Amidst the general lachrymose and pervading gloom which attended Onukaba’s demise, Atiku established an “Adinoyi-Ojo Onukaba Endowment Fund,” to support the young family. At the fundraiser in Abuja, on May 2, 2017, about N13 million was aggregated in cash and promissory notes. Atiku made the single largest contribution of N10 million.
A Board of Trustees, chaired by this writer, which includes select family members and intimate friends of Onukaba, was emplaced. Side by side with this effort, Taiwo Obe, a longstanding friend of Onukaba, rallied friends and colleagues on the Lagos stretch, to poll resources for the family.
Happily, Onukaba’s family is wearing a brave face and trying to cope without their father. In the absence of both biological parents for Asuku and Ebikere, Memunat their stepmother is filling the gap, as well as she can. Onukaba’s siblings, notably Audu, have also been supportive. Frugal management of the Endowment Fund ensured that Asuku and Ebikere continued their educational progression in one of the topmost private secondary schools in Abuja. They completed their Senior Secondary School Education, (SSCE), in flying colours in that institution without being dislocated from an environment they had aclimatised in overtime.
August 24, 2019, Atiku from his abode in Dubai, fulfilled his pledge, two years earlier, to grant fully-funded scholarships to any of Onukaba’s children desirous of studying at the American University of Nigeria (AUN), in Yola, owned by him. Asuku Onukaba, who turned 19 recently, is in his third-year studying Software Engineering, in the institution. Ebikere has been taken up by her maternal uncles, Festus and Kenneth Ogirri, who both live in Houston. Because she’s just 16, she’s been enrolled in a community college, pending her transfer to the university, when she is of age. Ebikere’s aunt, Ethel Ogirri-Omeye, lives next door in Canada, with her family. Last year, the proprietor of the “Cradle To Harvard” schools in Abuja, Phrank Shaibu, awarded a full scholarship to Onyeche, now five years old.
Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello, a kinsman of the late Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, visited Onukaba’s family house in Ihima, Okene, during the muslim three-day prayer for the departed, in March 2017. He promised to buy a property in Abuja for his family when he learnt Onukaba lived in rented accommodation at the time of his demise. He noted that this contrasted with his looming public profile.
Bello directed his chief of staff at the time, Edward Onoja, who is now his deputy, to set up a meeting to this effect, between him and officials of the Endowment Fund, on the subject. Five years after, the meeting has not happened. Bello’s finance commissioner, Ashiru Idris, recently committed to reopening the matter with the Kogi State governor, to push it to a successful denouement, when I brought the issue to his attention.
Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, the masquerade who never donned a mask, continues to be missed by many. He was a gentleman par excellence, cerebral, imaginative, forthright, unsuited for Nigeria’s political madness and rapacious rat race. I reminded him in our several debates that he was not cut out for a country like ours, which continues to confound the world with its self-inflicted ordered disorder, and disorderly order. I would tell him that a certain measure of agbero DNA, is needed to navigate the Nigerian conundrum, which I equated with Daniel Fagunwa’s 1938 novel in Yoruba, translated to English as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, by Wole Soyinka.
I always insisted he was better a professor and knowledge producer in a Western country, where he would thrive as the journalist, playwright, biographer, scholar and art connoisseur he was. To be sure, his authorial production which includes eight published and performed plays and four biographies, among others, would be the envy of many professors today. At the time of his departure, he was collaborating with Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru, a former chairman of the Federal Internal Revenue Service, (FIRS), on a landmark publication on Nigeria’s multifarious ethnicities, which had many respected intellectuals and professionals as contributors. The first volume was all but ready before he left. It’s been five years on and we miss Onukaba, every day.
Concluded
Olusunle, PhD, poet, journalist, author and scholar, is a Member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, (NGE).
