My mum, my coach, my hero

By Lillian Okenwa

A former Deputy Director General of the Nigerian Law School, Enugu campus, he’s a Senior Advocate of Nigeria. His wife is a Judge of the Federal High Court though he did not set out to marry a judge. Actually he met a beautiful student who looked like a younger version of his mum and decided she was the one. No surprises there, for his mum was not only his best friend but his hero. And so when he met her younger lookalike, there was no turning back.  His enthusiasm for law is also shared by his younger brother Chudi Ojukwu, a Senior Lecturer at the Nigerian Law School. Meanwhile, three out of his five children are lawyers although only one joined the profession. The other two veered completely off. One is a filmmaker while the other who acquired culinary skills from France is showcasing her skills a Chef.

He met her as a student but they got married after her call to the Bar. She was his student at then Imo State University. But what was the point of interest? “To a great extent she looks like my mother. That was my first sign but we found out that we share other values like orderliness, honesty, decency. In fact when we got married people thought she was my mother’s daughter.”

The couple started off as young people with different ambitions. He wanted to be a teacher and that was settled while in his third year at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. Unlike other young people that were unsure of what they wanted, he set out after the National Youth Service scheme to accept only employment in that area. Consequently, he commenced his teaching career at the Imo State University, which later became Abia State University at 25.

Many would wonder how a young man could be so focused and self-assured at a time his age mates were preoccupied with more frivolous pursuits. The secret however is his relationship with his mother.  Prof. Ojukwu calls her his biggest heroine and influence. My mum was my coach, hero, my star,” he professed.

“I found out after she died that most of the things I was doing to impact humanity I was doing for her. Most of the things I was doing were for her. After her death I lost my ability to work hard for a couple of years. I had to restart. I didn’t know why I needed to work hard anymore. That was the impact she had on my life. I mean she was honest and she set goals. She was tough as a woman and she could challenge anybody in any environment. She was very intelligent. By the way she only did primary school but ended up as a headmistress of primary school and supervisor.

“Actually, she later did two years Teacher Training school at Ovim Girls, now a secondary school. It used to be a primary and a boarding school. She went there on a white man scholarship. In 1959 she wrote a novel: ‘In Search of a Father.’ In fact my third child has taken after her. She studied architecture at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, but she is into full time fiction writing as her profession. She has a second book now. So she formed me. In all aspects of my thinking and career and she influenced me very much.”

The Teacher’s biggest motivation in life is to make a difference in peoples lives.

“I actually like to make a difference in people’s lives and community’s life. If I change somebody’s understanding, from ignorance to knowledge or from knowledge to improved knowledge, that is my biggest success and I enjoy it. That is why they call me Teacher. The day a young lawyer for instance walked into my office and I succeeded in teaching him how to write an address on an envelope I was happy. As simple as it appears, many people don’t know there is a rule on how to write an address on an envelope. It should always be in the middle. The young lawyer wrote from the right hand side on a big envelope and after interrogating, I found out he could not write an address on an envelope. I had to make sure he got it after I had condemned about three envelopes. By the fourth one, he got it and I congratulated him. You could see that he was cheerful. That made my whole day a success.

“When I was a Deputy Director General at Law School, I had a seven year old lawyer who applied to be an adjunct teacher. He wrote a formal letter to me and put my address on the right hand side of the letter. When I pointed the position of the address out to him, he could not identify that that was a problem. So I had to bring a plain sheet of paper and we spent the next 45 minutes learning how to write a formal letter (laughs). So when I succeed in changing such roadmap for a person I feel fulfilled.”