Dora Akunyili: Pathos For A Fallen Legend

By Kola Johnson

I remember sometime in 2005. I was caught in an intense pro-Akunyili frenzy. Akunyili-mania you may call it. I was simply stupefied, transfixed, dazed and titillated by it.

The culmination of this impulse was that it drove me on a self-imposed shuttle campaign to the media outfit that mattered across the nation.

The mission was clear and simple. The media as the pivotal fourth estate of the realm should rise from their uncheering slumber spell of mere gallery on-lookers to the utilitarian interventionist brand of catalytic prime-mover and an agenda-setting rousers on issues of edifying import to the attainment of national goals – in an aptly chip-off symmetry with the deterministic philosophy embedded in the excitingly activist variant of crusading journalism that typified the colonial press of the pre-independence era. This, as they are expected to do in this context, entailed that they champion the cause for Akunyili presidency – so I thought. This I backed up with a write up I would have described as powerful, but for the immodesty of self-praise.

Prominent among those I had tried to see then, were my big brother Mr. Femi Adesina presently Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief, The Sun Newspapers and worthy incumbent president, Nigerian Guild of Editors. He was then Editor of the Sun (the mainstream daily).

I had to cash in on his accessible disposition that borders almost on saintly meekness; his patriotism and down-to-earthness for a personal purveyorship of my pro-Akunyili prosyletism. Unfortunately, the Editor, with whom I worked briefly in the features department of the glorious but defunct National Concord, when he was the editor of that department, was yet to arrive office for the day.    

But all the same, I presented a write up at the security post for an expected onward delivery to him on arrival. This I followed up with a back up note persuasive enough on him not only to get the article published, but deploy the vantage weaponry and artillery of media power to champion this onerous cause of Akunyili presidency.   

The same campaign itinerary was also to take me to The Guardian, where I tried to seek audience of Debo Adesina, the then editor, The Guardian Newspaper and now the substantive Editor-in-Chief of the exalted media behemoth.

For one reason or the other, I could also not meet Debo, another big brother of mine, whom I had known one on one, thirty-two years ago, even before his advent into journalism and who simply refers to me as “Chairman” – an appellation which generally was to be adopted by his official aides in relating to me.

An aide of his, was however at hand, and promptly too – whereupon I repeated the same routine of a handover of the pro-Akunyili expostulation and back-up missive as I had earlier done at The Sun – by persuading the editor to bring the benefit of his good office not only to get the write-up published, but also deploy the vantage placing of The Guardian and its constitutive gravitas in the media firmament to a sustained and intensified support of Akunyili. The Guardian as it turned out, dignified my cause with a publication of my Pro-Akunyili treatise in its medium, coincidentally at a time, when Reuben Abati, the incumbent chief media voice of President Jonathan was the Chairman Editorial board of The Guardian.

At this juncture, it perhaps bears an emphatic mention, that throughout the turbulent but eventful sojourn on earth of this intriguing woman of amazonic acclaim, never did I behold her, even if for once, in flesh and blood – beyond the usual fleeting span sighting on the TV screen.

Never was it, that any soul on earth did excite me towards the campaign for the fallen legend which in poignant clarity, was an altruistic self-imposed task, not for Akunyili per se, but the love of fatherland and generations born and yet unborn. Such was my passion for Akunyili – that bordered on a fanatical maverick scale.

Never indeed had anyone excited in me like Akunyili, the fire of higher patriotic engagement, devotional fervour and sacrificial altruism such as evoked the ever living imagery of the Awos, Ayodele Awojobis, Fawehinmis, the Soyinkas, the Tai Solarins the Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwus, the Beko Ransome Kutis and perhaps, the Herbert Heelas Macaulays.

For me, it had been all along a conviction of an immutable iron-cast type, that the highest paradigm of patriotism ends with the glorious but lamentable exit of the Awos, Awojobis, Fawehinmis, Solarins, Nzeogwus, Muritala Mohammeds, Victor Banjos the Bekos and the Herbert Macaulays, but I never knew there was an Akunyili.

Didun ni iranti olododo (sweet is the memory of the just) is a popular Yoruba saying. This maxim of age-old antiquity applies no less to my lovely sister, Dora Akunyili. But, however, clear as this truism may apply, it goes without saying that the glorious exudation of her passage is not without its considerable share of lament.

Fact indeed was that Nigerians killed Akunyili. Otherwise, what business had Akunyili to transact in the Senate. Akunyili certainly had no business in that house of mercantile horse-trading. That later legislative recourse was a culmination of a malignantly festering frustration.

Now, come to think of it, it wasn’t as if those who hobbled the poor woman into the unseemly ministerial strait jacket of information were so dourly naïve or demented simpleton. They knew what they were up to. They would simply shudder to the panties to have a paragon of brain and brawn who would take the shine off them. A strong character and an achiever of inimitable puritanism as Akunyili was not for them. She could be their nemesis; nail their coffin; she could upstage them, she would overshadow them.

