By Tunde Olusunle
Monday March 1, 2021, marked the public presentation of a book, “Made in Aba: A Life Of Coincidences” by Enyinnaya Abaribe, Senator Representing Abia South Senatorial Zone, and Minority Leader of the Senate of the Federal Republic. March 1 was also the 66th birthday of the author himself, which meant the event was a double-barelled event.
His name preceded my meeting him. Yes, it was nearly two decades after I first heard about him, before we formally met.
“Barry” was one of our more enigmatic “seniors” in the Department of Modern European Languages, in our foundation year at the University of Ilorin. We were in the university, in a free space quite alright, but the African in us recognised there were “egbons”, either in age or academic hierarchy. Barry was in his final year and we were just resuming. We took a special liking for him for a number of reasons. He was ever decked with dark sunglasses, his cigarette in hand. He had a down-to-earth sense of humour, freely expressed, especially when he was in the company of close friends
Barry, unknown to us, was an abbreviation of a slightly longer name. Here was the bearer of the original name in a sociocultural space, away from his traditional environment, whose name was the subject of constant mutilation and misspelling. The way to simplify the challenge of people who had problems with getting his name right, was to adopt an easier abbreviation.
His full name was Onyekachi Abaribe. He told us then, that he was from what has now become the Old Imo State. Nigeria was a much better country those days, when tertiary institutions mirrored the true beauty of our multicultural diversity. The teaching staff and the student population were from all over the country, all over the world, enacting the very essence of the university as universitas. The primordial Nigerian University was truly a wholly, totally universal institution. They were not the religiously bigoted, ethnically nepotistic institutions which sadly, many of them now are.
At free times in our hostels, between listening to music on our radio-cassettes and general gisting, we told stories of how we found our ways to Unilorin. In his own particular instance, we wondered: Why would he leave the universities in Nsukka, Calabar and Port Harcourt which were closer to him in Imo, for faraway Ilorin? He wouldn’t be the first person in his family to be that adventurous, he said. “Even my immediate senior brother, Enyi, attended the University of Benin,” he explained.
The onset of democracy governance in Nigeria in 1999, would finally bring me face to face with Onyekachi’s brother. As a presidential aide, I moved around quite a bit with President Olusegun Obasanjo. I recall we were in Abia State in year 2000 on a state visit. At a reception hosted in Aba Stadium shortly on the President’s arrival, the master of ceremony while establishing the order of state protocol, announced the name of “His Excellency, Enyinnaya Harcourt Abaribe, Deputy Governor of Abia State,” as he listed dignitaries who were present at the ceremony. We were in the state box around and about our Principal and I managed to identify the senior Abaribe, when he courtesied, at the mention of his name.
On the sidelines of one of the President’s many engagements on that trip, I walked up to him and greeted him. We shook hands as I introduced myself to him: “Your Excellency, I am Tunde Olusunle and I work with the President. I’m just wondering if you know one Onyekachi Abaribe. He was our senior in the university.” Smiling and holding my hand still, he answered: “You must have attended the University of Ilorin then. Kachi was there.” And from that moment, we became friends. “Kachi is in the US,” he told me as we continued our banter.
Enyinnaya Abaribe and I met more frequently thereafter. I followed his tribulations in the hands of his colleague and Governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, very studiously and wondered why he was so unfairly treated. The gentleman I saw in Abaribe, was completely at variance with the monster that was being caricatured by Kalu’s spin doctors.
In the weeks and months preceding his eventual resignation from office, we met a few times in Port Harcourt, as guests of Chief Onyema Ugochukwu, pioneer Chairman of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, who lived there at the time. It was both courageous and honourable the decision he took.
With Ugochukwu as leader, Abaribe and like-minded concerned Abia statesmen including the late Chief Ojo Maduekwe (Minister of Culture and Tourism; Transport and Foreign Affairs at various times); Senator Onyedikachi Okoroafor; Col Austin Akobundu among others, came together and sought to refocus politics in Abia and wrest the state from the vice-grip of reactionary elements. In the run up to the 2007 general elections, Ugochukwu and Abaribe both won the gubernatorial and senatorial tickets of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP.
We met at the screening point of the Washington Dulles airport one of those summer holidays when I travelled with my family. He came in from Houston, to catch the Virgin Atlantic flight to London. My family and I were on the same vessel so we went through immigration and checked in together. We talked extensively about home and the teething challenges of democracy. He played with my kids and gave each of them a “high five.”
We arrived Gatwick Airport, the next morning to the rudest shock of our trip. Our Lagos-bound connection would not be from Gatwick, but Heathrow! Here we were, my wife and I and three young children. And we had shopped ourselves to the full, such that we had over half a dozen boxes. We had to collect them all from the carousel; load them up on trolleys; push them to the bus station outside the airport and load them into the luggage compartment of the bus. Abaribe could see my bewilderment and was particularly moved seeing my nine year old son, trying to help me out. My wife on the other hand was minding the other kids. “Young man,” he told my son, “Don’t worry, I will get this.” My amazement was palpable. Here was the deputy governor of a state in Nigeria, with the full apparatus of office offering to help my family manage our luggage. I was touched by his humility, his selflessness, his fellow feeling.
