By Prof Hassan Saliu
The news of the death of Prof. Aja Kpuru-Aja on the 16th of March, 2024 came to me as a rude shock because I never heard of him being indisposed prior to his death. Although two years before his demise, he had hinted me about the advisory of his doctors that he needed to slow down apparently because of his state of health, I never had an inkling of how serious it was. He made the disclosure in connection with an invitation I had extended to him to be our Billy Dudley’s lecturer for that year. Meanwhile, in 2021, he agreed to contribute a chapter to NPSA’s book on governance in Nigeria.
I first met him at Kuru where he was as a Directing staff when I went there to participate in a conference organized by the Institute on insecurity in Nigeria. After that, we became friends and academic colleagues. He was keenly following my academic progress, while I also did the same to him. He was in the broad area of security studies, an academic area where he was more known through his consistent contributions.
He was therefore a friend and colleague with whom I have had a healthy working relationship. As a demonstration of his friendship with me, he sent one of his children to our university at Ilorin for his master’s degree in political science to learn under our feet because, as he later told me, he wanted his son to study under me in our department to learn from our fountain of knowledge. Our respect was mutual; he respected me a lot by always citing some articles I have written on my primary academic area – Nigerian foreign policy, as the basis for the respect I had earned from him. I too reciprocated by following his academic engagements at NIPSS and back to Abia State University, Uturu, where he was like an academic oracle to junior colleagues before his death. On two occasions, I have led NUC’s accreditation teams to his university at Uturu. On one of such times, he was on ground in the university and we were able to exchange notes. I recall that last year, he was the lead paper presenter at the SE conference of the NPSA that held at Awka in 2023. On that occasion, he gave a good account of himself as he delivered his paper extempore to the delight of the audience.
Until his demise, he was always making reference to my intervention on the Nigerian Foreign Service, which appeared in one of SIRA’s publications in 2016 as my best outing for the justice I did to the issues involved. I have also read some of his own publications on strategic issues, especially on the pervasive insecurity in Nigeria and what was needed to overcome it. This explains why I invited him to contribute a chapter contribution on insecurity in Nigeria in a book on governance that is being put together by the NPSA. In the course of preparing the book for publication, I have had the opportunity of reading through the paper and I have found it to be a frank submission on the state of insecurity in Nigeria. He was a man of principles. As soon as he finished his contract term of five years at NIPSS in 2014, he returned to his university at Uturu without being forced to quit Kuru. While at his base, he was making occasional appearances in Abuja and other places, making his academic and policy interventions.
He was a scholar who had been adequately prepared by the circumstances of his PhD, which he obtained after some turbulence at UNIPORT. This shows in his numerous publications, covering political economy, strategic studies, Nigeria’s foreign policy, etc., that have appeared everywhere, including the United States where he had won some recognition, especially from the former US President Bill Clinton, the former UN scribe, the late Kofi Anan and others, on account of a book he wrote on the US Presidency titled: “The US Presidential Personalities and Power of Persuasion in Foreign Policy.” Cumulatively, he had written 12 sole- authored books before his death. He was not only known in the academic environment, his impact was also noticeable on the policy arena as he was part of the efforts to draft a National Security Policy in 2014 and the review of Nigerian Foreign Policy in 2016.
At the level of the NPSA, he was one of the elders I conferred with in Abakaliki in 2018 when the issue of another EXCO for our Association was developing a life of its own at the venue of the conference. Prof. Kpuru-Aja was a strong supporter of the modest efforts being made to reposition our dear Association. Any time he communicated with me, he would not fail to commend the current EXCO for what he considered its good performance in office. My last communication with him was about three weeks ago when he forwarded his resume to me as an author of a chapter in our forthcoming book on governance in Nigeria. The family of Political Scientists has indeed lost a scholar with a strong commitment to scholarship. I therefore pray for the repose of his soul and for his immediate family to have the fortitude to bear this irreparable loss of a bread winner.
Adieu Aja Kpuru-Aja, a shining academic star from Abia State University, Uturu, is gone.
The author is the President, NPSA
