(From Naijanet, Wednesday, July 3, 1996)

A FAREWELL TO “SIR”

Dr. George Akabogu will be laid to rest on Friday, July 5, at Otolo, Nnewi. If it were possible, I would make the trip to Nnewi; to pay my respect and to help commend him to the care of the angels. I know many of my secondary school mates will be there. They will come from Enugu, they will come from Lagos, they will come from Kaduna and from Calabar. They will be there in their numbers to pay tribute to a man whose influence helped mold us into the people we are today.

George Akabogu was my principal at Government Secondary School, Afikpo from Form Four to Form Upper Six. He left an imprint on me. It really couldn’t have been any other way. The man had a presence and you couldn’t miss it. If you were at Afikpo, either as a student or a member of staff, you knew who ran the place. George (we often referred to him as “George” in his absence, but most of the time he was “Princeps” or “Sir”) was omnipresent and took an intense interest in whatever you did. Sometimes we thought he was overbearing, but what did we know. We were a bunch of bright-eyed 12-18 year olds.

George’s arrival at Afikpo could not have been triggered by a more negative chain of events. You see, he was drafted by the Ministry of Education from Govt. College Umuahia to come and take control at Afikpo following the unfortunate and disastrous student riots of 1962. To understand the atmosphere on campus when George arrived, one has to be familiar with a little bit of history. Our then principal, Mr. D. G. Marriott, a very popular Englishman, had just been summoned to Enugu to answer charges that he had somehow slighted Sir Francis Ibiam (as he was known then) a distinguished son of the Afikpo area and the then Governor of Eastern Nigeria. The school community figured there must have been a mistake since, in our minds, it was unthinkable for anyone on campus, let alone Mr. Marriott, to do such a thing to a person as wildly beloved as Sir Francis. We were sure the mistake would be cleared up and that Mr. Marriott would return to campus the next day. The next thing we heard on the radio was that the Minister of Education had fired Mr. Marriott and he had been given 48 hours to leave Nigeria! We were in disbelief. It couldn’t be true. Students actually wept.

It probably would have just ended there, but for rumors that started circulating later that evening to the effect that the District Officer (DO) and his assistant (ADO) had made up the whole thing in order to get rid of Mr. Marriott. I’m still not sure where the rumors came from, but the student body got so incensed that they charged to the ADO’s house and made a mess of the place. Mob action took over and before anybody could do anything about it, we had a full fledged riot on our hands. The small police detachment in Afikpo was no match for the students who were backed by the Army Cadet Unit which had been set up on campus a year earlier.

The riots continued into the next day, and it was in these circumstances that Akabogu was dispatched to Afikpo to take over and restore control. He arrived in Afikpo in the evening of the second day of the troubles and, completely unaware of the level of angst among the student body, barged into our gated campus like a conquering hero, and was promptly chased away by furious students. Eventually, after another day of trouble, order was finally restored by the much feared Mobile Squad which had been sent from Enugu, and our new principal was able to enter the campus and take charge.

Boy, did he ever take charge.

Within a week, he had the place under his firm and full control. He led the inevitable government inquiry that investigated the crisis. At the end on the inquiry, one unfortunate student was expelled. We had expected a much worse outcome, but we learnt that George had insisted that no other students should be expelled. That won him brownie points right away.

He then turned his attention to (re)shaping our mind set. His approach was simple and straightforward. He demanded that we appreciate how lucky we were to be students at Afikpo. He insisted on the maintenance of standards that, in his view, were worthy of a school like Afikpo. He harped on this morning, afternoon and night; day in, day out. Before long, the message had taken root. One thing one could say about George’s boys was that they were fanatically proud of their school and very devoted to it.

The school had always had a pretty good academic record, but that wasn’t going to be sufficient anymore in this new era. Under George, sports became very important. I recall that in his second year as principal he assumed the role of coach of the soccer “First Eleven”. That year, we beat Govt. College Umuahia 6-0 and George insisted on getting the full account of the game, complete with the header that screamed “Umuahia no match for Afikpo” splashed in all the major newspapers in the East! That didn’t go down too well at Umuahia and we would hear about it later on. That same year, against all odds, Afikpo made it to the finals of the Phensic Cup, losing to then perennial football powerhouse, St. Patrick’s College, Calabar by a score of 1-0.

Without doubt, Dr. Akabogu’s greatest impact on me and my mates was his insistence that we believe in our innate abilities. He took an interest in each student’s progress and challenged each student to outdo and outperform anybody from any other school. To familiarize us with those he always referred to as “the competition”, he established sporting and other links with several schools outside Eastern Nigeria, including, to name a few, Govt. College, Ughelli, Kings College, Lagos, Barewa College, as well as other schools in the East. He opened up the student body, with the result that within two years of his arrival on campus, students from all parts of Nigeria, as well as the Cameroons, Sudan, Congo, Togo, and what are now Zambia and Malawi, had joined the student body.

I lost contact with George during the civil war years, but met up with him again when I returned to Nigeria in the mid 1970s. He had joined the faculty at the College of Education, Awka, located then at the old campus along the Enugu-Onitsha road. I lived in Enugu at the time and there was a large group of Afikpo alumni in Enugu. There was almost an unwritten rule that if you found yourself in Awka you had to drop in and say hello to “Sir”. I stopped in on several occasions on trips to Onitsha. I would almost always run into old boys who had also stopped in to visit. In fact, George’s colleagues at Awka had set aside a corner of the Senior Common room which they had christened “George’s Throne” corner. You could almost bet that some Afikpo old boy(s) would show up there between 12 noon and 1 PM every school day.

George always remembered your name, and would also recall some tit-bit about you!

It is sad that Dr. Akabogu is gone. He will be missed. He was a positive influence on me, and I shall always remember him with deep fondness. If I could go to Otolo on Friday, I would tell him how privileged I consider myself for having known him. I would thank him for all he was to me and others. And then I would just say “Farewell Sir. May the Angels protect you on your journey.”

Emeka Ofobike, Ph.D., CPA, CMA
Govt. Secondary School, Afikpo:
Form Five Class of 1963
Form Upper Six Class of 1965