The N.I.I.A. of that time was akin to a faceless spokesman of the country – and, by implication, a pointer to Africa’s unswerving intent to liberate Blacks from the oppression of the racist, white minority, especially south of the Limpopo. Essentially, it is obvious that the history of the liberation of Southern Africa is never complete without a detailed account of the role played by the N.I.I.A. of that era – a time when General Olusegun Obasanjo was in office, as a dictator, though. What seems to be going for Ogwu – as the Director-General – is her leadership style: belief in team work, which explains her principle of offering her subordinates a chance to prove themselves. She has, since assuming office – more than two years ago – cultivated the mode of looking inward in finding solution to some of the challenges she’s faced with. In place of awarding fictitious or dubious contracts for minor jobs within the N.I.I.A. – so as to siphon sorely-needed public funds into private pockets – Ogwu would rather delegate responsibility to any of the groomed, capable hands within. It is in her character to run the N.I.I.A. as a family, where every employee is given a sense of belonging. This, to some outsiders, has had the inadvertent effect of presenting her as a matriarch of the institute. With an open door policy, she has little quarters for misplaced academic arrogance, which is often the robe easily worn by the empty, clumsy and uncouth, to mask embarrassing, private inadequacies.

It is Ogwu’s leadership style, which has endeared the agile in her: one that believes so much in the ability of every industrious Nigerian and the power of prayer; to her subordinates. Be not surprised that – for her boldness – in breaching the male dominance of the crowning post of the N.I.I.A – she might be readying herself for another record: the next and the first female Foreign Affairs Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And, just in case, this should not be seen as an attempt to whet the notorious culture of vacuous, if destructive, gender tokenism – a form of conscious, but ill-advised, discrimination that has tended to vitiate genuine national development. If anything, Ogwu merits to be crowned our own Madeleine Albright. This thinking is not based – rather cheaply – on what, at certain times past, was beginning to assume the features of an institutional usage: from the second floor at Kofo Abayomi to – was it (?) – the fifth floor at the Marina. And what about a third: Nigeria’s first female Permanent Representative at the United Nations. There could be a fourth: the first female president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And why not! She is a brain of international eminence and she may earn such an elevated and fitting post – if her profile is any guide. The staff of the N.I.I.A. now feel, with some justification, that they belong – as do leading share-holders – to that eminent establishment. In effect, there has been – since the joyful coming of Ogwu – an appreciable rejuvenation of the spirit of the readers and other employees of the think tank. Stories have been told – with refined passion – by some of Ogwu’s subordinates, of how grateful they were to her – for giving them the chance to be part of the restoration exercise at the N.I.I.A.

If self-effacing Professor Bolaji Akinyemi was hailed for being an unrepentant accessory to the decolonisation of Southern Africa, it seems quite persuasive that so shall Ogwu – in her current role towards ensuring that Nigeria clinches one of the two permanent seats reserved for Africa at the United Nations Security Council. As a highly visible member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Foreign Relations, the country would need Ogwu for her experience and skill well after the current reform at the U.N. would have been over: she would be required to offer winning words on how best Nigeria should comport herself as a debutante at the reformed Security Council and protect her geo-political and strategic interests in the (north-east of the) Atlantic, amongst others. Besides, crowds are back at the N.I.I.A’s lecture theatre. Invitations to its round-table or skull session are often – in recognition of Ogwu’s peaking intellectual feats – honoured. In one of the crowd-pulling lectures organised by the N.I.IA, not so long ago, Ogwu was well optimistic that, in spite of the complex and costly war that was going on in southern Sudan, peace was still realistic. The guest speaker at the lecture was Dr. Sadiq el-Mahdi, the former Prime Minister of the Sudan and leader of the Umma Party.

Then, a sanguine Ogwu – in an allusion to the conflict in the Sudan – quoted from the Biblical prophecy of Isaiah – chapter 11: verses 6-8, to the effect that: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.” That optimistic prophecy of a peaceful, stable and progressive Sudan looked considerably firm until the death, on August 1, 2005 – in circumstances that smell, still, of foul play – of Vice-President Dr. John Garang, who was also the leader of the Sudanese People Liberation Army (SPLA). The helicopter which was taking Garang and some of his associates back to Khartoum from Kampala was said to have crashed in a stormy weather. Coming as it did – 21years after the end of the war, and barely 21 days into his new, if unexpected, post, Garang’s death has been seen as a cruel termination of a rare trend in African politics: lionising a rebel – suppose that what was Garang really was. The post offered Garang was the kind rejected t by the late Dr. Jonas Savimbi of the Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA). President Yoweri Museveni may have set the pace, but the obvious difference between his exploits and Garang’s was the ability of the former to take on an Arab lot that was bent on imposing Islamic law on the predominantly Christian/animist south. While Museveni could be seen as someone who was interested in ousting a corrupt regime, so as to gain power – just like Goukhouni Oueddei, Hissene Habre and Idris Debby in Chad, the captains of post-Dergue Ethiopia and ex-president Charles Taylor of Liberia – Garang was a nationalist, who stood against some religious and racial bigots and their foreign allies from the peninsula – just across the Red Sea. President Pierre Nkurunziza’s case, in Burundi, which is the most recent, is a sensible response to a situation that was not only beginning to ring hopeless, but also almost herding Bujumbura – and the rest of the Great Lakes region – into another bout of bloodbath.

