But above all, believe it, the sweetest Canticle is, Nunc dimittis, when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Francis Bacon, Of Death
On July 18, 2013, at 82, he publicly asked God to spare his life for five or possibly more years to complete the tasks he set for himself on this earth. He had already achieved so much but felt that his country still needed his intellectual guidance, especially to reorder our political order.

His achievements were almost too numerous for even his acolytes to keep track of. But his energy was boundless even as age and ailment gradually took their toll. “The fact that I’m incapacitated by illness, which makes me not strong to stand on my feet to address this gathering,” he said on the occasion, “doesn’t mean that I’m ready to go. I hope to live up to 90 years.”

That was an underestimate. He lived to 92. Merciful God gave him twice as much time as he requested. Perhaps God knew that Nigeria needed the man for a little while longer. On October 29, 2023, it was over. Who was this man?

One summer afternoon
I cannot recall what day it was in 1987. The third Idigbe Memorial Lecture to be delivered by Professor Nwabueze was scheduled for the day. He was expected to speak on the topic “Transition from Military Rule to Constitutional Democracy.’

The lecture did not take place. He arrived at the venue inside the University of Benin promptly. But the audience, better accustomed to “African time,” did not. He could not accept that situation, and he returned to his private lodging at the other end of town. This remains the only Idigbe Memorial Lecture that was not orally delivered.

I in the company of Professor Itse Sagay chased after our guest. Unable to persuade him to return to campus to give the lecture (though he was gracious to enough to accept our apologies for the disappointment), the occasion turned into a courtesy visit of sorts.

At this time, Professor Nwabueze’s fame, especially for constitutional law, had reached the ends of the earth. He had, by my recollection, already published nearly ten major titles on the subject since the first was published in 1964. In fact, these books, especially the ones he fondly called the three ‘ISMs’ published between 1973 and 1977, were my introduction to rich American constitutional scholarship. He was nothing short of my idol. Yet, on this auspicious occasion, the question I itched to ask him was not about constitutional law at all.

In 1972, Nwabueze published his Nigerian Land Law, an excellent exposition of the arcane doctrines of a subject that is a nightmare for many a law student. There was one glaring and surprising omission. This book did not include the important topic called leases, a standard aspect of the syllabus. The author explained in a preface that that chapter of the draft was lost during the Civil War, and that he was not able to immediately rewrite it from scratch, but that he would do so in a subsequent edition.

In his Autobiography nearly three decades after our meeting, he said, “I was clutching on to the manuscript of the book as we evacuated from place to place to escape from the increasing ravages and destruction of the war.”

Until he got the opportunity to send the manuscript to his mentor and former colleague, Professor L.C.B. Gower in England for safe keeping, who duly retuned it to him intact after the war. Nothing was mentioned in this narrative about the loss of the chapter. Instead, after the war, he said, “I revised the chapters, added some new chapters.” But not the missing chapter.

What I wanted to know from Nwabueze that afternoon was whether or when he hoped to write the lost chapter. Nearly a decade and half had passed already at the time of our meeting since the publication of the book, more than enough time for a second edition in the ordinary course of things but for his preoccupation with constitutional law since after the publication of the book. Nonetheless, he firmly assured me that he would get round to write the chapter sometime. He never did. Nor does any of his books have a second edition.

The public intellectual
The academic who aspires to play the role of public intellectual, according to Richard Posner, will need communication skills and authority. “Specialisation makes it difficult to write for a general audience. His orientation is towards writing for his fellow specialists on narrow topics in an esoteric jargon. For jargon is the natural language when people communicate primarily with members of an in-group.” Nwabueze’s works were very readable and always appear to be written for a general audience than as specialist works, and he probably always intended them to be so.

For that reason, he captivated an audience far wider than his specialisation of law and government. He vigorously pushed his views publicly at almost every opportunity from the mid-1960s until only a few years ago through frequent public lectures and speeches, books and essays, newspaper articles and interviews, and above all, active participation in constitutional reform and constitution-writing.

“The public intellectual is a social critic rather than merely a social observer,” Posner reminds us. The evolution of Nwabueze from a mainstream and highly influential constitutional technocrat whose services were widely sought within and outside Nigeria to write constitutions to the later-day less influential advocacy of radical constitutional reform is telling.

He was one of the principal authors of the 1979 Constitution, being a leading member of both the Constitution Drafting Committee and the Constituent Assembly, respectively. (The present 1999 Constitution largely replicates that constitution.) He wrote several books in the 1980s expounding the different aspects of the 1979 Constitution, including his widely read Federalism in Nigeria under the Presidential Constitution (1983).

His books were frequently cited in court decisions and lawyers’ briefs of argument. However, from the mid to late 1990s, he started having second thoughts about the constitutional changes he championed previously. He turned to advocacy of radical constitutional changes, including a repeal of the 1999 Constitution by the National Assembly, a drastic restructuring of Nigeria’s federal system and the revenue collection and distribution regime, a national conference complemented with plebiscitary adoption of a new constitution, and even a sovereign national conference.

Being conscious of his own mortality, there was heightened urgency in his tone with every year, and his impatience grew. This period coincided with his leadership of advocacy groups such as The Patriots, The Southern Leaders of Thought, and Project Nigeria (The Save Nigeria Project) among others.

His scholarship
Before he was a public intellectual, he was a scholar. And being a scholar was always what he wanted to be. “When I graduated LL.B. from the University of London in 1959 and was subsequently called to the Bar in England in the same year,” he recalled, “private practice as a barrister and solicitor was never in my thought. What was constantly in my mind and thought was a life of study and reflection as an academic.”

He distinguished himself as a student, both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his LL.B. and LL.M. degrees, and the bar examination, respectively.

He was commended by one of his teachers, the eminent English constitutionalist Professor Stanley Alexander de Smith FBA (1922-1974) for being the student who “scored the highest mark ever awarded by the University of London in the LL.M. Examinations in the constitutional law of the Commonwealth,” a course that Professor de Smith newly introduced at the university.

Nwabueze’s career as an academic began at the University of Lagos in 1962. Before then, his only teaching experience was one year teaching LL.B. students at the Holborn College of Law. In addition, he previously had another one-year experience as a secondary school mathematics teacher in Eastern Nigeria during 1955-1956.

After completing his LL.M., he registered for a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London in 1961with the expectation to work on a dissertation on “The Position of Chiefs under the Laws of Eastern Nigeria” with Professor Tony Allot as his supervisor.
To be continued tomorrow
Ukhuegbe wrote from Toronto, Canada.