other parts of the country. It was in 1989 that he earned the special permission to travel outside Nigeria for some two weeks. Not until 1991, that is, about eight years after his detention, was he allowed the full freedom of movement as enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution.
In the preface to the book, Ekwueme reveals that “the story was written between 1984 and 1986 and, for the most part, smuggled out of prison. I took the decision at the time of writing that it would be published only when the civilians had finally and firmly taken over the reins of democratic governance in Nigeria. The idea was that it might point civilians to the danger and consequences of playing into the hands of the military. I had thought that the waiting period before publication would be a matter of a few years.”
Ekwueme’s optimism could not be borne out as the military stayed put in power, and the book could only be published some 16 years after it was initially written. But the enduring lessons in the book are timeless. It was in the wee hours of the last day of 1983, at 4:00 a.m., that the military coup-makers came knocking on the then Vice-President’s door. Four guns were pointed at him, and he was told by the gun-toting soldiers that their mission was to bring him to the Army Headquarters. Ekwueme thought he was being taken to the Independence Building at that ungodly hour only to be told by the army major that Army Headquarters was now at Bonny Camp. He had no suspicion that a military coup was imminent, as the coup broadcast was a surprise, thusly: “Fellow countrymen and women, I, Brigadier Sani Abacha of the Nigerian Army, address you this morning on behalf of the Nigerian Armed Forces…”
After the initial 10 days’ detention at Bonny Camp, “we left under cover of darkness, and within 10 minutes or so we were in my new quarters, which turned out to be 4, Temple Road, in Ikoyi.”
While being detained at No. 4, Temple Road, Ekwueme took to abstinence from food. It was on January 17, 1984, that Ekwueme saw the inside of a prison for the very first time in his life, and it was the dreaded Kirikiri Maximum. It dawned on him that not all who found themselves in prison were actually criminals. When he overheard the ACP of Kirikiri Maximum discussing the matter of confining him in a cell, Ekwueme said: “I mentioned the matter of my claustrophobic propensities to the ACP and suggested half threateningly that it might be wiser for him to leave my cell door unlocked if he expected to find me alive the following morning.”
Of course, the Justice Samson Uwaifo tribunal set up by military President Ibrahim Babangida to try the detained politicians eventually set Ekwueme free, stating that punishing Ekwueme would amount to “setting a standard of morality too high for saints in politics in a democracy to observe.”
The ultimate testimonial for Ekwueme came from the erstwhile Communications Minister Audu Ogbeh who stressed that “ministers and key government officials with frivolous memoranda at Federal Executive Council meetings usually feared Dr. Ekwueme,” revealing that Ekwueme saved Nigeria a loss of N800 million in 1983 alone.
One of the revealing disclosures made in the book is Ekwueme’s level of selflessness. Following his nomination in January 1979 as vice-presidential candidate of National Party of Nigeria (NPN), Ekwueme took the hard decision to wind up his lucrative Ekwueme Associates, Architects and Town Planners, a firm he had established on January 2, 1958, as the first indigenous architectural firm. “Most Nigerians could not believe that I had truly given up architectural practice after 22 years in order to render public service,” he wrote on page 67. He was not done, as his family fared no better during his 51 months in public office.
On being sworn in, Ekwueme did what many politicians in present Nigeria would consider unthinkable, to withdraw his first son from a boarding school abroad. “At the time I was sworn in as Vice-President on October 1, 1979. my eldest son, Obioma, was enrolled at St. Bede’s School in Eastbourne. His fees had been paid for the entire session ending June 1980. Since I was no longer in practice and had severed my international business connections and closed all my foreign accounts, it would have been impossible to keep him at St. Bede’s after that session. I informed the boy accordingly, and very much to his displeasure, I brought him back to Nigeria. Thanks to his performance in a written test and the assistance of the principal of King’s College, a former student of mine when I taught there briefly between 1951 and 1952, he was admitted at Class 11 at King’s. The change disrupted his programme of studies, and although he finished at King’s at 16 in June 1985 with eight ‘O’level passes, the fact that he had to repeat a class was a traumatic experience for a bright young boy, and could have been disastrous for somebody without the self-assurance or parental encouragement that he had. But I considered his withdrawal from a United Kingdom public school only one small item in the list of personal sacrifices I had to make for serving Nigeria,” Ekwueme narrated.
It is obvious that Ekwueme used his deep knowledge of architecture in giving detailed description of Kirikiri and Ikoyi prison cells. He described the cells at Kirikiri thus: “Each cell was about 2.5 metres wide, 2.7 metres deep and three metres high. The only openings were a steel cell door on the corridor wall and two courses of open reinforced concrete block walling directly under the reinforced concrete suspended floor slabs or roof, and a window opening 0.8 metre square on the external wall. There were no windows and the window opening was protected by 25mm diameter rods built into the reinforced concrete window cill, and held at 150mm centres. Although the window opening was shaded somewhat by a reinforced concrete hood, it was not possible to keep out the sun at certain hours of the day, or to keep out water from the cells whenever there was driving rain. Yet this was said to be one of the more modern prison designs available to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
He also described in detail the daily routine of the detainees and prisoners; location of the administrative buildings, kitchen, assembly hall, chapel, classrooms and workshops.
The tone of the prison memoir is that of anger and bitterness. Sampler: “As I ponder over many of my investments, which have fallen into ruins, the question inevitably keeps recurring: Was I wrong to have been involved in Nigerian public life, in the service of my country? Were some of my friends right in warning me in 1978/79 to keep away from Nigerian politics because it was only good for dirty people? (page 291)”.
Rationalizing his decision to write the book, Ekwueme said he had taken pains to catalogue some of what he called “hazards of holding public office in Nigeria” not to show that he is a saint. The purpose, he said, was “to put down facts which, hopefully, some historians of the future generation may investigate in detail and then pass judgment as to whether public service in Nigeria’s Second Republic was synonymous with thievery.”
The book is appropriate for these times and highly recommended for present political players, public servants and students of history.
