By Uche Ugboajah
There is a saying in Igboland that looking at the mouth of an elder, you would think he never suckled with it. Yet another says when a child washes his hands clean enough, he dines with elders. Those proverbs indeed hold true when we consider the personality of Professor Chidi Anselm Odinkalu who was born on June 12, 1968, as bombs rained on the people of the Southeast.
Odinkanlu has risen from treacherous circumstances and background of his birth to become a global scholar and thought leader today. Yes, Odinkalu is a child of war born into displacement in Ihiala Local Government Area of today’s Anambra State although both of his parents who were teachers and community leaders trace their ancestry to Orsu Local Government in Imo State. It would seem that the “war drums” beating at the time of his arrival to our world have started beating again within the precinct of the area he calls his village—both Ihiala and Orsu are now caught in the renewed separatist violence ongoing in the Southeast zone of Nigeria.
For those who may not know, records have it that thousands of children born at the time Professor Odinkalu was born in the Southeast died either directly from gunshot injuries, kwashiorkor (a severe form of malnutrition), and other diseases. So, when Odinkalu states that he is a “war child,” he is saying that he is a survivor who deserves congratulations.
On a lighter note, although Odinkalu cannot be said to be vertically challenged in terms of physique, he is significantly not a tall person either. I have noticed that many of us born in the Southeast during the Biafran war have some problem with height. I wonder why the Professor had not figured this out with all his involvements in civil society and activism and make a compensation demands on the Federal Government on behalf of all of us, “war children.”
On a serious note, Chidi, as his friends love to call him, grew up in a family of ten children from same parents. He started school quite early. According to him, his mum did not have dependable childcare, so she took him to school with his two elder sisters who cared for him in the margins of the class in the few years after the war. “So, I learnt by Osmosis in the make-shift pram, avoided nursery and went straight to primary school as a three-year old.
“As a result, I went to school well ahead of my age cohort and kind of feel sometimes like I was born an adult. I was a boy sandwiched between my parents’ first five children. The two before me are girls as are the two after me,” Odinkalu revealed.
Although his late parents were teachers who at that time in Igboland could be said to be part of the elite, Odinkalu remembers that while they were not poor, they were also not materially comfortable.
“We were not born with access to any cutlery, so the ornamentation question doesn’t arise. The things that endure in life are not material. We were not materially comfortable by any stretch, but we grew up in a wealth of values, of love and of dignity. In reality, the things that define your life’s chances are nothing to do with material conditions. They are when you were born, where and by whom. None of these are things over which we have any control. If I had been born in Banki, my chances would be different.”
Even then, Odinkalu’s life has been shaped by many factors, which include education, the quality of mentoring he received and, of course books, he read. On his mentors, Professor Odinkalu who is now a big mentor in his own right, will not easily give names for fear of embarrassing some of them who are still alive but reckons that his parents were perhaps the greatest influence on his life. “My Dad had an extraordinarily good heart, and my Mum had an extraordinarily good head. They are up there in the pantheon of my mentors.”
Other mentors Odinkalu easily reeled out include Chief Olisa Agbakoba SAN, who according to him as his former boss at the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) was a terrific inspiration when it comes to hard work. Emma Playfair another former boss changed his perspective about managing people fairly. “It is important to have a commitment to fair dealing. Stubbornly so,” he told Ikengaonline. Another mentor was the late Justice Chwukwudifu Oputa.
“Justice Oputa was the first guest lecturer I had as an undergraduate just as he was about to be elevated to the Supreme Court. By the time he emerged as chair of the Oputa Commission, I had known him, and he had mentored me for nearly two decades. He had peerless diction, application, insight, and learning. It was a privilege to know him and call him a mentor,” Odinkalu enthused.
As a scholar, reading is one of Odinkalu’s lifelong activities. And he admits he has read tons of books. Although he stopped reading fictions a long time ago, he finds it difficult to pinpoint one book that has influenced his life. Even then, there are some that left an indelible mark.
“In terms of the lives I have read about, one of my biggest heroes is Oliver Reginald Tambo, the former leader of the African National Congress (ANC). He had the right combination of everything, and it is no accident that Madiba described him as the greatest South African ever. Another is Benazir Bhutto for her courage and clarity. Her autobiography is titled Daughter of the East. I love Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali Chants, especially Gitanjali which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913,” Odinkalu said.
For several years Odinkalu was one of the strongest voices in civil society fighting human rights abuses and dictatorship in the country, especially under the military. For his troubles he had spent days in detention. It was therefore surprising when the government of President Goodluck Jonathan, against what has become a norm, appointed Odinkalu, one of the fiercest critics of his government, chair of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in 2011.
If the stratagem behind that appointment was to silence one more critic and bring him over to the government’s side, it failed woefully. A man not given to sentiments and not afraid of his own voice, Odinkalu, in the course of his duties at the Commission, never failed to call out the presidency whenever that government infringed on the rights of the people whether as individuals or groups.
