In the 1930s and 1940s, when Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was a little boy, the journalist, orator, blooming politician and nationalist, Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe was already a power to be reckoned with in Lagos and beyond. As a founding member of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), and before then, a pivotal member of the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), Azikiwe was instrumental to taking Nigerian nationalist politics beyond the confines of Lagos. When Herbert Macaulay, the first president of the NCNC, died in 1947, Azikiwe succeeded him.
Azikiwe’s comeliness, charisma, persona and academic achievements drew him to the emerging Nigerian moneyed class who saw in him a rallying point for the promotion and protection of their interests. The new Nigerian colony’s economy was dominated by the Lebanese, Syrians, Greeks and British. There were Nigerians who made good in the system. The Rochas, the Ojukwus, the Bank Anthonys, the Dantatas, all rose to great heights in the colonial economy. But these were exceptions as the colonial structure determined how high many of the emergent Nigerian business class would fly. Grossly dissatisfied with the status quo, the Nigerian merchants and entrepreneurs gave their support to this enfant terrible whose newspaper the ‘West African Pilot’ took British colonial policies on Nigeria to the cleaners.
Azikiwe was a very good friend of Sir Louis Philippe Odumegwu Ojukwu, the father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. The two men had a lot in common. Azikiwe was born in 1904; Ojukwu Senior in 1909. While Azikiwe was born in Northern Nigeria, specifically Zungeru in present-day Niger state, and spent most of his early childhood there, Ojukwu Senior was born in the Igbo heartland town of Nnewi but spent some years of his working life as a staff of John Holt Company in Northern Nigeria. Business deals also took him regularly to the north when he left salaried employment for entrepreneurship. It was in the course of one of such business journeys that he became acquainted with the young, beautiful and nubile Delta Igbo businesswoman named Grace who eventually gave birth to Chukwuemeka. Azikiwe’s hometown, Onitsha, is not up to thirty kilometres from Nnewi, and both towns occupy commercial and technological pride of place in Igboland. Both men also attended the famous Hope Waddell Institute in Calabar. Azikiwe spent a short period there before going to Lagos while Ojukwu Senior who was a classmate of the only premier of the former Midwestern region, Dennis Osadebey, spent only one year there before bidding goodbye to formal education. Both men also enjoyed the company of beautiful women and did not have the best of marital unions. Ojukwu Senior divorced Chukwuemeka’s mother at a young age and married thrice before his death. Azikiwe married twice, first to Flora Ogoegbunam, later to Uche Ewah. Odia Ofeimum, the poet and former private secretary to Obafemi Awolowo gave insights into Azikiwe’s appreciation of ladies that manifested during the run-up to the 1979 general elections.
Thus it is not surprising both men forged a close relationship. They were high flyers in the firmaments of Nigerian politics and commerce in the 1930s and 1940s. Ojukwu Senior was an ardent patron of the NCNC and stood by Azikiwe. But he did not allow politics become his first love. There was good business to be done with the British and the shrewd Nnewi tycoon would not unduly antagonize them. But he was a strong pillar when Azikiwe’s career as Premier of the Eastern Region was threatened by Justice Foster Sutton inquiry into his financial relationship with the African Continental Bank (ACB) which Azikiwe established in 1949. The ACB was the successor to Nigeria’s first domestic bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank, established in 1929. The hiatus that followed the bank’s liquidation was briefly filled by the Mercantile Bank in 1931 before it also went under. The ACB was the only successful Indigenous bank for many years and paved the way for the emergence of a highly successful Indigenous business class from Eastern Nigeria and other parts of the country. If the Foster Sutton inquiry had ended in Azikiwe’s conviction, it would have destroyed the ACB which pioneered the end of British monopoly on banking in Nigeria.
Azikiwe was a surrogate father to Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu who was born on 4 November 1933 in Zungeru. The Biafran leader recollected that as a child he sat in Azikiwe’s arms while the nationalist and his comrades talked shop in Ojukwu Senior’s sprawling Lagos mansion. Ojukwu Senior had a stint in the House of Representatives and it was obvious he was grooming his son for a career in politics or big business. But the lad had other plans.
After her separation from Ojukwu Senior, Chukwuemeka’s mother had a romantic relationship with a white man in Fagge, Kano, where she was living. The liaison led to the birth of Chukwuemeka’s half-brother, Thomas Bigga, who was killed in action fighting for Biafra. Azikiwe was largely instrumental in convincing Louis Ojukwu to reclaim the young Chukwuemeka after his marriage to the mother collapsed and integrating him into his wealthy, cosmopolitan household.
When Ojukwu decided to join the Nigerian army despite his father’s virulent opposition, the senior Ojukwu turned to Azikiwe for help in dissuading his son from his ‘madness.’ Azikiwe summoned the young man and told him if he, Azikiwe, were in his shoes, he would grab the Nnewi millionaire’s offer to oversee his empire. With his MA in History from Oxford University, the world would be at his feet. But Ojukwu replied that since he was not an Azikiwe he would not do so since his father’s offer would perpetually define him as Ojukwu Senior’s boy, living in his father’s colossal shadow.
In spite of their close friendship, the relationship between Azikiwe and Ojukwu Senior was not without hiccups. There was a blight which probably marked the beginning of the animosity that would find expression years later between Azikiwe and his friend’s son.
Azikiwe made his reputation as a leading African journalist. In 1934 he became editor of the Ghanaian newspaper ‘African Morning Post.’ Following his clash with the colonial authorities in Ghana, then called Gold Coast, and prejudice from some Ghanaians who felt he was stealing their thunder in the Ghanaian anti-colonial movement, he returned to Nigeria in 1937. According to Oliver Anyabolu in his book ‘Nigeria: Past to the Present”, Azikiwe subsequently set up the Zik Press Limited with his funds and loans from friends. The flagship of the media company was the ‘West African Pilot.’
In spite of their friendship, both men contended for ownership and control of the remarkably profitable ‘West African Pilot.’ Azikiwe won, and in the words of the March 5 2012 edition of ‘The Source’ magazine earned ‘the reputation of the only man ever to best the wily transportation magnate in a business deal.’ The younger Ojukwu apparently never forgot this slight on his father by Azikiwe.
One cannot help but wonder if Ojukwu Senior had not overstepped his bounds by seeking to add the newspaper which was Azikiwe’s brainchild to his business empire. Was he one of Azikiwe’s financial benefactors when the doyen of journalism wanted to set up his company, and seeing how successful the enterprise had become, decided to take over the entire project? What were the conditions attached to his loans to Azikiwe, if any was given, and what did Azikiwe make of them?
However, it was on the political stage that the colossal clash between Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu played out, with far-reaching implications for both men and Nigeria.
