Nigeria’s Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, continues his beat as the Red Chamber number two man, even while in a minority party, confirming the axiom that trust and integrity are essential leadership attributes, writes Correspondent, SAM NWOKORO
Leadership is an institution itself. Only the virtuous gets there and stay up” – Lee Lacocca, corporate turn-around expert.
Those schooled in the very intricate art of leadership have many times confirmed this saying by the globally reputed corporate czar, Lee Lacocca, the famed Chief Executive Officer of Chrysler Motors Corporation of the United States. The history of market economy and the dynamics of corporate re-engineering, whenever written, cannot omit the name of Lacocca. In the 1980s when Asia’s automobile industry started hitting hard on the U.S. auto industry, no one was able to decipher the reason Japanese automobiles were taking a huge chunk of U.S. car market share.
Only Lacocca had the insight, and before competitors could discern anything, he had begun in earnest to reposition Chrysler: he cut down on the units that produce upper crust limo brands, diverted more resources to research and development, increased and empowered design units of Chrysler Corporation, cut down prices, wowed Washington establishment to manage relations with China more carefully because of the size of its market, did sundry corporate engineering and pushed a whole lot of slimmer automobiles into the car market. He became a school for corporate turn-around. And in less than three years of corporate re-engineering, American autos started flooding the markets again. Today, many auto brands from other countries are actually designed in U.S. plants and laboratories. That is the merit of vision and commitment derivable in whatever calling one finds him or herself.
In very many respects, Nigeria’s deputy Senate president shares much of this Lacocca attributes of focus, cocktailing it with truth, reason, passion and love of country. A good leader is one who understands the aspiration of his people, and bothers about how to meet those aspirations. Without platitude, Senator Ike Ekweremadu has proved to be a symbol of the kind of politician and public officer suitable for young democracies like Nigeria’s. Someone said the other day: if all Nigerian politicians behave the way Ekweremadu behaves, the redemption of Nigeria is not a difficult thing to accomplish.
Many attributes and conduct of the man attest to this, and this probably accounts for why despite that his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lost the presidential election last March, fellow parliamentarians still went ahead to choose him as deputy president of the Senate, after Senator Olusola Saraki of All progressives Congress (APC) from Kwara State (North Central), chieftain had emerged Senate president.
Senate’s ‘Ike’ intact
Is there anything in a name? ‘Ike’ means ‘strength’ in Igbo. The latest development is a testimony that the Ike of the Senate has to be intact.
The election of Ekweremadu was a reciprocal attitude extended to the elected Senate president by a ‘rebel’ faction of the ruling APC who command majority in both chambers of the federal parliament. The PDP senators had aligned with Saraki’s faction who initially had a different choice. An amalgam of the pro-Saraki APC senators and PDP sympathy senators ensured the emergence of the new Senate president. Logically, the Saraki APC senators had to return favour by ensuring that the whole house returned Ekweremadu as the deputy Senate president.
Observers of Nigerian politics believe that the combination of Saraki from North Central and Ekweremadu from South East balances the delicate composition of the APC government in terms of equitable representation and in deference to the principles of national character as enshrined in the constitution. The fact that both Saraki and Ekweremadu not long ago were members of the same PDP obviously cements the camaraderie. Much as Saraki had been a former governor in Kwara under PDP previously, at that same period, Ekweremadu was a PDP senator.
No doubt, it is in confirmation of the Ekweremadu factor that even President Muhammadu Buhari had in his characteristic statesmanship welcomed the Saraki/Ekweremadu combination. The president enthused without mincing words that “due democratic process has taken place” and that he was willing to work with those the NASS has elected as its officers.
Great stabiliser
Without platitudes, one can safely say that Senator Ekweremadu has been a courageous stabiliser in national politics and leadership these past 16 years.
At every level, it appears the 21st century was a seminal date with destiny for him in the echelons of national leadership, right from the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999. At every turn in the nation’s annals, Ekweremadu’s sagacity and deep sense of history, nourished by his conscious understanding of Nigeria’s ethnocentric and political fault lines, have ensured his success on many occasions to save the country from undeserved catastrophes. He demonstrated this much when he paired with former Senate president, David Mark, to propound the “doctrine of necessity” when one of Nigeria’s president was indisposed in 2010.
A combination of then PDP’s zoning palaver and the desperation by some power-hungry elements to just take over power regardless of what the constitution was saying, as if Nigeria had descended to a state of a la carte, would have thrown the country into one maze of anarchy. But Mark and Ekweremadu saved the day. That was just one. Again, after the United Kingdom criticised Nigeria’s Prohibition of Same-Sex Marriage bill, threatening to pull their foreign aid, the Senate under Mark and Ekweremadu responded that they “should keep (their) aid”.
Ekweremadu as deputy Senate president also was instrumental in settling issues that touched on the nation’s economic and social well-being through his savvy, unobtrusive relations with other arms of the government.
It would appear that circumstances had left the senators with no choice than to pick somebody like Ekweremadu as deputy Senate president.
The outcome of the 2015 general elections somehow appeared skewed to the utter exclusion of some critical components of the Nigerian entity. Of course, right from Independence through serial phantom republics and military interregna, Nigeria has always managed to devise at any occasion some tools of power distribution to ensure “the house stands”. Perhaps that is one sublimating elixir of the emergence of Ekweremadu, aside his sterling qualities as the deputy Senate president of the eighth NASS.
Life of service
Born in 1962 at Amachara Mpu in Aninri Local Government Area of Enugu State, Ekweremadu holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Law from the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1987. He also holds Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) degree in Law from the University of Abuja. He established a private law firm. In 2002, he was appointed Secretary State Government (SSG), Enugu State, and on April 12, 2003, he was elected into the Nigerian Senate. He had been chairman of Aninri Local Government Area and won the Best LGA Chairman in Enugu before he was appointed Chief of Staff of Enugu State Government House.
During his first stint in the Senate as Chairman of Senate Committee on Information, Ekweremadu showed early signs that he has a listening ear and caved in to public agitation for probe of how the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), then under Nasir el-Rufai, was being run. The probe, for the first time, revealed that many anomalies were being done in the administration of FCT. That was his first Senate portfolio before he lost the Senate presidency contest in 2005 to former Ken Nnamani.
In July 2006, as spokesperson for the Southern Senators’ Forum, the suave deputy Senate president doused controversy regarding certain allegations that agreement was reached by his party, PDP, to return power to the North by 2007. He is known for saying only what he knows and can defend as an attorney.
He also doused similar public outpouring when a certain principal secretary to then Vice President Atiku Abubakar was alleged to have been charged in a British court for money laundering. He did not succumb to public hype to begin to blackmail an institution he runs as number four man then.
In September 2009, Ekweremadu was named co-chairman of the committee to conduct primary elections for PDP governorship candidates, a task he accomplished satisfactorily for his party.
The same year, he was appointed to lead the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Adhoc Committee to work for the return of constitutional order in Niger Republic. He was elected first Deputy Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament and subsequently emerged the Speaker in August 2011.
During the Jonathanian era, Ekweremadu was re-elected to represent Enugu West senatorial seat, gaining 112,806 votes with which he defeated his closest rival, Jackson Ezeoffor, who was flying the flag of a little known Peoples Democratic Change. Ezeoffor polled a paltry 7,522 votes.
For good measure, Ekweremadu has been a veritable asset in Nigeria’s nation building project, as deputy Senate president.