Unlike some people who when they leave public office still see themselves as members of the governing class, Odinkalu slid back into default mode on leaving the NHRC and returned to civic activism and defence of the rights of citizens. Odinkalu has remained one of the consistent critics of government. For example, when the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, was arbitrarily removed from office, Professor Odinkalu described it as “the lynching of a head of another arm of government by the executive.” And perhaps more than any other individual, Odinkalu has taken the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, to task over the genocidal killings in Southern Kaduna under his watch, even at personal risks.
Odinkalu has had a brilliant career. In announcing his appointment, his current employers, the Fletcher School, wrote this about him: “Most recently, he was part of a three-member team that mediated the readmission of The Gambia into the Commonwealth, where he litigated human rights before national and regional courts as well as in transnational contexts.
“From 2011 to 2015, he chaired Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, the country’s lead institution for the protection of human rights and promotion of human rights policy. He also worked within human rights philanthropy.
“For 10 years prior, he was involved in drafting the Protocol for the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights through to adoption by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 1998. In 2004, he led the advocacy effort for its entry into force with the creation of the Coalition for the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. For more than three years, until 1993, Odinkalu was head of legal services for the Civil Liberties Organization in Lagos, where he was responsible for litigation, advocacy, and constituent building strategies, as well as managing relationships with the military government and its institutions.”
He has also worked as an advisor for the Ford Foundation, New York, the World Bank, and the International Council for Human Rights Policy, Geneva. In 1998, the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone appointed him as a Human Rights Advisor. In February 2003, Odinkalu was appointed as the senior legal officer for Africa for Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI).
In August 2021, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA, appointed him a Professor of Human Rights Law.
Professor Odinkalu did not achieve all these by a single flight as Shakespeare would say. Yes, he is now a global citizen and thought leader, but he is also essentially home-grown. He attended Federal Government College (FGC) Okigwe, Imo State, where he reckons his best friends come from, the old Imo State University from where he earned a first degree in law and emerged the best graduating student of the School of Legal Studies in 1987. He won the Chief FRA Williams prize for best student in Legal Drafting and Conveyancing at the Nigerian Law School in 1988. He obtained a master’s degree in law at the University of Lagos in 1990 before heading to the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) University of London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned a Ph.D in law.
It is often said that “a prophet has no honour in his own country.” Odinkalu’s brilliance and the recognition it has attracted have debunked that saying. When the governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, another professor, set up his star-studded transition committee, Professor Odinkalu made the cut. Just the other day, Soludo set up the Truth, Justice, and Peace Committee to “seek a restorative justice approach into the killings and violence that have engulfed not just Anambra State but the entire Southeast recently. Professor Odinkalu was appointed the Chairman of that 15-member committee. Indeed, Odinkalu as a prophet is, recognized at home.
His research focuses on contemporary challenges of multilateralism in regional systems in development, human rights, and governance. He has authored over sixty papers and six books, including Too Good to Die: Third Term and the Myth of the Indispensable Man in Africa (Kachifo, 2018), which he co-authored with Ayisha Osori.
Odinkalu does not believe in religion but considers himself “a person of faith not a person of worship.” In his view, God is too important to be ritualised or imprisoned in one house, even if the place is called a place of worship.
Odinkalu does his best in trying to keep his family life and relationships very private. And he explains the reasons behind that. “President Museveni in Uganda once told a few of us that the problem with putting your face on the currency as a head of state is people want to put you in their pockets. The problem with discussing your private life publicly is that everyone thinks they know or own you. I value relationships built on trust. Those who are in any form of relationship with me know themselves,” he declared.
Odinkalu says he likes natural, organic, traditional foods in small quantities. He also likes fruits—corn and pear (ube na oka)—a delicacy in the Southeast. As part of his leisure, he used to do a lot of road running and badminton, but endurance walk is it for him now.
Does Professor Odinkalu regret anything now? He says that aspect of life is best reflected during retirement. “While he was still racing in Formula One, the Great Michael Schumacher was once asked this question and he said those are the kinds of things you think about when you are retired. I feel, like Michael, that regrets are what you do when you reflect on a (long) life if God gives you that opportunity. I look forward….,” he said.
Behind the façade of seriousness and amid all the hard work, he finds time to laugh at himself. “Those who know me would know that I am one of the most frivolous people you are likely to encounter. The one thing you cannot do is take yourself too seriously and, so, yes, I laugh at me a lot. But I am also grateful a heck of a lot because providence has been kind to me,” he admitted. He acknowledged that he had a nickname while in school but said it is only known to his schoolmates.
Although you can never say never, Odinkalu says the odds of him going into partisan politics later in life are improbable.
Professor Odinkalu also had a thing or two to say to the young people in the Southeast today. “Igbo people have what we call “Agugu Ani” — oral history, “Ako n’uche,”— thoughtfulness. These appear in short supply these days. We need to rediscover the skill of using our tongue to count our teeth. I need not say more except we need to do that quickly before we lose all our teeth because no one uses the tongue to count their gum when the teeth are no longer there!”
