Emma Okocha
“This nationalist movement called the Zikist Movement was founded in 1946 by four journalists and this is a fact, which many people don’t know. These young journalists were MCK Ajuluchukwu, Kolawole Balogun, who later became a prominent lawyer and national secretary of the NCNC, and Nduka Eze, one of the great names in the labour movement and a political activist from Asaba.”
–See Chief David Edebiri, the Esogban of Benin, Alemma Aliu, Vanguard, August 31, 2019
Abiodun Aloba, with the pen name of Ebenezer Williams, was the last of the radical four that founded the Zikist Movement. While Kolawole Balogun swerved with preponderant charisma, yet the overthrowing gift of the garb, intellectual urbanity the total mobilizing capability of Nduka Eze, thrust the freedom fighting four to the lead. Brandishing the new Zikist Movement philosophy aimed to over throw the Colonial Government to be replaced at once by the awaken educated patriotic Nigerians.
Nduka Eze was prepared and as the pioneer UAC National Union President, he stopped Nigeria in 1947! Leading the first national strike against the British, he was the first black to bare his fangs against the British. This courageous move was not only nationally successful, it was unprecedented!
Unlike many union pretender leaders of our time he was very circumspect. Nduka Eze fought for his workers’ welfare and moved to the trade union international affiliates securing international scholarship, grants for his workers. Many committing suicides, changing their journeymen or artisan statuses, travelled to Europe and Asia to upgrade their education, vocation, etc, returning to Nigeria to head their departments.
From the UAC, Nduka Eze was the Secretary General of the NCNC. He was at the London School of Economics, where he read Law. On returning, he ditched the slow NCNC and moved over to the AG. Under Awo, he collided against the former Premier Chief Dennis Osadebay as they swam different tides and waves to find fulfillment for their ever forlorn Western Ibos who from day one were helmed in by the phallangist Edo and Urhobo nations. Nduka Eze to his evergreen credit established the Asaba General Hospital and moved many Anioma young men to study abroad. Rejecting his kinsman Nwajei, Nduka Eze crowned Nosike Ikpo from Ibusa the senator for our people! For those of us his lieutenants (including Col. Fejiokwu, who recruited me from the class and former Transport N.A. Officer taught me Research and Industrial Public Relations at UNN) witnessed Eze’s sad evening days, it is invigorating to be part of history again.
All week at Asaba, I and many of the late statesman’s friends, colleagues have participated in the extravaganza, the earthquake revelry, which has exploded in Asaba since the last Titan, Prof. Obi Chike Edozien, paid a deserving tribute to the gargantuan patriotic contributions of Nduka Eze. On his 95th birthday anniversary he conferred on son Chuck, ISAMA AJIE!.
Isama Ajie, today, as you stand at my mother’s Eze Afadia Square, where the “Magistri Lengentes” your father is chiseled out of stone, I kiss you with the last words of your father. Like in the Ninth book of the Iliad, where Phoenix in addressing Achilles reminded him that he had been “sent by your father to you to prepare to be both a Speaker of words and Doer of deeds”.
For some three decades, I had beckoned on you Chuck to be your father. Asaba cannot afford to bury Nduka Eze without a Resurgemento, Risorgimento, Revolution …without a reincarnation of that legendary pathfinder. Chuck whose mother was the heroine of the Asaba massacre (preferred to be shot dead unlike other traumatized Asaba women who succumbed to debauched rape). Again growing up Chuck did not enjoy any parental care, he was a teenager in London when his father died in Nigeria.
Chuck was rattled by the Asaba genocide and eventually like his father he jumped into the arena. He led the Asaba case file when we pleaded our case at the Oputa Panel. In those long years of near suicidal confrontations with the military, he was with me and two others who had fallen by the wayside as we battled against the mighty and the ignorant. Advocating that the greatest black on black genocide, the Asaba massacre is a crime against humanity and therefore cannot, like the Jewish Holocaust, the Rwandan and the Armenia genocide ever be forgotten or forgiven.
In many ways the triumph of Chuck Nduka Eze, sprouting from the legendary footsteps of his father also belongs to the Nduka Eze First Lady. A bubbling Plateau beauty, daughter of General Joseph Garba. In this trending xenophobic times detailing the South Africa’s ingratitude, it was Nduka Eze’s father in-law who as our Foreign Minister in the mid ‘70s pursued a land mark foreign policy shift, declaring Africa as the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy. Subsequently, Nigeria joined forces with Cuba and the rest of the progressive world to realise the freedom of Mandela and South Africa’s independence.
Congratulations. Chuck Nduka Eze, Isama Ajie, at last, is his father’s son.