We have lost our Innocent
By
Chido Onumah
Two
weeks ago, I lost a comrade, brother, and friend, Innocent Chukwuma.
Innoma, as I called him, was 55, and until a few months ago when he
retired, the regional director (West Africa) of Ford Foundation.
Every waking moment in the last two weeks has left me thinking about
life and Innocent Chukwuma’s death.
I
had a busy day on Saturday, April 3. Earlier that day, my spouse had
informed me of the news of the death of the political activist,
Yinka Odumakin,
national
publicity secretary of Afenifere, the Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural
group.
At 2:22p.m. Pacific Standard Time, I was about to put my phone on
flight mode for a nap when I received a message from Dr. Chidi
Odinkalu. The first message read: “Good evening sir. How are you
doing?” It was followed by two questions; all three messages in a
space of one minute: “Family?” “Have you heard about Innocent…? I
replied immediately, “Good. Thanks. Innocent?” I became apprehensive
when I didn’t get an immediate reply. My apprehension soon turned
into distress. I couldn’t take my eyes off the phone. A minute
later, I sent another message: “Are you there?” I asked. No
response. My anxiety increased. I was about to dial his number when
Dr Odinkalu called with the devastating news. “We may have lost
Innocent,” he intoned. My stomach tightened. I didn’t know how to
process the news. All I could ask was, “When, how, what happened?”
He went on to explain how Innocent had taken ill and had been
diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) two days earlier and was
about to start chemotherapy the day he died.
I
first came across the word leukemia many years ago in an article
about the death of
Frantz Omar
Fanon, the psychiatrist and political philosopher from Martinique.
Fanon died of leukemia in the US in December 1961 after military
expeditions in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. He was 36. For many in
my generation, Fanon was the quintessential primer for political
education. In
his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
admonished: “Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover
its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
In life, Innocent Chukwuma epitomized the words of
Fanon, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.
He discovered his mission and fulfilled it, and he is deservedly
being honoured in death.
A
lot has been written about Innocent and his contribution to the
civic space in Nigeria and outside. Every sector has a story to tell
about his impact. I have nothing to add. My tribute is to pay homage
to our friendship, his humanism and
good-naturedness.Innocent
and I became close the moment we met. We had a relationship that
bordered on brotherly love. I don’t know what it was, but we seemed
like kindred spirit. Many years ago, in the middle of a conversation
about the trouble with Nigeria, he averred that a big part of the
trouble with Nigeria started in 1966 when the first military coup
took place, propelling a chain of brutal events—including a civil
war—that have left the country comatose. He proposed that those of
us born in 1966—we were born two months apart—should spearhead the
effort at national redemption. He then suggested the formation of a
group, the Class of 66, to undertake that task.
Like
many in our generation, we met and became friends in the student
movement. Our first contact must have been in 1988, but what I
remember now is how he frequented my hostel at the University of
Calabar in the late 80s for refuge anytime he was in “trouble” at
the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Fate
would bring us together again exactly thirty years ago at the Kashim
Ibrahim College of Education, Maiduguri, Borno State, for our
national service. It was a great reunion. I worked as a reporter
with the camp radio. I needed an ally like Innocent to stand up to
the highhandedness of the impetuous camp commandant. Just as he did
in secondary school, he led the quest to ensure that corps members
got what they were supposed to get at the cafeteria. And he was
always willing to be interviewed by the camp radio. For our actions,
we were “punished” and posted to far-flung places. He was posted to
Monguno for his primary assignment while I was posted to
the remote
village of Kwajafa,
Biu, about 200 kilometres from Maiduguri.
While Innocent was keen on national service, the dreary condition in
Monguno left him with no choice. He returned to Lagos. I wanted to
explore. Even though I had travelled extensively across the country
as vice president, special duties, of the National Association of
Nigerian Students in 1989, up until my posting, I had not been to
Borno and Sokoto states. After a few months in
Kwajafa,
I redeployed to Maiduguri and travelled to Sokoto State immediately
after service and then back to Lagos where I reconnected with
Innocent who had spent the remainder of his service year at the
Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO).
I
visited the CLO office regularly to see Innocent and other friends.
During each visit, he would ensure that I had the latest
publications and materials I needed to file stories on the human
rights situation in the country. When I joined The News in
1995, Innocent’s three-bedroom apartment at Cement Bus Stop in the
Iyana Ipaja area of Lagos became my weekend hangout. Every Friday,
after work, I would head to the apartment he shared with hometown
friends, Geoffrey Anyanwu and Okey Nwanguma, Executive Director of
Rule of Law
and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC).
Innocent Chukwuma loved life and he enjoyed it to the fullest. You
couldn’t get bored in his company. He had a joke as a solution to
every problem. His
uproarious
humour stood him out in every gathering.
