When I arrived in the cold city of Jos in 1982, it was, among other momentous events of my life, a reconnection event between me and a childhood acquaintance of mine, Mr. Peter Agada Okpe. Prior to this trip, and reconnection, I had worked with him as a temporary staff and co-worker at the Kakawa Street Passport Office of then Federal Ministry of External Affairs, in Lagos even before I finished my Secondary school education as I had to work and pay my own school fees.
The Lion-hearted Late JP Peter Agada Okpe Omoha
Settling down in Jos, I reconnected with “Agada”, as he was popularly called by all who knew him well, right from his former rented home at Ali Kazaure street while I lived with my late uncle, Matthew Ichukwu at Anglo Jos. His former boss at the Passport Office in Jos, Alh Mustapha, was instrumental to my employment with the Nigerian Mining Corporation, a Federal Government Agency, as a Passages and Communications Officer after I confidentially penned him a brief letter. The Corporation later folded up as a result of politically foisted “mismanagement”. The corporation’s headquarters where I worked was on the 7th floor of the Federal Secretariat while the Passport Office occupied the 3rd floor. Therefore, I and Agada were together virtually every other day, including weekends. My schedule of work had everything to do with Corporate Communication between the Corporation and other organizations and embassies of other countries on issues relating to traveling visas, air tickets and passports within and outside Nigeria, so I spent more time in Agada’s 3rd floor office than mine on the 7th floor. In my God bestowed analytical mind, I discovered from close scrutiny that Agada was a legendary-minded young man who had the genealogical wherewithal to lead Nigeria, of which Owukpa our homeland is a component, to greatness, BUT was a victim of a malaise 85% of Nigerians suffered from in the early nineteen sixties when we were born. It is the malaise of socio-economic deprivations, as in timely educational opportunity.
Comrade Austin Agada, Benue State APC Chairman, and one of the sons of Late Peter Agada
Agada was a brave man! He confronted those socio-economic limitations to a standstill! For example, if the former governor of Nasarawa State and immediate past Chairman of All Progressive Congress (APC), Senator Abdulahi Adamu, who was his very close personal friend breezed into his office and wanted to hurriedly make Agada to have a family member’s passport related problem solved in a jiffy without meeting “certain” requirements, Agada would flash his golden-toothed, usually respectful smile at the politician and made him sit down. Then without making it obvious, he would confront him eye-ball to eye-ball in an explanatory verbiage extracted from a communication war chest only he possessed to get the politician to happily provide the needful requirements for the passport to be appropriately processed. That was his ways with Professors and Igbo traders who came to him. He was a giver, to a fault, even to a slight bent. He closed from work almost every Friday with a full load of friends, often times including myself, in his tear-leather factory delivered Peugeot car to join others waiting for him at refreshment points. He paid all the bills. However, he was shrewd, in his own way: he never gave or learnt you cash without a collateral. He helped people. I can count the fingers on both of my arms without exhausting the number of persons Agada fixed at federal government jobs, Customs and Immigration Departments inclusive.
Sen. George Akume at the Adoption Ceremony
Based on personal principles, I felt I had a deep personal responsibility to him on some of “our” social lives and responsibilities. I decided to be brutally frank with him when it became necessary, seeing as he had a number of other friends who were very senior to us on the civil service scale whose styles and burden of lives he was vulnerable to adopt if left unguarded. This was much later in our lives after the corporation I worked with at the federal secretariat had folded up and I was now practicing Development Journalism which sees me traveling all over the country with less time to spend with him in Jos.. For example, I confronted him on the security implications of patronizing one particular refreshment spot almost every day at a particular timeframe. He shunned the advise until his car was stolen from that same point and it took God’s divine intervention for me to have sited the car in Maiduguiri where I had travelled to on research assignment on desertification and this information facilitated the police to recover the car. Then, hesitantly, his family. He put together a great African family. That was until, as a result of his vulnerability to peer group influence, he decided to expand the size of the family. He told me about it when it was almost too late! And I told him, “No! you will not do it because you are not psyched up for it even though you can afford it today. Don’t do it because a few of your friends are in it as you are not actually in the same social bracket with them”. Then he shut me out of the issue until a day or two before the date he had set aside to actualized the ambition. I had to undertake a three-day marathon journey from Maiduguiri to Gboko, with a stop-over in Jos to drop my personal belongings, to enable me attend the event, out of which I will forever remember I got one of my eyes nearly blinded from a fisticuff I cannot remember how it started. He was a warrior who set out to fight for what he desired. No one could stop him, unless himself.
The Historic Symbol of Sonship
Products of his loin cloth, his children, the first few of them who I could observe at close range before schooling and change of home location took them far away, are, colloquially speaking, lions and lionesses like him. Sunday, Austin, Omoha, Moses, Ene, Eche, Ena and all the rest of them are all carrying the lights that was extinguished in their fathers hands ten years ago.
Austin, the second son and flame-hearted chairman of Benue State branch of All Progressive Congress is imbued with a set of life principles that strings together those of his parents, the ones schooling bestowed on him and other unique ones that stand out and deserve an honest attempt at analytical dissection. As far back as about eight years ago, when poverty-fertilized political wisdom in vogue amongst most politically exposed Nigerian youths was for most of them to fight and even bribe their ways into the membership lists of political parties in power in their States and Local Government Areas, Austin demonstrated a glue-like attachment to an opposition party, the APC, then the opposition party in Benue State. He did this in quite convincing ways that drew my personal curiosity and cascading flows of tears from his politically exposed beloved aunty, whose name I prepare not to mention on this page. However, almost ten years down the memory lane, the chickens of curiosity on his stoic political principles are returning home to roost. His consistency at exhibiting the “staying power” in an uncomfortable opposition camp when it mattered most has earned him the confidence of the institutional leadership of the party. In a rare relationship brickmanship unarguably woven around Austin, the party’s sub-national leadership, personified in the most powerful civil-service technocrat in Africa’s number one economy and most populous nation, Senator George Akume, the Secretary to The Government of The Federation of Nigeria, ACCEPTED to be adopted as a worthy “Son of Owukpa Land”, the land whose grains produced the yet to be so honored “Most Resilient Member of The Party In Nigeria”, Austin Agada. The adoption ceremony took place on the 31st December 2024 as Austine’s father’s ten years of passage to the greater beyond was marked.. As the event has been recorded in the socio-political history book of Nigeria as record-breaking in the annals of relationship building between peoples and societies, its anticipated developmental impacts on Owukpa land has been allocated yearning pages in the books. Peter Agada Okpe Omoha, rest in peace! Your footsteps are forever marked
