There is still no let in the passage of notable members of the elite in Nigeria from the Covid-19 pandemic. The latest to fall prey is Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria’s notable Sociologist, Prof Femi Odekunle. He died December 29th, 2020 at the isolation centre where sufferers are taken care of.
A student of his in the late 1970s who is himself a Professor of Sociology confirmed to Intervention the death of Prof Odekunle. The Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria has been Odekunle’s base since he returned to Nigeria from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States where he trained as a Criminologist.
Between 1994 and 1997, he served as the Political Adviser to the Chief of General Staff, General Oladipo Diya. When General Diya was implicated in a coup plot, Prof Odekunle suffered detention before his discharge and acquittal by the Military Tribunal which tried the suspects.
It was not possible immediately to collate insights on his days at ABU, Zaria from some of his students who are now leading authorities in their own right but scraps of information on his Facebook wall showed he was variously Head of the Department of Sociology at ABU; one time Dean of the defunct Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, (FASS) and a member of the Governing Council of the University of Lagos as well as ABU, Zaria. He has lately been a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption headed by Constitutional Law expert, Prof Itse Sagay.
It was also not possible to establish which might have been his most controversial intellectual outing in terms of a journal essay, book chapter or research report. He was certainly a top flight scholar in the ABU, Zaria intellectual firmament who though appeared to have stayed off that university’s ideological politics.
