I did not associate closely with my brother very much as we were growing up, since schooling in far-flung areas of the country impeded our contact with each other. But we congregated during coterminous holidays to share our mother and our female siblings who were much older than we were. My mother preserved us like eggs and our sisters relished us but never failed to crack at us.
PJ was known to have fallen off the hands of his maid at infancy and had sustained a permanent deformation of his cranium. My sister cracked at him for being a he-goat that fought with the horn. They called him Nwokulampi. I was cracked at since I did not have a fashionable buttocks. Me they call Nwodokipara. PJ resented that joke and fought it vigorously initially. It persisted and he enjoyed the fun in order to put paid to it.
I wonder now why it did not occur to me to relate with my brother while he was at school. I might have fared better in my bid to get into secondary school. Well, I was not that bad, but could have been better.
My brother took his brilliance into the Navy and excelled. He was very remarkable at Teshie Gold Coast (now Ghana), Dartmouth in England, and Venduruthy, Cochin in India, where he had undergone training as an officer of the Navy. Even at Apapa Naval Dockyard, he was spoken of in superlative terms.
He had his downside with women. Joseph Garba, one of his colleagues in England at some odd point, remarked to me later on how PJ worked himself into the good books of an English old lady and got away with a lot of benefits from the woman who was indeed his landlady. PJ spoke frugally because he resolved all matters in his head logically before he spoke. He used to stammer as a youth and worked so hard at it by breathing and thinking that the stammer disappeared almost completely before we met after he became Lt. P.J. Odu of the Nigerian Navy.
My brother sea-jacked a warship to Biafra and fought hard to build Biafran Navy with Commodore Anukwu as his boss. He was the toast of the entire sea defence machine of Biafra, according to distant sources. He got lost in the swamps during the war as I pined away at Kirikiri for fighting behind enemy lines as captain of suicide squad of Biafra. It is to the eternal credit of one of his aides, one clansman Onyegbaduo, that he lives today. Onyegbaduo bore him and his legs rotten from weeks of being marooned in the swamps of the Delta to safety of both swampland and Nigeria. I was to share Alliance for Democracy (AD), a political party later on in the evening of my life, to reminisce and reward him for that feat.
My mother was shattered by both his disappearance and my presumed death, and her physical health deteriorated on that account. All kinds of stories assailed my mother about my brother and me. She had heard of my hijack mission and how I had become a bomber pilot and had been killed in air battle. Some said we had been executed for seeking to bomb Lagos with explosives, and that was more plausible. My mother was, as long as I remember, asthmatic and the pressure of losing her mission to raise heirs for my father choked her to death in 1968.
PJ came home to release salvos from his rifle in honour of my mother and her noble passage. I was far away in Kirikiri as I narrated in ‘Foundations of a Life’, the first volume of this series.
Readers of the first volume of the series ‘Spring in Hell: Foundations of a Life’ would recall that my brother sent me money to pay my first school fees as soon as I gained admission into University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) in 1964. That was where our relationship came closest. We were to make it closer as entrepreneurs in the organised private sector in 1971 upon my qualification.
My brother at an early age had been introduced to high life of seamen and the wild comfort that went with the armed forces everywhere. Best food, best drinks, best women were the order of those men in uniform everywhere. They worked hard at sea and relaxed hard at port. He was a handsome man in and out of uniform and was not a saint, so girls fell head over heels for him. But like me, he took one at a time and did not like hurting people. But fun he had. The reader can well imagine what it would have been like for one used to regimented and organised officer status to be discharged from his calling to seek to eke out a living in private sector arena of intense survival commercialism.
My brother decided in his usually logical manner to seek investment capital upon which to build an enterprise.
Our brother-in-law, Sunday Dankaro, had become a baron of industry following the oil boom that immediately became apparent at the termination of hostilities. He had a substantial stake in Universal Steels and Specomills Textiles, a chain that was brought into being in Nigeria by Chinese interests. The Chinese required a chairman who would command respect from the government and who would have the responsibility of smoothening the way of the company in its relationship with the government.
Dankaro was efficient in playing that role. He had substantial leverage with the Chinese for that reason. His mates and friends were in power. Even General Yakubu Gowon, General Gibson Jallo and others of the older military order and other senior officers from Plateau and Benue states were well known to him.
The Hausa oligarchy was familiar to him. He had served as a top manager of Northern Nigeria Produce Marketing Company in the 1950s before or is it after he served Mobil Nigeria with merit. In fact, he had nearly lost his life and that of his wife in a vehicle in which his bosom friend, Ali Akilu, died and it was news in the North.