Encounter With Chuks Iloegbunam

By Dan Amor

In 2013, when yours sincerely was about leaving the Editorial Board of Daily Independent Newspapers, having served on the board for more than ten (10) years, Chief Nnanna Ochereome, Chairman of the Editorial Board of Vanguard Newspapers, recommended me to his friend and colleague, Chief Chuks Iloegbunam, then Media Adviser to Prof. Sylvester Monye. The latter was then Special Adviser to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on Performance Monitoring & Evaluation at the Presidency in Abuja. The purpose of the recommendation was for yours sincerely to assist them in the writing and documentation of some procedures at that level of government as a consultant.

*Iloegbunam 

Before then, I had been reading and following Chuks Iloegbunam without having to meet with him face-to-face. He was already an established writer and one of the inimitable and quintessential pen rollers in Nigeria and Africa. Chuks Iloegbunam, for me, is simply a man who has been working hard to find words and images that capture the experience of Nigeria, from her first decade of independence or thereabouts to her first experience in violence as national pastime. 

A man of immense vitality and great learning, Chuks is a human Mississippi and an avatar who could walk in the pantheon of the gods. This is, therefore, not a tribute, per se, but a profound and ramifying intervention in the creative and scholarly output of an eclectic personage on the occasion of his birthday celebration since last week (May 18). 

When I finally met with him in his office in Abuja in 2014, it was a dream come through. He told me that he had long been reading me and did appreciate how illuminating a writer I was. Chuks takes an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the story of Nigeria, combining literary study with social and intellectual history. 

All his writing, whether in book form, an opinion piece or contribution to academic journal reads like a piece of exact scholarship which is also a work of great intellectual power and penetration, great fairness, and, above all, great humanity. It is a pleasure, and an education, to read whatever he writes. He makes his characters speak for themselves, whether in biography or fiction, especially about the deep fundamental malaise in which the country finds herself. 

For instance, in Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics, Iloegbunam makes Major-General Johnson Ummunnakwe Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi's personality not just impressive but beguiling. It reads like a Victorian novel... Ironsi looms forward from the pages of this biography like a firedrake, glittering, capacious, burning, dangerous. It is masterful and definitive. In all, aside from his contributions to academic journals and opinion articles, Chuks has written and edited six (6) books:

(a)Ironside: The Biography Of General Ironsi (1999). (b). Updated as, Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics (2019). (c). Surbenia's Day (Novel, 2004). (d). The Case For An Igbo President Of Nigeria (2007) A Collection Of Essays From My Weekly Perspective Column In Vanguard. (e). Journey To The Throne: The Story Of Eze Professor Green Onyekaba Nwankwo, OON (2005). (f). General of the People's Army (a tribute to Ojukwu) (2012). 

His "General of the People's Army" (edited), shines forth in salutary, starlike, splendour. 

Ignore Chuks Iloegbunam's writing and ignore a huge reservoir of knowledge. I read the novel, Surbenia's Day in 2015. On the face of it, despite eclecticism in language, the novel is primitive, naive and formless; at the same time, it is sophisticated and strangely unified. One might hesitate to call it a novel, but one would assuredly not call it anything else. The separate chapters - or stories, or segments - are not linked so much as they are interpenetrating. But Iloegbunam has the morose wit as well as the nostalgic innocence to tell the story; numerous distinct tableaux are formed on a single canvas. 

These relate to each other through tone and texture and design, through theme , through narrative control. Elements dominating one scene may fill a peripheral function in several of the other scenes. A river or a street or a mood might run among them together, separating them. The whole picture does not emerge gradually: it is there from the beginning. Nor do the parts somehow contribute to a larger whole: they are the whole from the beginning. In the novel, Iloegbunam has created an unworldly dream vision of the real world. Apart from his biography of the King and retired banker, Prof. Green Nwankwo, I have almost read all of Chuks' books. Ignore his books at your peril. 

I see Iloegbunam as a radical realist. He is a journalist, writer/novelist who sees journalism and publishing as being intertwined having made the best of both worlds right from 1977 when he cut his teeth as a journalist with the Punch Newspapers. In 1980, he was employed by Longman Publishers, Lagos, as an Editor. He was an editor with Newswatch Communications Limited when the news feature magazine was the best of its kind in Nigeria. 

He wrote the column, Perspective, with painstaking clarity in Vanguard   Newspapers for many years. He has also worked in the media teams of politicians such as Mr. Peter Obi, former governor of Anambra State, former President Goodluck Jonathan and current governor of Anambra State, Chief Willie Obiano. 

Chuks is a very humble man, very calm and extremely principled. Throughout the period of two years that I was in close touch with Iloegbunam, he was angry only once. He had asked me to go with a photographer with the Presidency to interview Dr. Hassan Bello, the Executive Secretary/Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Shippers' Council in Abuja. He had been asked to do so by Prof. Sylvester Monye for the magazine, Performance Review, which the Jonathan Administration was using to evaluate the performances of Federal Ministries, Agencies and Departments or Paraltatals. But because Chuks was flying to Enugu that day, he delegated the job to me. 

I went with a colleague of mine at the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Federal Capital Territory (F.C.T) Council and the photographer. Unknown to Chuks, I had been Editor-in-Chief of African Cargo News, in Lagos for more than five years; so that I was conversant with almost every issue relating to the Nigerian Maritime industry. The interview with Dr. Bello was so enthralling that he had to call Prof. Monye to ask him what kind of a guy he sent to him that could flow so easily in maritime terms and vocabulary. 

As I was stepping into Prof. Monye's office, I could read excitement written boldly on his face, and he quickly awarded me a cash prize of fifty thousand Naira for a job well done. About a week later, when Chuks saw that the accountant was yet to give me the money, he called him to his office and raved seriously at him: "Why haven't you given the fifty thousand Naira to Dan? Don't you know that he is one of the best writers in Africa?" Chuks was vividly angry. And that was the first time I saw him in that mood. That it had to do with a writer, shows where he places his premium - writing. Chuks Iloegbunam, to be candid, is one of the most accomplished writers in Africa. 

As a man who does not brook any nibbling in calling a spade a spade no matter whose ox is gored, Chuks Iloegbunam is one of those Nigerians with very critical and strident voices, who fought the military to submission and brought this democratic dispensation about in 1999. 

His Ironsi, is a tour de force - its brilliance and audacity are exhilarating. It is lucid, fresh and moving, a lasting achievement. It is a biography in which striking maturity of insight is conveyed with remarkably disciplined and yet lyrical style or prose. Chuks can write. But I had thought he was much younger. I never knew he would be up to seventy years. 

Convinced that history is an art, not a science, Chuks Iloegbunam, in his writings, underlines the importance of Marx's artful use of language, Carlyle's gift for capturing the flow of history in time, Gibbon's humour and his creation of a benevolent conspiracy between the reader and himself, Macaulay's ability to propel inert facts into motion, and the literary artistry of other great historians. 

In his books, Iloegbunam has shown us how to create suspense, has balanced background and foreground, and enabled readers to feel like actual participants in, as well as observers of, events large and small - and how the great historians have at times acted as prophets and sages, opening up to their readers fresh, sometimes radical, views of the world and of man's place in it. 

Happy 70th birthday anniversary, Chief Chukwu-Kweleze Iloegbunam, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer of Eminent Biographies, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria.

*Amor, critic and journalist, lives in Abuja, Nigeria.