He loved to curse
in Igbo, but not out of anger or disrespect. The fecundity of his
mind reminded you of a
griot, the
repository of oral tradition in West Africa. Innocent was
friendly and accessible. The influence he wielded did
not change his disposition towards friends or younger associates.
When
he took up the job at Ford Foundation eight years ago, he called to
inform me. About the time he joined Ford Foundation, my teacher,
mentor, and current chair of the
Spanish Radio
and Television Corporation
(RTVE),
José Manuel
Pérez Tornero,
invited me to apply
for a doctoral programme in communication and journalism at the
Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona, Spain. I was
47. I told Prof.
Tornero
that I was not interested in taking up the offer. Even though I had
been a part of the faculty of UAB’s Journalism Summer School for a
few years prior to 2013, I was not planning a life as an academic.
Prof.
Tornero persuaded me and pledged his support.
Three years into the programme, I was at my wits’ end. Living in
Canada, studying in Spain and working in Nigeria had left me
mentally and financially drained. Worse still, instead of focusing
on school, I had spent the early part of 2016 working on a book.
A few days after the book was published in May 2016, I call Prof
Tornero who was my supervisor and informed him of my plan to abandon
the programme. He was alarmed. He insisted that I had to finish the
programme if it meant switching to part-time. What I didn’t tell him
was the financial strain, particularly travel cost. Amid my turmoil,
Innocent had called to invite me to an event he and his spouse,
Josephine, were planning for their 50th birthday in
Lagos. He tried to cheer me up by telling me that Dr. Mathew Hassan
Kukah was the keynote speaker and that while in Lagos he would
arrange some television appearances to promote my book.
We
had a great time. It was an opportunity to meet friends we had not
seen for many years and to reminisce about life as students.
Unfortunately, I lost a bag containing personal effects. When the
party ended, I went to Innocent and Josephine to tell them what had
happened. While Josephine was comforting me, Innocent was teasing me
that I had enjoyed myself so much that I had lost my belongings. The
couple arranged for a hotel accommodation for the night and came
back the following day to take me out to lunch. During lunch,
Innocent asked about my research and when I was planning to finish
my programme. I explained my situation and the decision to abandon
the programme. Typical of him, he teased me about the effect of
“adult education.” For someone who described himself as a “lifelong
learner,” I knew he was only being mischievous. He asked me the most
pressing need concerning my programme. I told him I needed fund to
travel to South Africa and Spain to complete my field research. He
said if that was the only problem, I had no reason not to finish the
programme. He said he would ask his people to get in touch with me.
Before I left Lagos, I received an email from Ford Foundation asking
me to fill out a form for a research grant. That grant enabled me to
complete my programme.
Innocent was a big man, tall and imposing. But it wasn’t just his
frame that defined him. He was a man of ideas, big ideas. He was
also practical in every sense of the word. There was hardly any
problem Innocent did not have a solution to. Whether you agreed with
him or not, you had to respect the depth and originality of his
ideas. A few years ago, during a conversation on the political
turmoil in Nigeria, he told me how worried he was and that he was
planning to discuss with the country’s business elite to support the
quest to rein in the political class to save the country. I told him
I shared his idea. You couldn’t argue with that. The business
community needed a safe environment for their business to thrive.
Much earlier, he had shared with me his idea of the Oluaka Institute
in Imo State, a technology incubation village which he set up to
bridge the technology gap and tackle youth unemployment.
In
2019, when the current government and its spokesperson, Lai
Mohammed, upped the ante in their anti-press rhetoric, I spoke with
Innocent about the need to do something. He asked me to share a
concept note for a conference to address the challenge of the
shrinking media and civic space in Nigeria. That conference held in
November 2019 with the support of Ford Foundation, Amnesty
International, and Open Society Justice Initiative.
A
month after the conference, I shared the idea of a book project to
mark Nigeria’s diamond jubilee. He found the project fascinating.
Then COVID-19 struck, causing major dislocation globally. For a
while I didn’t hear from Innocent. Then, last September, I got a
call from him asking if I was still keen on the book project. I told
him we had started the project with support from the Open Society
Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). He offered to lend additional
support through Ford Foundation. The result is the book, Remaking
Nigeria: Sixty Years, Sixty Voices, a collection of essays by
post-civil war Nigerians on what ails the country and how to tackle
it. A day before I received the news of his death, I had planned to
send him an advance copy of the book through a mutual friend
returning to Nigeria from the US. I didn’t know death had other
plans. Innocent’s death reminds us of our mortality; his life, a
testament to selfless service and its impact on humanity.
A
man close to his roots, Innocent never stopped talking about
retiring to his village in Mbaise in Imo State and starting a local
musical group. I still remember teasing him about it during his
farewell party at Ford Foundation a few months ago. Whether he meant
it or not, we will never know. What we know, sadly, is that we have
lost our Innocent, and it hurts!
Onumah
is the Coordinator of the African Centre for Media & Information
Literacy (AFRICMIL). Twitter: @conumah |