Those who suspected foul play in Garang’s death: the Khartoum-based youths from the South, who went on violent protests, until security agents stepped in; a certain Ugandan radio journalist, who drew Museveni’s wrath; figured that Khartoum, in alliance with some Arab powers, may have paid some insiders to do the dirty job of disabling the craft, which was owned by Museveni – a long-time ally of Garang’s. That thinking was augmented by the fact that the Sudanese war had to it a compelling tinge of the Muslim North against the Christian/animist South. It was a war which the Vatican was said to have felt very much unease with after the much publicised “Arab diplomacy” embarked upon by the then General Omar El-Bashir soon after coming to power in the July 31 1989 revolution. Not many, especially in Khartoum, were happy that, as the second-in-command, Garang – given his stabbing switch from Khartoum to take up arms in the southern thicket, while on an official peace mission amongst his kinsmen and women – was, at the price of taking the sheen off other leading Northern political leaders, the new sensation in the politics of the Nile Valley and North-east Africa.

Some top politicians in Khartoum – former parliamentary speaker and El-Bashir’s ally, Hassan el-Turabi, say, who felt he had a messianic assignment to govern the Sudan – sounded visibly bitter that it was wrong to have met Garang – a Christian at that – with the post of the first vice-president in a manner less democratic by pushing the Northern incumbent and an Arab – Ali Othman Taha – to the second position. They would have felt a lot better had the post been contested by all those who felt they could do well on it. Perhaps so. But the exigency of the time – the pressing need to put the fratricidal war behind Khartoum, probably a popular offer from all the parties – the United Nations, the United States, South Africa, Cairo, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Brussels et al – that had been very active in bringing about peace in the Sudan – made the unique juggling of power – Khartoum style – inevitable. They calculated that Khartoum could do with a Christian first vice-president, even though the commander of the national army would be the second vice-president. Garang’s post has since been filled by his deputy – Salva Kiir, who does not seem to believe very much in the present arrangement. He thinks the idea of a government of national unity – after so much feud over a long distance, within which he had seen clearly the obvious distinctions between the two halves of the Sudan – would not solve the problem of the country. He prefers an independent South. You might think that his is a position waxed by the rich oil find in the South, which has made the Sudan a prospective client, who’ll satiate Washington’s gourmand appetite for the commonest commodity in international trade. But what else, if not that, could have been it? As a rebel, Garang saw the Cross as a factor in almost all the backing flanks around him. There was, quite glaringly, Kampala – which was his utmost guide – where Museveni, as a rebel had, back in 1986, fought his way to power. He felt, still, that at no time would Addis Ababa – and, perhaps, Christendom allow another Rwanda in the Nile Valley. A thinking shared by Washington and Brussels that had noted the oil profile of the South. Indeed, by the closing years of the 20th Century, it had downed on the El-Bashir administration that a diplomatic solution would be it in ending the war. And so came the series of demarche by the United Nations Secretary-General – Kofi Annan, the Bush administration, the African Union and the European Union, which peaked at the January 2005 peace accord signed in Kenya. Washington and Brussels were prodded, in part, into intervening in the Sudanese war – a war that had outlived the (defunct) Organisation of African Unity; a war that had proved Garang a nut too hard to crack by successive Sudanese military and civilian leaders from General Gaafar al-Numeiry in 1983 to the incumbent El-Bashir – for their desire to pacify Khartoum, thus making it unsafe an operational base for terrorists. Still, it is a bit difficult to tell the extent to which the post-Garang developments – attempts to placate the S.P.L.A. members in the El-Bashir administration that nothing would be done to truncate the transition period over the next four years, within which the South is expected to chose what form of political order it prefers: total independence or some form of generous autonomy within the Sudan – have shaken Ogwu’s sanguinity in the prophecy of Isaiah.

Ogwu meant all that she said on that sunny day – the eve of a Nigeria-Sudan soccer encounter – before the crowd in the N.I.I.A’s lecture theatre, if only because they were mainly Blacks in the south of the Sudan, who have either taken refuge in Kenya and Uganda or were being killed in the war. She saw no need for further senselessness in Africa’s largest country. Her optimism in that prophecy might have a prominent expression in the years ahead: the rise of global terrorism in the Middle East has tended to threaten the steady flow of oil from the conservative sheikhdoms of the Gulf Co-operation Council to the international market. There is, therefore, a sense of urgency, mainly in Washington, to find an alternative source. The Christian and animist south of the Sudan – as is the Gulf of Guinea – is a very good candidate to fill the impending Middle East slack. It’s for this reason, really, that Washington is beginning to pump princely post-war development aid into Khartoum’s coffers. Besides, the African Union, the European Union, the Arab League and the United Nations are expected to be part of a long-term national reconciliation and pacification effort in the Sudan. It’s, again, for such international goodwill that the prophecy of Isaiah may come true; to the joy of every Sudanese.

*UZUAKPUNDU is a journalist on the Foreign Affairs desk of Lagos-beased newspaper -- VANGUARD.