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If Dr. Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe the indefatigible
Nigerian politician better known as KO or the Man of Timber and Calibre was to be alive, March 15, 2008 would
have marked his 91st birthday. But KO, the Agadagbachiriuzo of Arondizuogu, the Ononenyi of Orlu, the Maye
of
Lagos, the
great eagle around whose name many legends are spun took the eternal bow on August
29, 1990. Since then no politician with the same vivacity and audacity has
illuminated the Nigerian political landscape.
Born at Oneh in Orumba on March 15, 1917
to Mbadiwe Odum of the wealthy Odum family of Ndianiche Uno, Arondizuogu in the
present Ideato North Local Government of Imo State, KO, at birth, was
proclaimed to ba a reincarnation of Okoli Idozuka, a famous warrior and wealthy
merchant whose title, Agadagbachiriuzo (the
great tree that blocks the way), he inherited and bore all his life. Thus imbued
with the heart of a lion from a tender age, KO began school at St. Marys
Catholic School,
Port Harcourt
where his brother, David, was a staff of the Nigerian Railways. His assertive
character began to manifest at this time. During the late 1920s while he was holidaying
in Arondizuogu, KO who had become fascinated by the aura of Catholicism decided
to relinquish the Anglican faith of his family. He walked up boldly to the
Irish priest at St. Philips Catholic Church, Ndiakeme to request for baptism.
The bewildered priest hedged until an older communicant, Mazi Stephen Okafor
Ogbaji, volunteered to mentor the boy who was eventually bestowed with the name
Gabriel at baptism. Today, in the large Odum kindred, KO’s nuclear family
remains Catholics among Protestants.
After completing his elementary
education at
Government
School,
Aba, KO
attended Aggrey Memorial College Arochukwu,
Baptist
College,
Lagos
and
Igbobi
College,
Lagos. On
leaving Igbobi in 1934, he tried his hands at trading, an occupation that made
him to settle in
Port Harcourt.
His residence there proved providencial. When Zik returned from the Gold Coast
with the gospel of nationalism and visited PH on a lecture tour in 1937, KO who
had just turned 20 at the time was captivated by Zik’s erudition. He got close
to Zik and arranged for the orator to meet his wealthy elder brother, J. Green
Mbadiwe, then a gold miner and railway contractor in Minna. At the meeting,
Green readily subscribed to the setting up of the West African Pilot which became the flagship of the Zik group of
newspapers with the motto “show the light and the people shall find the way”.
KO became the representative of the newspaper for PH,
Aba
and
Onitsha but
not for long.
With Zik’s encouragement, KO was one of
the seven young men who were inspired to sail to the
United States on December 31, 1938
in search of the Golden Fleece: others were Mazi Mbonu Ojike, George Igbodebe
Mbadiwe, Otuka Okala, Dr. Nnodu Okongwu, Engr. Nwankwo Chukwuemeka, and Dr. Okechukwu
Ikejiani. They were later joined by Dr. Abyssinia Akweke Nwafor Orizu. KO was
to refer to this group as the Seven
Argonauts.
On his return to
Nigeria in May 1948, KO undertook a tour of the
country with a movie “Greater Tomorrow” which he had made in the
US to promote
the cause of his African Academy of Arts
and Science. With interest generated by the film, the Academy was able to
send a batch of 16 students to the
US before the end of that year. In
April 1951 KO joined the NCNC. Not long after, the Macpherson Constitution was
promulgated which introduced regionalism into the political matrix. With
radical nationalism manacled by the ban placed on the Zikist movement, KO
contested and won election as member for Orlu in the Eastern Regional House of
Assembly from where he was elected to the Federal House of Representatives in
Lagos. In 1952, KO was
appointed the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources. The journey through
political minefields which saw him remaining in the limelight for almost four
decades had begun.
How
does one begin to catalogue the contributions of a man like KO to Nigerian
politics? But in a country that is no stranger to ironies, memories run short. K.O
made persistent calls for the ‘rebirth’ of this nation. Over fifty odd years
ago, he convened the first committee on National Rebirth, a forum for all political
leaders. Even his authobiography published in 1990 is aptly titled ‘Rebirth of
a Nation’. Today
Nigeria
has adopted and institutionalized both the catchphrase and the idea. K.O fought
for the institution of a zoning system (which was encapsulated in his typically
illustrative coinage “zoning to unzone” as a sine qua non for equity and national development. It was K.O who
secured the inclusion of the clause “25% of votes cast in at least two thirds
of the states of the Federation” in the 1979 constitution during his days in
the Constituent Assembly to counteract the dangers of electing a president by “simple
majority”.
In his lifetime, K.O showed a
preference for a nationally based political party over any regional or ethnic
party. This has become accepted today as the only panacea for national unity. How many residents of Surulere today
know that this model estate was conceived and established in a virtual forest
by K.O as Minister for Lands to settle victims of the
Lagos slum clearance project, a scheme that
was resisted and opposed by the Action Group? Indeed, when K.O moved a motion
in 1952 to remove
Lagos
from the Western Region in view of its status as a capital city, the same
Action Group opposed and caused the motion to fail. But K.O’s DPNC struck an
alliance with Action Group in 1958. At that time he was thought by Ndigbo to
have committed political sacrilege. Today, the ‘handshake across the
Niger’, a
synonym for Igbo/Yoruba political co-operation has become a favourite song in
the Igbo political hymnal
Even before 1958, K.O’s vision,
amiability and candour had moved him to earn the trust and confidence of the
northern political establishment. This made it possible for him to engineer
many monumental political alliances: the NCNC/NPC alliance (1954), the NPN/NPP
alliance (1981) and, when that failed, the multi party alliance which K.O the
quintessential wordsmith tagged ‘accord-concordiale’ (1982). K.O Mbadiwe was a
flamboyant man who thought only in superlatives. As minister of Aviation, he
structured Nigerian Airways partnership with Pan-American Airways and took exotic
Atiliogwu dancers and two royal trumpeters from Kano on the maiden flight from
Lagos to New York which he tagged “Operation Fantastic”. In the thick of his
debacle with Zik in 1958, K.O declared that if Azikiwe was “iwe” that he (Mbadiwe)
was “iwe” too – an onomatopoeic reference to the identical suffix of their
surnames which translate to “anger”. At the height of the 1965 political crisis
in the former
Western Nigeria, KO was reported
as saying that “when the come comes to become, we shall come out”.
At various times KO served this country
as Minister of Communications, Minister of Aviation, Minister for Lands and
Natural Resources, Minister for Trade, Personal Adviser to President Shehu
Shagari on National Assembly Affairs, and the first and, so far, only ‘Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’ of the
Federal Republic of Nigeria. K.O had an abiding respect for the press which
nourished his relationship with the fourth estate of the realm which so
glamorized him that even his silence on issues made as much headline news as
his comments.
Next to Zik, K.O ranks among the
greatest nationalists of Igbo extraction that ever trod this land. This
colossal image was recaptured by another orator and hero Chief Emeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu who wrote in a befitting tribute “K.O was grand, his actions grandiose,
his speeches grandiloquent”. In his lifetime K.O was like the phoenix, a
mythical bird that always rose rejuvenated from it’s ashes: there was no single
political conflagration from which he did not emerge straight into power or, at
worst, into the corridor of power. Today, we refresh our memory on this
unforgettable man who (like many other heroes of yesterday) has not received
his deserved honour from the government of
Nigeria. uchebush@yahoo.com
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Posted by Robot| 15.03.2008 09:07