BY ETHELBERT OKERE
While I was gathering materials for a recent article I did on Africa’s Tech guru, Leo Stan Ekeh, I discovered that there are two categories of Igbo “big men”. One group is made up of those who, in spite of their national and international exploits, remain quite at home with their people. You wouldn’t mistake where they come from. I discovered that Chief Leo Stan Ekeh belongs to this category and I went ahead to establish that in spite of Ekeh’s national and international exposure, he has a very robust presence among his kinsmen in Imo state.
The article came after he bagged an award of honour as Distinguished Star of Imo State from the government and people of the state during the 50th anniversary celebration on the creation of the state last February. To be able to quality for that honour, Leo Stan’s Imo kinsmen did not have to go far to see his contributions to the growth and development of the state. For over three years now, he has been running an entrepreneurship centre at the Imo State University and which he established along with other similar centers in two other Nigerian Universities outside Imo state.
Leo Stan has also been involved in the Imo state government Skill-Up Imo programme for the young people of the state, making huge donations both in cash and equipment. Recently, he donated a 500million naira ICT-AI centre to his Alma Mater, Holy Ghost College Owerri. The article referenced above and entitled, LEO STAN: AS CONSTANT AS AN IMO STAR, was to personally appreciate Chief Ekeh on these contributions back home.
In it, I contrasted the category he belongs to with a second one, made up mostly of “Professors” but who are hardly known in the states they supposedly come from. As a matter of fact, Imo state has quite a good number of such “professors” who talk and act more like people from the Diaspora than from among the good people of the state reputed for their tact and tenacity. These “professors” prefer to profess their professorship more on the social media than in the classrooms. When challenged, the claim to be “visiting professor” to unknown universities in the Diaspora and in their ill-digested commentaries with which they inundate the social media, you would never fail to notice their abysmal lack of grasp of issues at home.
Chidi Odinkalu, who is described as a “Professor of Law”, belongs to this category. Although “Professor” Odinkalu appears occasionally on television to talk about issues, majority of Nigerians know him more as social media activist than a Professor of Law. He is the first to react to every issue in the social media, from the mundane to the sublime. Each time he is being introduced, he is referred to as “former” chairman of Nigerian’s Human Rights Commission, a position he left over two decades ago, clear evidence of an anachronistic idiosyncrasy. That puts him behind contemporary issues.
Incidentally, Odinkalu is an alumnus of the same Imo State University where well-meaning non-alumnus of the institution like Chief Leo Stan Ekeh are making efforts to make it “great” – the slogan of the university staff and students. The last time I checked, Odinkalu was described as a “Professor of Practical International Human Rights Law of the Fletcher School”. He is also referred to as “Chair, the Truth, Justice and Peace Commission”, said to be “a transitional justice initiative established to address the crises of violence and agitation in the states of Southeast, Nigeria”.
Take the first. Pray, does Fletcher schools have and affiliate in the Imo State University of which Professor Odinkalu is an alumnus? Or to put the same thing in a different language, do students of the Law faculty in IMSU know that an alumnus is holding such as intentionally acclaimed position?. The answer is most likely to be resounding “NO” but I am not afraid of being proved wrong. Put differently still, how many students studying currently in the faculty know of the name, “Chidi Odinkalu”. On the second score, how many indigenes of the Southeast have ever attended a conference convoked by Odinkalu’s peace initiative in that geo-political zone.
To be sure, Chidi Odinkalu’s recent work, “THE SELECTORATE: When Judges Topple The People”, is a brilliant interrogation of very sensitive issue in Nigeria’s democracy: the creeping in of a situation wherein the courts, rather than the electorate, determine who assumes political power in the country. However, it remains largely what it is: an academic treatise that hardly draws impetus from what the very electorate he talks about witnesses in the field of practical politics and politicking. This lacuna finds a bold expression in Odinkalu’s penchant to narrow his examples to members of the political elite in his home state, Imo. Although he is hardly known in the state, his parents are said to hail from the Orsu local government areas of the state but it is believed that he was born and breed in Ihiala, Anambra state. As it is, therefore, Professor Anselem Chidi Odinkalu is apparently trying very hard to reconnect with his root but he is doing it the wrong way. He tries to draw the attention of his kinsmen in Imo state by incessantly lunching attacks on his fellow members of the elite without arming himself with facts.
For example, each time he posts any of his numerous scathing comments on the government of Imo state, his poor grasp of issues shows glaringly. Not to help matters is his apparent fixation on the sitting governor, Senate Hope Uzodinma, who he trails to every nook and cranny of the country to sniff anything that would enable him update his ubiquitous gafees in the social media. When, for instance, the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO) in 2024, awarded Governor Uzodimma an honorary doctorate degree, Odinkalu went to the social media – he knows that the regular media would not publish him – to say that the honorary degree was not earned through “a scholarly contribution,” even when he knows fully well that honorary degrees are not usually awarded as a result of rigorous academic work. Is “Professor” Odinkalu more scholarly than Nnenna Oti, the ebullient academic who, as FUTO’S Vice Chancellor, presided over the award to Uzodimma?
On the same FUTO ground on Thursday June 4, 2026, Governor Uzodimma gave the institution’s 38th convocation lecture. Somewhere along the almost two-honour lecture, delivered in a fluency that would make many academics envious, the governor pronounced a word twice and proceeded with his delivery seamlessly. It happened in a split second which perhaps only a very few in the audience noticed.
The next day, some mischief makers employed AI technology to multiply the number of times the governor pronounced the word, to make it look as if he was struggling with his delivery. Of course, this is not the first time such a mischief is being witnessed but as they say in our native parlance Osisi Puro Iho Anaghi Aso Anwu (The Iroko Tree Cannot Run Away From The Scorch Of The Sun). But guess who took it from the rascals and made a song and dance of it? Chidi Odinkalu. Odinkalu went to his familiar turf, the social media, where he is a celebrity and wrote: “There is a degree of illiteracy that the professional rigging of elections and dubious court orders even from @ Supreme Court Nigeria cannot clean up”. When earlier Governor Uzodimma was invited by the University of Nigeria, Nsukka to deliver its 52nd convocation, lecture, Odinkalu berated the University’s managed and accused it of belittling its motto of restoring the dignity of man.
Did I hear “illiteracy”? As I have noted earlier, of this essay, “Professor” Odinkalu suffers a fixation over fellow members of the elite in his state and the reason is not far-fetched. He is one of those so-called intellectuals who believe that a “Professorship” automatically earns them the right to determine who ascends political power. It doesn’t happen that way.
I challenge Professor Odinkalu to choose any topic outside technical Law for a debate with Uzodimma and let’s see how it will go. In the time being, I advise him to continue with his to return home. It is not too late. He should reach out to his friend in the neighboring Anambra state, Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, and find out how the latter made it. But from what we have seen since he became governor, Soludo must have been a home boy also even though he held the high position of governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