Driving from the National Universities Commission, NUC, towards Gana Street one evening, my headlamps caught the profile of a gentleman who was properly dressed in an attire, consistent with the sartorial disposition of the South East of Nigeria. He was crossing over from Transcorp Hilton Hotel, to the adjacent gas station. It turned out it was Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe. As I closed up towards him, I wound down the car windows and called out to him “Alaasala,” his popular nickname within the Abia State political family, adapted from a traditional title conferred on him by the former monarch of Lagos, Oba Adeyinka Oyekan. He had already climbed the median on the road, but waited to see who it was who knew him so well and called his intimate name at this time of the day. “Tunde, na you,” he asked as I levelled up with him. “Where is your car, Your Excellency? Where are you going?” He explained that he came for a function in Transcorp and had a breakdown. Abaribe was in. He said he left his driver to fix the car and was going to take a taxi home. Abaribe was in his second term as senator of the Federal Republic. He wore no airs at all. He’s just your regular guy. I offered to take him.
We arrived his place and I expected he would be received by a battery of security operatives, the way they fawn over privileged people in our political ecosystem. “Where are the policemen attached to you, Your Excellency? They should be opening the door for you.” But Abaribe “disappointed” me. He reached for pocket and brought out the keys to his house. “If people in our position have to surround ourselves with security personnel even here in Abuja, what message are we sending to those who voted us in, what are we telling the diplomatic and international community? That even our nation’s capital city is unsafe?”, he asked me rhetorically. He opened his house and said to me, “Tunde, thanks for your kindness. That’s why we conferred the title “Enyi’Oha on you in Abia,” he said as he laughed. Continuing he said: “Tomorrow is Saturday. Abeg come around so we can take the EPL games together. You know you and I are Arsenal fans,” he giggled as we waved to each other.
During the Africa Cup of Nations football hosted by South Africa in 2013, Abaribe in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Committee of Communications, led his colleagues in the parliament to the tournament. I was also there with about half a dozen football loving friends, in our private capacities. As the Super Eagles played their group games moving from one city to another, we kept encountering Abaribe and his colleagues, from the state box of one stadium to another. And after one solitary win and two drawn games at the competition, our morale as compatriots and football aficionados began drop.
Like many others who felt unconvinced by the prospects of Nigeria in that competition, my friends and I headed back home to Nigeria. Dramatically, the Super Eagles won their quarter final and semi final matches. They were now to face the Stallions of Burkina Faso in the finals. The mood of the country went upbeat. Senator Abaribe called me a few days before the finals played at the “Bird’s Nest” Stadium in Johannesburg: “Tunde, are you in Johannesburg or Abuja?” “I’m in Abuja, Your Excellency” I replied. “Our boys were not doing well so we came back home.” “Well, they’ve made it to the finals and I’m going to attend the event. Be my guest in Sandton, Johannesburg, if you make it back.” What other prompting did I need with such an invitation, especially when my good friend, Bimbo Daramola, then in the House of Representatives had gifted me a business class ticket back to Johannesburg?
As Senator for the fourth consecutive term, Abaribe has built a solid, sturdy reputation for himself as a fearless, dogged, objective, hard-hitting, respectable parliamentarian and defender of the people. He is the quintessential akpruka, resilient and tireless. Not for him the circuitous, roundaboutish meandering of some of his colleagues given to massaging and caressing the egos of their principals in the executive arm of government. Not for him unnecessary genuflections and gerrymandering. He says it as it is with unequalled comportment, with verifiable facts and figures. He has become something of a public defender, who sees the entire country and not Abia South Senatorial zone alone, or the South East for that matter as his primary constituency.
His scholastic interventions and evidence-based contributions to parliamentary discourse is not a surprise to those who have known him over the years. To be sure, Abaribe began his working career as a lecturer in Economics in the erstwhile Bendel State University, Ekpoma, Edo State, which is now known as Ambrose Alli University. Even on short haul flights within the country, you will most probably find him reading a book.
Not one to be gagged, he once described President Muhammadu Buhari as nepotistic, a “provincial” leader who has scant knowledge of the country he runs. He wondered why the President was more disposed to appointing only people from his own immediate sociocultural catchment. He decried the extrajudicial killings of some youths in Emene, Enugu State, during an altercation with security forces. At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown last year, he criticised the brutality and killings inflicted on people in the South East of the country, in the name of the enforcement of the lockdown.
With the escalating national security situation characterised by unending insurgency in the North East, banditry and kidnapping in the North West, and the farmers versus herdsmen’s crisis in the North Central, Abaribe called on Buhari to resign. In his summation, since the President had run out of panaceas to the security situation, there was no justification for him to continue in the position he was voted into.
Abaribe has been guest of the Department of State Services, DSS, on a number of occasions. Among others, he was remanded in custody for failing to produce in court for prosecution, Nnamdi Kanu, the self-styled leader of the Indigenous People Of Biafra, IPOB. And he remains unbending, unbroken.
This is wishing Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe many happy returns of his special day in continuing altruistic service to our country.
I salute you, Alaasala.
* Tunde Olusunle holds a doctorate degree in Media Arts from the University of Abuja.