On July 18, 2013, at 82, he publicly asked God to spare his life for five or possibly more years to complete the tasks he set for himself on this earth. He had already achieved so much but felt that his country still needed his intellectual guidance, especially to reorder our political order. His achievements were almost too numerous for even his acolytes to keep track of. But his energy was boundless even as age and ailment gradually took their toll. “The fact that I’m incapacitated by illness, which makes me not strong to stand on my feet to address this gathering,” he said on the occasion, “doesn’t mean that I’m ready to go. I hope to live up to 90 years.” That was an underestimate. He lived to 92. Merciful God gave him twice as much time as he requested. Perhaps God knew that Nigeria needed the man for a little while longer. On October 29, 2023, it was over. Who was this man?
I cannot recall what day it was in 1987. The third Idigbe Memorial Lecture to be delivered by Professor Nwabueze was scheduled for the day. He was expected to speak on the topic “Transition from Military Rule to Constitutional Democracy.’ The lecture did not take place. He arrived at the venue inside the University of Benin promptly. But the audience, better accustomed to “African time,” did not. He could not accept that situation, and he returned to his private lodging at the other end of town. This remains the only Idigbe Memorial Lecture that was not orally delivered. I in the company of Professor Itse Sagay chased after our guest. Unable to persuade him to return to campus to give the lecture (though he was gracious to enough to accept our apologies for the disappointment), the occasion turned into a courtesy visit of sorts. At this time, Professor Nwabueze’s fame, especially for constitutional law, had reached the ends of the earth. He had, by my recollection, already published nearly ten major titles on the subject since the first was published in 1964.
The academic who aspires to play the role of public intellectual, according to Richard Posner, will need communication skills and authority. “Specialization makes it difficult to write for a general audience. His orientation is towards writing for his fellow specialists on narrow topics in an esoteric jargon. For jargon is the natural language when people communicate primarily with members of an in-group.” Nwabueze’s works were very readable and always appear to be written for a general audience than as specialist works, and he probably always intended them to be so. For that reason, he captivated an audience far wider than his specialization of law and government. He vigorously pushed his views publicly at almost every opportunity from the mid-1960s until only a few years ago through frequent public lectures and speeches, books and essays, newspaper articles and interviews, and above all, active participation in constitutional reform and constitution-writing.
Before he was a public intellectual, he was a scholar. He distinguished himself as a student, both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his LL.B. and LL.M. degrees, and the bar examination, respectively. He was commended by one of his teachers, the eminent English constitutionalist Professor Stanley Alexander de Smith FBA (1922-1974) for being the student who “scored the highest mark ever awarded by the University of London in the LL.M. Examinations in the constitutional law of the Commonwealth,” a course that Professor de Smith newly introduced at the university. Nwabueze’s career as an academic began at the University of Lagos in 1962. Before then, his only teaching experience was one year teaching LL.B. students at the Holborn College of Law. In addition, he previously had another one-year experience as a secondary school mathematics teacher in Eastern Nigeria during 1955-1956. After completing his LL.M., he registered for a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London in 1961with the expectation to work on a dissertation on “The Position of Chiefs under the Laws of Eastern Nigeria” with Professor Tony Allot as his supervisor.
He never completed the PhD. Because the following year, he was recruited by former teacher and dean of law at the London School of Economics, Professor Gower to teach at the University of Lagos, where the professor had been appointed to establish a faculty of law. Thus, Nwabueze was among the foundation lecturers of the University of Lagos.
Nwabueze’s career at the University of Lagos ended abruptly with the closure of the University in 1965 in the wake of the Eni Njoku-Biobaku crisis, which resulted in the departure of all lecturers and students of Eastern Region origin from the University for the University of Nigeria. At the end of the Civil War, he left for the University of Zambia only to return to the University of Nigeria in 1975 but quickly retired. He was only 44 years old. While some of his greatest works were already published, he would live for nearly a half century longer, during which he produced three times as many books as he did as a university teacher.
Nwabueze published a total of about two dozen titles including a few multi-volume books. Yet, his greatest work may be among the half dozen titles he published by 1975. He felt Nigerian Land Law was “considered by many as the most scholarly of my works.” But he personally judged his more recent two-volume Colonialism in Africa: Ancient and Modern (2005) “the best of my books.” The reason why the former is so highly rated is obvious. Land law is a terror to many a law student, especially the abstruse labyrinths of the English tenure system and estates.
Regrets.
Nigeria’s present Constitution has been much criticized for its adequacies, and Nwabueze was one of the principal authors of the Constitution of 1979, which the present Constitution closely replicates. What is peculiar about the critique is that Nwabueze was among the leading critics. This was not simply self-criticism but a total disavowal of his previous position, root and branch.
He also regretted serving on President Babangida’s Transition Council, although he was proud of what he accomplished as Education Secretary during the eight-month life of the Council. It is difficult to justify the country’s leading constitutionalist participating in an organ of a military dictatorship designed to prolong transition to democratic rule. If that was not bad enough, his tenure was tumultuous, and will be remembered mostly for his confrontation with ASUU.
Nwabueze scrupulously avoided partisan politics throughout his life. “I have always kept an unwavering aloofness from politics, because it (politics) seems to me not quite in tune with the life of study and reflection I have chosen for myself ….” Yet, that November 14, 2018 iconic image of the octogenarian Nwabueze weeping on the shoulder of Atiku Abubakar, PDP’s presidential candidate for the 2019 election, will be hard to forget. This more so when, seven months later, though he ceased appearing before any court as a lawyer in 2008, wheelchair-bound, he showed up at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on July 4, 2019 as the lead counsel for the petitioner, Abubakar. But he was there for only briefly, during which he requested and got leave of the court to address it while remaining seated. He spoke for only a few minutes, and he left the court riding into the sunset.
Nwabueze has rightly indisputably taken his place as among Africa’s greatest constitutionalists. He was a comparativist, and his strength was comparative constitutional law. He was not a theorist, and he did not make any contribution to constitutional theory or political theory. His forte was constitutional statics. He identified and explained rules of the constitutional order. He said little about constitutional dynamics or how a constitutional order actually operated.
Nor was Nwabueze, despite his prodigious output, necessarily an original thinker. I even doubt if he intended to be one. He was richly eclectic for sure. His strength lay in his ability to master a subject and render it in a manner that was capable of being quickly understood by a student or a non-specialist. And although he exuded great learning, he was always quick to admit or acknowledge the impact of his teachers or the debt he owed other authors he read.
Such was the man Benjamin Obiefuna Nwabueze, the greatest of his generation. A man of humble birth whose illiterate parents had no record of the year of his birth but who by a lifetime quest to excel put his God-given capacity to master things arcane and render them for easy understanding, to the betterment of his country and of humanity has fallen asleep. But his reputation as a scholar and public intellectual will long survive him. The market for public intellectuals is much poorer with his demise.
•Ukhuegbe writes from Toronto, Canada.