Akunyili’s exploit in NAFDAC is already common knowledge, even to a baby of yesterday. It was a feat possibly accomplishable by the fact that the director-generalship of NAFDAC for an expert pharmacist in the mould of Akunyili was like sailing on familiar waters, fraught with the salutary propensity to bring out the best in terms of quality input. To post her to Information of all departments was like dispatching her to the wracking trauma of Siberian experience.

The health department was there, on account of its propinquity to the pharmaceutical specialization of the woman, even of an elevated professorial ladder – but this wasn’t enough to sway them from the ill-course option of information accorded her by the presidential powers that be. Why? Politics of course. Not as if Jonathan was ignorant of the right thing.

There is an adage that man had gone too far not be man enough, to realize that the problem with man is man. Expressed in interpretatively poignant relief, all Jonathan needed do all along was to install Akunyili the magician in charge of NEPA, and fold his arm thereafter and see whether the rot hitherto extant in the system would not yield to the devastating sweep of her endemic reformational dynamo.

And with NEPA in full throttle functioning, let’s see whether other things would not fall in place in the salutary multiplier consequence of employment, self-employment, industrialization and sundry situational indices of national growth.

When for instance, Obasanjo appointed Ige into no other than the ministry of Power and Steel, he (Obasanjo) wasn’t just trifling. There was certainly no doubt that he was sincere enough in his belief that eventually, he had discovered in the Esa-Oke-born politician, the suitable peg with which to fix the incurable trademark black sheep parastatal called NEPA. Unfortunately, Ige was to falter, and disappointingly too, on that all-important tall order mandate.

The saboteur power cartels endemic in the system as Soyinka his bosom friend once expressed as having been confided in him by his late bosom friend (Ige) is such that would hold no water with an Akunyili.

Of course what cartel could have waxed to such monstrously over-reaching invincibility than the Mafiosi fake drug cartels, whose conspiratorial code of omerta masks its abiding sadistic credo to parcel perceived obstacles out of the way, in a dastardly ruthlessness that evokes the truculently terrimotive exploit of Pablo Escobar the dreaded Colombian patron saints of the drug biz.

Throughout her turbulent but epoch making tenure at NAFDAC, this woman saw death and passed through the valley of the shadow of death miraculously unscathed. She fought like a Trojan. She triumphed, sweeping every perceivable obstacle out of sight – thus carving the niche of legendary invincibility.

Her encounter with the viciously mercantilist cabal of fake drug merchants would on account of the amazonic soldiery with which she engaged them – for ever linger in evergreen memory.

If Akunyili could dare this notorious cartel with such suicidal bravura, now tell me how the NEPA mafia would not be a match-over.

Yet, Jonathan wasted this woman for a reason one could not fathom. This was a woman who threw all official etiquette to the wind to facilitate Jonathan’s transmogrification to substantive presidency during the cover-up, hide-and-seek shenanigan of the sickly moment of Umaru Yar’Adua, the ex-president – at a time, when Binta Yar’Adua, his beautiful wife, who all along had been seeing herself as the president in waiting, must have been toying with the crazy fancy of a transmogrification to full presidency, even when our constitution does not permit that.

Otherwise, my sister Akunyili had no business in the senate. She took recourse to that option finding herself in the frustrative limbo of redundantly none-use, ill-use and dis-use.

Never known to have been a failure in life, she must have been convincingly enamoured of perceived zero probability of failure. But she failed to reckon with the inscrutable determinism of magisterial faith. The vagaries of life’s convoluting twists and turns; its miasmic uncertainty and dashing jokers. She failed to reckon – in her mortal lack of precognition – with the imminence of the transition of the Ikemba Nnewi; the Ezendigbo Gburugburu, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, the dynamic soul essence of All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA, – to the ultimate world beyond, after a presaging spell of long coma.

And of course, with the Ezendigbo Gburugburu out of circulation, you would need less of a soothsayer to understand that APGA, as the symbol of Igbo micro-nationalism, was fast lapsing into edentulous impotence. Thus my sister Dora lost the battle to the Senate which accentuated in her, a mounting melancholic fits and frustration.

But as the chips are down in crystal relief, it would soon dawned in the recesses of the general mind, that Akunyili is least the victim, but Nigeria, in the context of its cherished lofty dreams, in dire dislocation.

All Jonathan’s administration neededto turn around the economy was the Akunyili wand of miracle. Dora Akunyili the immortal patriot and eminent matriarch of the nation, has gone. Whence cometh another? May her great soul rest in perfect peace.                

•Johnson is a writer and Journalist.