By Obi Nwakanma

One of Nigeria’s greatest, and most eminent medical scientists of the 20th century, Professor Nathaniel Chukwuedu Nwokolo died in New York City on May 18, 2014. Professor Nwokolo lived a long and distinguished life. He was not only an eminent grise of medicine; he was a distinguished scholar and teacher of scholars in the human sciences. He was honored for his work with the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) – the Nigerian equivalent of the Nobel Prize – in 1982. The Nigerian National Merit Award was established by decree in 1978, and thus Nwokolo was among the early league, joining Chinua Achebe, Ben Enwonwu, Pius Okigbo, Adeoye Babalola, Muhammadu Junaidu, Akin Mabogunje, Ben Nwabueze, Ladi Kwali, Taslim Elias, TSB Aribisala, Adeoye Lambo, Abubakar Imam, and such others.

It is a terrible indictment on the current quality of the Nigerian press, that not a hint was made on the obituary of such a man as Nwokolo whose pioneering contributions to medicine not only had global significance, but does account in large part to the early quality of Medical training in Nigeria in one generation. It is well known in the medical community that had the Nobel Committee in Sweden found it in itself to honor the remarkable work done in Tropical Medicine, Chukwuedu Nwokolo should have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Born in April 1921 in Oraifite, Eastern Nigeria to pioneer Anglican Missionary parents, Nwokolo spent his early childhood in Missionary compounds in the old Owerri provinces, specifically in Amaimo where his parents were missionary teachers, and in Ezinihitte-Mbaise, where he began primary school, and later at the Mbieri Anglican School, where he lived with his school master uncle, Zeph Nwokolo.

Chukwuedu Nwokolo was a precocious child. From Standard Five, he passed into the famous Government College Umuahia in 1933. From the Government College Umuahia, Nwokolo was admitted to the Yaba Higher College to study medicine on a government scholarship. Most Nigerians continue to mistake the Yaba Higher College for the current Yaba College of Technology. Although the contemporary Yaba College of Technology inherited the grounds of the Yaba Higher College, they are two different institutions with different missions and significance. The Yaba Higher College was established in 1932, to train a small cadre of indigenous professionals in Medicine, Agriculture, Education, Engineering and Surveys to serve as Assistants to colonial officers running the empire. It was the result, in large part, of pressures on the colonial regime by Africans for an institution of Higher education for a new generation of Africans seeking higher or tertiary education in that era.

It was the Yaba of the Titus Ejiwunmis and Michael Okorodudus; pioneer Nigerian educators and administrators at Yaba, who also went on to greater accomplishment later in the early postcolonial years. Chukwuedu Nwokolo earned his Licentiate in Medicine at Yaba in 1946, winning the prize in Organic Chemistry and the Walter Johnson Prize in Public Health. In the periods between 1946 and 1949, Nwokolo interned at the Women and Paediatric Wards of the Aba General Hospital, the Lagos General Hospital, and the Enugu General Hospital, where he worked as Assistant Medical Officer under the Senior Surgical resident Dr. Richard Savage, who later also became the Chief Medical Officer of Eastern Nigeria. When the University College Hospital, UCH, Ibadan began its Medical School in temporary quarters at the Adeoyo Hospital, Ibadan, in 1948, it requested the government to release Chukwuedu Nwokolo to it. Thus Nwokolo, alongside his Yaba Higher College classmate and friend, Dr. T.O. Ogunlesi, became the first of the Assistant Medical Officers to be seconded to Nigeria’s Premier Medical School in 1949 as House Officers; Ogunlesi under Dr. Margaret Joly in Surgery, and Nwokolo, under Professor  Alexander Brown, UCH’s first Professor of Medicine and Dean of its Medical School.

From UCH, Nwokolo proceeded to the Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, in South East London, for Specialist Training in Medicine and Surgery. In 1952, he moved to Edinburg, where he prepared and was admitted into the Membership of the Royal College of Medicine, the second Nigerian, after Dr. Olu Mabayoje, to earn that distinction. On return from the UK in 1954, Nwokolo  joined the Health Services of Eastern Nigeria as a Senior Physician at the Enugu General Hospital, from where he did wide-ranging research. In 1960, he was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and invited on the recommendation of Professor Alexander Brown to the University College Hospital as Senior Lecturer in Internal Medicine.

He traveled on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship with which he spent two years from 1963-1964 at the University of Minnesota, attached to Gastroenterology research. He was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine at UCH in 1964, and on his return from the United States, established the first Department of Gastroenterology at UCH. Among his more distinguished students was Professor Jubril Aminu. Chukwuedu Nwokolo was one of the key figures of the University College Ibadan Medical School until the troubles of 1966, when he moved, like most Eastern intellectuals and professionals, to the East following the nation-wide killings of the Igbo. At Enugu, Nwokolo continued his work, and was one of the key movers that prepared the grounds for establishing the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu in 1967. The late professor Onuaguluchi, a great colleague of Nwokolo’s, has in his memoir detailed the moves that led to the establishment of UNTH in Enugu in 1967.

Displaced Igbo professors from Ibadan, including Nwokolo, had drawn up a program which was quickly approved by the government under Odumegwu-Ojukwu, for establishing UNTH, and thus Chukwuedu Nwokolo was appointed the first Professor of Medicine of UNTH, and from 1972-1975, Dean of the University of Nigeria Medical School. Chukwuedu Nwokolo’s pioneering work as medical doctor and a leading medical researcher of his age is actually the stuff of legend, evident in his groundbreaking work in the incidence of Paragonimiasis on which his international reputation was firmly established.

He was a great Nigerian even if the skewed values no longer make it possible for Nigerians to grasp the meaning of true greatness. Chukwuedu Nwokolo was a great leader in Medical education in Nigeria, and was appointed Professor Emeritus of Medicine at UNTH Enugu, in 1982. In 2006, UNTH established what should now be known as the “Chukwuedu Nwokolo Memorial Lectures” at the College of Medicine. A great star has departed from among us. It is incumbent on the federal government to recognize the stuff of sterling accomplishment emblematized in the life and work of Professor Chukwuedu Nwokolo – distinguished scholar and winner of Nigeria’s National Order of Merit.