By Obi Nwakanma

Annually, for the past decade, the alumni of the Government College Umuahia in the United States and Canada meet under the auspices of the Government College Umuahia Old boys Association, the GCUOBA-USA, to discuss the situation of their alma mater, find possible solutions, generally keep the flag flying, and while they are at it, loosen their collars a bit. These are very busy men and they come with their equally busy spouses – those honorary and graceful Umuahians we call “young girls” perhaps because they defy gravity and age – who have been pillars of support for both the old school and their alum-husbands.

Some in fact are not only wives, but also are mothers of “Umuahians.” They too have as great an interest and as much a concern for the fate and situation of what has generally been regarded as a great and pre-eminent school. As Ihuoma Nkele, an Attorney and herself alum of the equally prestigious Queens College, Lagos, and spouse of the Umuahian Onyema Nkele did once poignantly say: “we have an obligation to build and keep these schools. If our children don’t go there; maybe our grandkids would. It is called continuity.

All good things continue…” Umuahia and its peer schools – Kings, Ibadan, Barewa, Ughelli, Owerri, Afikpo, Keffi, Bida – were truly, very good places. They were schools at the crucial foundation of Nigeria’s modernity. But the situation at Umuahia presently reflects a sad fact: what we touch as Nigerians, we turn to dust. It is profoundly inexplicable. This sad fact was on my mind when, out of a need to see a bit of the American landscape, I drove with my friend and classmate, Vin Onyrimba, from Florida to New Jersey for the annual Umuahia convention. Vin – a steady hand on the wheel – left Umuahia to finishing school in France early in our last term in Umuahia in 1982.

From France, he came to the United States, studied Computer Science and moved on from the digital world to Real Estate Brokerage in Davenport, Florida. He has not been to Umuahia since and is unable to process the horrifying stories and image of decay that keeps coming out of Umuahia. In a terse, preconvention statement about his inability to join the convention, Dr. Warwick Onyeama (class of 1956) son of the late Judge Charles Daddy Onyeama (’35) of the World Court wrote with regret that he has resolved that “the school in which I grew up is no more.” In other words, the Government College Umuahia no longer exists for him. That part is true and increasingly so for many an Umuahian.

Various administrations since the late 1980s, and some might even say, since Ukpabi Asika’s education reform in the post war East Central State, carried out under no less than the Umuahian Cambridge and Harvard educated Dr. Offia Wali, under whom this great school had been in a relay of trusts had ensured its imponderable waste. Current education policy by the Abia state government – its current Trustees – will be the final nail to the coffin. This year, the Umuahians met at the Ramada International in Newark, just off the turnpike. The New Jersey/New York Chapter of the GCUOBA-USA, under the able hands of the Attorneys Charles Chikezie and Don Egbuchulam, Dr. Chuks Ibeku, Dan Okengwu, and Moses Ukejianya, an Architect in New York City, had laid the grounds.

Umuahians from across the US and Canada had defied the brooding weather, and gathered. A repast that Friday evening in the hospitality suite allowed us to count our numbers: Eneli, not present, Nwariaku and Jide Oji, Kevin Uwazurike, Denis Onwualu, Randy Nduka, U.K Obasi, Morgan Ukaegbu, Stan Ikem Okoye, Egbonye, Fidelis Umeh…and many such were inexorably absent. Yet there was the unmistakable Umuahian conviviality with the good number present led by the indefatigable Christian Chike Momah ( class of ’44), our grand patron, who at 83 still puts many a young man to shame with his stamina and love of life.It must be all that cricket – and his age defying wife, Arunne Ethel Momah. At Umuahia, we were taught to work and to play. We danced that Friday at the Odudua Lounge, on Newark’s Central Avenue, a rather sketchy part of town, but not the worse for wear.By the next morning, it was up early and to business.

This year’s convention was themed around tributes to the novelist Chinua Achebe, our distinguished old boy who died this past March; and a review of the state of the old school, and the question of whether old Umuahians should forthwith withdraw further financial and material relationship with the school given its current reality, which seemed quite precisely the fundamental question before us. Discussion was brisk.

The School report detailed a very complex situation. Over the years dedicated Umuahia oldboys have tried to use their private resources to prop up the school and supplement government spending, but this mode of intervention has proved both ineffective and limited. It has resulted in ambivalence: clearly, the current education policy in Abia state has totally stripped Umuahia of its special status and also long erased its original or foundational mission as a selective English-type boarding school.Umuahia alumni in Nigeria are as moved to try a final push to finding an alternative governance model that would restore the school to its hallowed past, and guide its possible future. Dr. Emma Okafor, physician, and now quondam President, steered the meeting magnificently to a close, on the following terms: a six-man task force comprising Udobi Ikeji,Onyema Nkele, Enyi Kanu, Dr. Marcaulay Onuigbo, Professor Emeka Aniagolu and I was nominated to liaise with a Nigerian contact group led by Emeka Ifezulike and Okey Eneleamah, to perfect a usable Public Trust framework for Umuahia.

The GCUOBA-USA also resolved to stop forthwith all financial investments in the school and hold all contributions in trust pending further development. It was an election year, and Umuahians elected a new executive committee led by God. Okoji and comprising Emeka Aniagolu, Ali Talib, Kingsley Umezurike, Chuks Ibeku,Chuma Mmeje and Ofo Iheanacho, to steer the affairs of GCUOBA-USA for the next two years. Then came the evening reception and tributes for Achebe: his old classmate C.C. Momah set the tone by going down memory lane; I read an excerpt from his collection of poems, Emeka Aniaogolu read from his last memoir, There Was A Country, and a special guest, Achebe’s niece, the physician and novelist of Onaedo, Dr. Ngozi Achebe, gave a scintillating tribute to her uncle. And thereafter, we truly freed our stiff collars and partied as only Umuahians know how, and laced our boots for Texas, next year.