Life And People
The Lion of Ojiagu at 63 -By Festus Adedayo
Nnamani is not your run-of-the-mill man. He requires hyper activity from anyone who works with him. He is composed of a tireless, boundless energy, the type that is rare among leaders.
My ex-boss, former governor of Enugu State and Senator representing Enugu East, Chimaroke Ogbonnia Nnamani. will be 63 years old on Tuesday. At different fora in the last 16 years since I left Enugu State, many people have demanded that I availed them the chemistry that ensured that I succeeded in working in the Coal City State. My submission is always that, Nnamani protected me from the sharks of government who you would find in every polity across the three regions of Nigeria.
Nnamani gave me my first public service teeth. Before Enugu, I was a mere theoretician who didn’t know that life existed outside of the confines of theoretical postulations. He was detribalized and ethnic-blind, to the core. I left my Imalefalafia, Oke-Ado, Ibadan office in 2003, pregnant with stereotypes about the Igbo man. One by one, those stereotypes collapsed, like the walls of Jericho. If I had been to the southeast before then, it was scant. My sojourn however afforded me a peep into the purity of the mind of an Igbo man and knowledge of virtually everywhere in Enugu State. With Nnamani, where I hailed from did not matter; it was my contributions that defined me.
At meetings when my colleagues naturally veered into discussing issues in their mother tongue, Nnamani cautioned them: “Do you want Adedayo to think we want to sell him?” he queried and in his characteristic jocular manner, he turned to me to ask when I would be marrying an Igbo lady so that I could break the language barrier logjam!
The height of it all was sometime in 2005 when he asked Osita Ugwuoti of blessed memory to hand over to me as head of the governor’s media and Special Adviser on Media. With Nnamani, your output, not your ethnicity, mattered. When we left office in 2007, he insisted I must also go to the Senate with him, where he entrusted his finances in my care, without knowing, as the Yoruba say, the bird that laid my egg. When the world expressed shock that he queued behind Bola Tinubu in his quest for the presidency, rather than his kinsman, I saw a recreation of my Enugu experience in that equation. Yoruba constituted the core of his personal relationships as governor.
Nnamani is not your run-of-the-mill man. He requires hyper activity from anyone who works with him. He is composed of a tireless, boundless energy, the type that is rare among leaders.
Here is wishing he Lion of Ojiagu, Agbani, a very happy 63rd birthday.
