Adieu, Alex Akwueme (1932 – 2017)

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country was practically thrown into mourning on November 19, 2017 following the eventual demise of the nation’s first Executive Vice President, Dr Alex Ekwueme, in a London hospital, after a brief illness.
Born on October 21, 1932 to the Ekwueme family of Oko in Orumba North Local Government Area of Anambra State, young Alex started his early education at St. John’s Anglican Central School, Ekwulobia in Anambra State. He later proceeded to Kings’ College, Lagos for his secondary education before travelling as a Fulbright scholar to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Architecture and M.Sc. Urban Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle in the United States of America.
He also obtained degrees in Sociology, History, Philosophy and Constitutional Law from London University, while his Ph.D in Architecture came from the University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom. Ekwueme later enrolled for his Barrister-at-Law examination at the Nigerian Law School in 1991, years after serving as Nigeria’s vice president.
On completion of his architecture degrees in the US, Ekwueme worked briefly as an assistant architect with Leo A. Daly & Associates and later in London with Nickson and Partners. Back in Nigeria, he worked as Head of Construction and Maintenance Department at Esso West Africa Limited. It was after these stints that he established Ekwueme & Associates, the first indigenous architectural and urban planning firm in Nigeria.
As a doyen of architecture in Nigeria, Ekwueme was variously elected to serve as president and chairman, Board of Trustees, Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIA) and also the Architects Registration Council of Nigeria (ARCON).
During the Nigerian Civil War, he was said to have headed the Biafran Airports Board which undertook the ingenious construction of Uli and Uga Airstrips through which foreign humanitarian shipments and war materials entered the rebel enclave.
Ekwueme’s initial foray into Nigeria’s murky political waters was in 1978 when he contested the governorship primaries of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the old Anambra State but lost to Chief Christian Onoh. Apparently undaunted by this loss, Ekwueme had opted to reach for the higher office of the vice president and eventually paired with Alhaji Shehu Shagari to win the 1979 presidential election before being toppled in a military putsch four years later.
After some years of house arrest and outright ban from politics, alongside other Second Republic politicians, Ekwueme bounced back to public reckoning with his appointment into the National Constitutional Conference of 1995 where he made a sterling proposal for the creation of six geo-political zones in Nigeria so as to enable people from minority regions aspire to occupy the highest offices in the land rather than what was obtainable then, where only people from a region dominated the political scene.
Ekwueme’s influence also went beyond Nigeria. Apart from being a member of the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) Council of Elders, he had in 2000 also led monitoring teams to the parliamentary and presidential elections in Zambia and Tanzania, respectively. He also co-led an observer team to the 2005 presidential run-off election in Liberia.
Ekwueme’s role in galvanizing members of the G34 political movement which later metamorphosed into the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1998 cannot be over-emphasised. Even as an octogenarian, Ekwueme still accepted to undertake the onerous task of pacifying and pulling some aggrieved members of his party back especially following the party’s dismal outing in the 2015 polls.
As Nigerians and even foreign sympathisers gather to bid him a final farewell in his Oko country home today, there is no doubt that they will miss a man who truly would have loved to bequeath to the next generation a better nation than the one he left behind. Nigeria will surely miss the Ekwueme rallying factor in its politics. But more than anyone else, the Ekwueme family and Oko kingdom will greatly miss their beloved Ide Aguata who attracted so much development to the community while alive and even in death.
Ekwueme was indeed a man of peace, high integrity and served as a natural stabilising voice in times of national crises. In fact, if his late friend and brother, Dim Chukwuemeka Odimegwu-Ojukwu, had survived him, the ex-Biafran warlord would most probably have paid a glowing tribute to another ‘best president Nigeria never had’.
Adieu, Dr Alexander Ifeanyichukwu Ekwueme, GCON.