Dr Dalhatu Tafida, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the UK confirmed in London on Saturday that Ikemba Nnewi, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, is dead.
“A member of the family just called to tell me,’’ Tafida said in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.
Reacting to the news on a telephone interview from London, former President Olusegun Obasanjo said that, “it is with deep sadness that I received the news of the demise of my friend and colleague.
“He and I were subalterns in the army at Nigeria’s independence in 1960. In a way, his death marks the end of an era in Nigeria. I condole with his family and pray for the repose of his soul.’’
Odumegwu-Ojukwu was born on Nov. 4, 1933 at Zungeru, Niger State to Sir Louis Phillippe Odumegwu Ojukwu, a businessman from Nnewi
The leader of the defunct Republic of Biafra began his educational career in Lagos, but was briefly imprisoned for assaulting a white British colonial teacher who was humiliating a black woman at King’s College, Lagos.
His father sent him to Britain at the age of 13 to study, first at Epsom College in Surrey from where he thereafter bagged a Master’s degree in history at Lincoln College, Oxford University.
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu returned to Nigeria in 1956 and joined the civil service in the defunct Eastern Nigeria as an Administrative Officer at Udi, in present-day Enugu State.
In 1957, within months of working with the colonial civil service, he left and joined the military as one of the first and few university graduates to join the Nigerian army.
After serving in the UN peacekeeping force in the then Congo under Maj.-Gen. Johnson Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, Ojuwkwu was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1964 and was posted to Kano, where he was in charge of the 5 Battalion of the Nigerian Army.
Aguiyi-Ironsi appointed Odumegwu-Ojukwu military governor of the defunct Easter Region on Jan. 17, 1966.
After the first military coup of 1966 and the counter coup that followed, Odumegwu-Ojukwu declared the defunct Eastern Region a sovereign state to be known as Biafra.
In the declaration and during his public address to the people of Biafra, he said: “Having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf, and in your name, that Eastern
Nigeria be a sovereign independent republic, now, therefore I, Lt.-Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by virtue of the authority, and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her continental shelf and territorial waters, shall, henceforth, be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic of Biafra.’’
On July 6, 1967, the then military Head of State, Col. Yakubu Gowon declared war and attacked Biafra in a bid to stop Ojukwu’s secessionist attempt.
The war lasted 30 months and ended on Jan. 15, 1970.
As the war was wearing out, Ojukwu went on exile and stayed away for 13 years. He was granted state pardon by President Shehu Shagari, a decision which was trailed by the deceased’s triumphant return in 1982.
Odumegwu-Ojukwu was married to Miss Intercontinental 1989 Bianca Onoh. They have children.
Until his death, Ojukwu was the undisputed leader of the All Peoples Grand Alliance.