Barrister Clement Nwankwo, Hon Abdul Oroh, Engineer Y. Z. Ya’u, Comrades John Odah and a couple of yet others were some Nigerian civil society mandarins who woke up to an award Thursday night in Abuja Nigeria. Dr. Otive Igbuzor, a pastor-politician appeared to have anchored the award process.
Igbuzor who seemed to administer the awards gives Y. Z Ya’u his
Barr Clement Nwankwo
The event which took place at the Continental Hotel (formerly Sheraton hotel) in Abuja came from a rather little known but obviously an enabled civil society organization called Spaces For Change.
Some of the recipients told Intervention that the awards came literally from the blues, suggesting that Space for Change is most likely keener on working quietly on its mission.
Intervention understands too that there was a civil Society dialogue component of the little publicized event but which is equally understood to have become public because of the caliber of activists involved.
Symbolising the award
An internet graphic on ‘Spaces for Change’ which is not just more than 10 years but also involved in multiple spaces, true to its name
Barrister Clement Nwankwo was a part founder of the Civil Liberties Organisation, (CLO) which is the first of such liberal civil society platforms in Nigeria in the late 1980s. Through acidic advocacy and campaigning, the CLO, working together with the Nigeria Labour Congress, (NLC) of those days, the National Association of Nigerian Students, (NANS) also of those days, the Nigerian Bar Association, (NBA) the National Association of Resident Doctors, (NARD) and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), gave military dictatorship bloody nose.
Hon Abdul Oroh who later became a conventional politician was one of the earliest Executive Directors of the said CLO.
Enginner Y. Z. Ya’u who used to be a Lecturer in Bayero University, Kano was an ideologue and tactician of ASUU at both the local and national level while Dr Igbuzor held the forte for gender agitation in Maiduguri, Borno State where he was based. He is now a politician. John Odah who was part of the radical detachment at the ideologically constituted, fire-eating NLC later became its General Secretary.
The awardees must have thus been critically selected and it is not clear why the event was not given the publicity corresponding to the memories it evokes.
