A boon companion has just taken me to Onitsha, the city on the bank of the River Niger in Anambra State, and the only matter on my mind is the Zik Mausoleum.
Here is the resting place of the father of “One Nigeria”, revered or criticized depending on the side of the divide that one stands.
Of course the man called Zik of Africa in his lifetime would not be happy in the grave as per what his dear country has turned out to become.
Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the only black Governor-General of Nigeria, the first President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the only Nigerian whose name appeared in a Constitution of Nigeria, among many other sterling firsts, would not have bowed the knee to two wrongs of primitive prebendalism making a right in the sway of politics in today’s benighted Nigeria.
The Zik Mausoleum, aka Zik’s Place, in Onitsha, Anambra State, is a crucial metaphor that tugs at the challenges attending to the demise of a pan-Nigerian essence.
Zik who ranked as Nigeria’s foremost nationalist died on May 11, 1996, aged 92.
The initial contract for the construction of the Zik Mausoleum was awarded in 1997 to Messrs Lemmy Akakem for N350 million.
It became abandoned and overtaken by weeds until it was re-awarded in 2013 to a French construction company at N1.49 Billion.
Upon coming to power in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari gave marching orders to his Works Minister Babatunde Fashola that the contractor must deliver the job by October 2018.
The Zik Mausoleum consists of the museum housing Zik’s grave and an administrative unit on two floors.
The administrative block is made up of a reception, offices, conference halls, VIP lounge, museum-cum-archives, video display room, research, library, documentation section and conveniences.
The Zik Mausoleum follows in the line of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the grave of King Mausolus of Persia, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
It’s cool by me to interrogate Zik as a modern wonder.
Politician, poet, author, orator, sportsman, visionary, nationalist, but above all else, a remarkable human being, Zik was the quintessential Nigerian.
Born in the Hausa-Fulani North of Eastern Igbo parentage, Zik spent his most productive years in the Yoruba West.
He spoke Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo fluently, as well as other Nigerian languages and was a welcome presence everywhere in the country.
A native of Onitsha in Anambra State, Zik was born on November 16, 1904 in Zungeru.
He had his early education at the esteemed Hope Waddell Institute, Calabar.
After further education in Lagos, he stowed away on an America-bound cargo boat in his dogged search of the fabled Golden Fleece.
He was smoked out of his hiding place and cast overboard off the coast of Accra, Ghana.
He refused to accept defeat and still made his way to America, the land of his dreams.
When the suffering in the United States got so much he attempted suicide on a railway line but was saved by a Good Samaritan.
Zik was inspired by the vision of the early Ghanaian nationalist Kwegyir Aggrey.
The legendary American jurist Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Judge in the USA, was Zik’s classmate.
Zik served as a lecturer in his alma mater, Lincoln University, before travelling back to Africa, first to Ghana because he wanted to liberate the entire African continent.
Forced out of Ghana by the British colonizers with a charge of sedition due to his editorship of the Accra Morning Post, Zik relocated to his native Nigeria to found his flagship newspaper West African Pilot that had a motto taken from Dante Alighieri: “Show the light and the people will find the way.”
He then joined forces on August 26, 1944 with the venerable Herbert Macaulay to start up the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC).
Zik’s pan-Nigerian vision was such that he made Lagos and the West his base instead of the East.
Zik and his NCNC were poised to form the government of the Western House of Assembly in 1951 until the Action Group (AG) turned the table through the controversial carpet-crossing incident.
Zik then became the Premier of the Eastern Region in 1954.
He was in the forefront of Nigeria’s fight for independence, and his NCNC had the highest number of popular votes in the 1959 Independence Elections even as the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) won more constituencies as mapped out by the British.
He was appointed President of the Senate and shortly after Nigeria’s independence on October 1, 1960 he became the Governor-General of the federation.
He was appointed the President of Nigeria in 1963 when Nigeria became a Republic.
The Zikist essence is enshrined in his doggedness as per founding the University of Nigeria, Nsukka when the press kept lampooning him for championing the cause of “BSc Orlu and PhD Awo-Omama!”
A believer in healthy competition, he charged his fellow Igbo people who were lagging behind in education to go to school so that they could match the other Nigerian ethnic nationalities and riverine peoples who had earlier encounters with the white man’s education.
He led stellar Igbo sons known as “The Argonauts” to go searching for education in the United States.
Zik was a poet and the author of books such as Renascent Africa, Liberia in World Politics, My Odyssey etc.
The Great Zik was equally at home with traditional matters as the Owelle of Onitsha.
My final prayer at the Zik Mausoleum in Onitsha is that Nigeria shall someday get a leader who thinks of all of Nigeria as his constituency.
As then President Zik wrote in his Foreword to the book, Reflections – Nigerian Prose & Verse edited by Frances Ademola, “Our literature in English will never lose the traces – nor should it try to – of its cultural origins in Hausa, Ibo (sic), Yoruba, Benin, Efik, Ijaw and the rest. Our writing must remain as diverse, yet rich in unity, as our beloved Federal Republic.”
It is incumbent on the government to give requisite attention to the Zik Mausoleum at Onitsha.
