ON December 2, 2024, Nigerians will converge at the main auditorium of the National Universities Commission for the public presentation of Senator Chris Anyanwu’s autobiography, Bold Leap.

To be sure, this is her third book. She wrote the first, The Law Makers, Federal Republic of Nigeria, while she was NTA correspondent at the National Assembly in the Second Republic. The second, The Days of Terror, came after her release from General Sani Abacha’s gulag in 1998.

But Bold Leap is significantly different and, no doubt, will stir up the hornets’ nest for the very reason that she pulled no punches in the 612-page tome.

An autobiography can be tricky because of the tendency of the author to remember only what is convenient, which most times creates the faux pas of presenting opinions as facts. But Bold Leap is significantly different because the author remembers everything, which makes the book truly “an inspirational story of a woman of exceptional talent and indomitable spirit.”

Born on October 28, 1951, nine years before Nigeria’s independence, the story of C-Gal, as she was fondly called while growing up, is the story of Nigeria writ large. Like many other Igbo families, her comfortable family life was shattered in the late 1960s. Her father, Hon. Nicholas Diala Ukah, popularly called N.D. Ukah, who started off as a primary school teacher after passing the First School Leaving Certificate Examination with distinction quickly climbed the academic ladder, culminating in a University of London degree in British Economic History.

In the late 1940s, he joined the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, NCNC, and just as he did in academia, he also rose rapidly in politics – first Council Chairman for Mbaise District Council and garnered the coveted award of Member of the British Empire, MBE, in 1956. In 1959, he won election to represent Owerri North-East Federal constituency in the Federal House of Representatives.

Then the civil war and Ndigbo were devastated. C-Gal who was already riding high academically at Owerri Girls Secondary School became part of the collateral damage. The bigger tragedy happened after the war. Her family survived the war but not the peace. Her adorable father was arrested and detained by the Nigerian Army, as she put it “for no reason other than that he was a member of the Federal House of Representatives.” He was arrested from his village – Umuokirika – and taken to a detention camp in Port Harcourt where he was detained, starved and brutalised for three months. “The ill-treatment at the camp obviously took a heavy toll on his health. He was looking very thin, unwell and quiet… During the detention, he developed kidney problem,” Chris wrote.

She recalled going to see him on his death bed at the Emekuku Hospital and still remembers his plea. “With tubes in his nose and mouth, all he could tell me was to go home and take care of my siblings.” A tall order. But she says: “I have obeyed that injunction ever since.”

N.D. Ukah was only 51 when he died in August 1971, leaving behind 13 children, the eldest was Chris who was only 20 years and a widow who had become a fulltime housewife without any source of income.

On his father’s ordeal in the Port Harcourt detention camp, she wrote: “I was told by a former Inspector General of Police that the camp where they kept and starved my father and other leaders arrested at the end of the war was managed by Chief A.K. Horsfall, a Rivers State man who later became head of the National Intelligence Service.”

One remarkable thing about Chris Anyanwu as manifested in the book is that even as she mentioned names and narrated harrowing life experiences, classical cases of man’s inhumanity, there was no bitterness. She simply made statements of fact.

Obasanjo, in his Foreword, made the same observation. “Chris was able to render otherwise tear-inducing details in a manner that removed the sting from the bitter experience to allow the reader enjoy accounts of unfair experiences without the revulsion that such stories ordinarily should have elicited.”

Bold Leap is a breath-taking chronicle of her enthralling life experiences. Obasanjo said if he was to propose an alternative title for the book, he would have called it “Triumph of Courage.” He would have been spot on. This is an incredible story of a woman with a never-say-die spirit, who, despite challenges dominated her world.

She became a broadcasting sensation at the NTA where she was National Assembly, Diplomatic and OPEC correspondent. About eight years into her phenomenal career in television, she went to her home state of Imo to serve as Commissioner for Information. She later became the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Magazine, TSM, a weekly newsmagazine, before veering into the TSM TV project. Today, she owns a chain of radio stations – Hot FM. She executed all these projects with remarkable panache.

Bold Leap is the unusual life story of a phenomenal go-getter, who plunged headlong into the murky waters of Nigerian politics and came out triumphant, serving two terms as a Senator. In the Senate she scored a treble firsts – the first senator to be elected on the platform of a small regional party (APGA), first female elected to the Senate from Imo State and first senator from the State to be re-elected.

The account of her political odyssey in Imo State will generate enough heat in the coming days, no doubt. But it is a treasure-trove for anyone who seeks to understand why politics is so fraudulent a game in Nigeria. “Everything is bought. You buy votes to be nominated. You buy votes to be elected to office. And then you must pay to defend yourself from frivolous court cases and bad judgements. It is an all-round corrupting, wearying and spirit-crushing experience,” she explains.

Bold Leap is the story of the grit and singular determination of a young woman who rather than allowing the tragedy of her father’s untimely death derail her vision, powered on, acquiring a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri and a Master of Science degree in Mass Communication from the Florida State University in the U.S.

Bold Leap is a chronicle of the major socio-economic and political developments in the country in the last four decades and the major players. Chris Anyanwu knows them all. She is, perhaps, the most connected journalist the country has had in recent times. She was at home with the military and political leaders as well as the hoi-polloi.

But the book is not only about Chris Anyanwu and her incredible exploits in journalism and politics. It is also about Nigeria. And she wants everyone to be aware of that fact. In a short note she attached to the book sent to me, she hinted: “Appendix 1 – 2, etc. is a goldmine. I would like you to go through and possibly ask: what is it about? Why?”

The two appendixes dealt with the lingering National Question. On February 22, 1994, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Odumegwu, Ikemba Nnewi, delivered the second TSM Diamond Lecture to mark the fourth anniversary of the magazine. Though he said he was approached in November 1993, Ojukwu only wrote what he called a “talk” in the morning of February 22 longhand.

Given the latitude to choose the topic, Ojukwu titled his talk, “Nigeria: The truths which are self-evident.”

Speaking before an audience that included the then Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Chris Alli, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, Senator Olusola Saraki, Chuba Okadigbo, ministers, diplomats and company executives, the charismatic Biafran leader brought the roof down, literally.

Narrating what happened in her column in the March 6, 1994 edition of TSM, Chris Anyanwu wrote: “As he (Ojukwu) spoke, many cried. Young people, old people, they all had tears in their eyes. 

I see this picture of Chuba Okadigbo raising his horse whip in the air, his face overtaken by excitement and in the foreground a vastness of people hanging both hands in the air.”

And what did Ojukwu say? “Nigeria is sick. It is our duty, each and everyone one of us, to help cure it.”

Ojukwu said 34 years after independence that Nigeria was sick because: “The sovereign people of Nigeria have never succeeded in designing for themselves their own society. Nigerians have never been able to articulate for themselves the general and fundamental ideas of Nigeria,” and consequently: “Nigeria cannot be a nation unless its fundamental law is articulated and is accepted by Nigerians for universal application.”

Sadly, 30 years after, nothing has been done and Nigeria remains not just sick, but gravely sick.

By including Ojukwu’s 1994 “talk” in the Bold Leap, Senator Chris Anyanwu is simply pointing Nigerians to where the rain started beating them, a proof of her continuing service to fatherland.