Former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Deputy Governor, Financial System Stability, Prof. Kingsley Moghalu has eulogized former Vice President of Nigeria, Dr. Alex Ekwueme. In a speech delivered at the memorial service for Ekwueme in London, United Kingdom, Moghalu said the former number two citizen helped to unity the country.
Excerpts….
The great Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle once wrote. “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Nigeria sometimes feels like a nation that has lost its direction. In many ways, we are a country that sees excellence as difficult to achieve in leadership and many of us feel powerless to change it. Then every so often, someone comes along repackaging old promises in a shiny new box, telling us they are the answer to all our woes, only to leave us disappointed once again. What is the result? A place where almost 200 million people fight to secure their individual destiny, where the collective good is often an afterthought. That is not a country.
Dr Alex Ekwueme spent his career and his life seeking to unify us all as a nation, using the weapons of honesty, integrity, and truth. As a business man, as a politician, and as a philanthropist, his goal was to always use the power of unity to build better things—whether it was a people, a party, or a country. His vision was to build a nation with one goal, and one dream, with all of us working as one to lift all our boats in collective prosperity.
As we gather here today to remember the man we must learn from his legacy. Unity is a formidable weapon. It can move mountains, it can change tides. It can reform a nation and set us on a path to fulfilling our destiny as a true giant of Africa. We must learn to compromise—wisely—and accept our differences to come together for the greater good. The Ide was a man who ultimately believed in the equality of all citizens of Nigeria, and our ingenuity in finding solutions.
As we remember his selfless work, we Nigerians must put our heads together to defeat our sense of persecution and speaking in one voice, aligned in purpose to build something great. Young and old, man and woman, we all must take the lessons from his life and apply them to everything we do, and Nigeria will be a nation reformed and reborn. We must learn to vigorously inspire each other using the strengths and uniqueness of our differences, the unparalleled skill of enterprise and the passion for innovation he that our people are famous for. The Ide pushed the cause for his kinsmen to fire the competitive spirit that built excellence in the nation.
As we mourn our father, kinsman, mentor, friend, and fellow comrade, let us remember to uphold the values he believed in. Let us as citizens stride forward collectively and work for a more prosperous and egalitarian society. His legacy demands much of us; asking us to be active participants in seeking the leadership that can truly make Nigeria the very best version of itself as a country, of us as a people. To remember and honor him will not be in the eulogies we will share today but in our lives, expressing the values he lived for.
We must move to make him proud by putting ourselves up for service to fill the big shoes he has left and work to right the wrongs of this nation. We must make Ide proud by ensuring Nigeria works even beyond what he would have dreamed. The iroko may have fallen but the seeds have taken strong root in fertile ground.
On behalf of myself, and the entire family of the late Elder Isaac Moghalu, my late father, I would like to express our deepest condolences to the family of the Ide. Our thoughts and prayers are with his son, Pastor Goodheart Obi Ekwueme and his daughter Mrs. Chidi Onyemelukwe and her husband Dr. Okey Onyemelukwe, who are close friends of my wife and me.
In his habits and in his actions, the Ide was truly a man who lived up to his name, Alexander, “defender of men”.
May he rest in peace.
