How Leading Nigerian Political Scientist, Prof Jonah Isawa Elaigwu, Died Within An Hour

Bits and pieces available to Intervention point at death giving Prof Jonah Isawa Elaigwu no signals or notice before striking. He died early Tuesday, July 22, 2025 within an hour or thereabout of noticing breathing difficulty.

It is now known that he had a normal evening, retiring to bed around midnight Monday after watching an unnamed television programme with some of his children. A few hours later, he woke them up to report breathing difficulty. By the time they got to an Airforce medical facility, the doctors did nothing else than confirm him dead.

7 years ago when his legatees insisted on a dinner in his honour!

He died in the hands of two of his youngest daughters. They may be young but Intervention has been told they have been brought up in line with the Prof Elaigwu’s strict standards of propriety and brilliant finishing. Another of his children will be taking charge of The Institute of Governance and Social Research (IGSR) he set up and retired to.

Prof Istifanus Zabadi of the Department of Political Science at Bingham University in Karu, near Abuja was both an undergraduate student and later Special Assistant to Prof Elaigwu when Elaigwu was the Director-General of the National Council on Inter-Governmental Relations (NCIR). He told Intervention that coping with standards peculiar to Prof Elaigwu was what they learnt from him. In the end, Elaigwu would call the staff and say, I knew I was overworking you but the end justifies the means. It was Elaigwu’s own way of grooming those who worked with him and sending the notice that every output must have overcome any elements of clumsiness and anything sub-standard. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was imposing the standards of the great opportunities that he and his generation had at ABU, Zaria of those days and Stanford University, a global front-rank American institution where he pursued his PhD.

Prof Elaigwu remained the foremost authority on comparative federalism in Nigeria but no less on civil-military relations. It is also not clear which of the two areas he had better mastery of. Unimpeachable sources credit him with writing the Concept Paper for the National Council on Inter-Governmental Relations (NCIR) of which he became the D-G and ran for about four years before it was scrapped by the Abacha regime.

A 2018 outing

Prof Hassan Saliu, the president of the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) agrees that the demise of Prof Elaigwu is the end of an era in itself. His death has depleted the rank of the elders of the Political Science discipline in Nigeria. those that readily come to mind are Prof Bolaji Akinyemi, Prof Okwudiba Nnoli, Prof Sam Egite Oyovbaire, Prof Moibi Amoda, Prof Tunde Adeniran, Prof Okello Oculi and Prof Adele Jinadu. It is not clear immediately if Prof W. O. Alli and Prof Sunday Ochoche belong to this club in terms of age but both of them were close to the late Prof. Elaigwu. While Prof Alli taught in the same Department of Political Science, University of Jos with Elaigwu, it was Elaigwu who drew Prof Ochoce from Philosophy to Political Science. Ochoche is, otherwise, a Philosophy graduate of the University of Ibadan.

Beyond the Political Science constituency, Prof Elaigwu’s death will be felt in the military (many of whose commanders were his students one way or the other); the civil society where he was an eminent resource person and head of a civil society platform; larger academia and politics (he wasn’t a politician but his students and friends were. Alhaji Gali Umar Na’Ábbah who became the Speaker of the House of Representatives was his student at ABU, Zaria and consulted him a lot as Speaker).

It was from ABU, Zaria Elaigwu went on to become a star at UNIJOS, beefing his stardom up with the arrival of his long time friend, Prof Ali Mazrui. In Mazrui’s Triple Heritage, there is a section featuring Prof Elaigwu’s father’s interview.

Prof Isawa Elaigwu looks like the one about whom can be said to have put everything in place in anticipation of death. His daughter is already in charge of his own institute. She started running the place under the departed Prof’s gaze.

That was him!

In Political Science, there are no less than about five successors on ground, from Eghosa Osaghae of UI to Okey Ibeanu of UNN, Attahiru Jega of BUK, Sam Egwu of UNIJOS, Jibrin Ibrahim. The list would certainly be longer if extended to younger specialists of that field outside of the generation of Nigerian political scientists uniting the above five.

The hint is that he even drew a list of those to be contacted and informed of his death whenever it happened. That list, it is understood, has been followed.

The one area it didn’t click is him becoming the Och’Idoma of Idoma in 2022. There is no knowing if Prof Elaigwu was ever aware of this since the idea was never his but a reflective surge which considered that someone of Prof Elaigwu’s standing would give voice, visibility and presence to that stool, variables that a minority of minorities such as the Idoma was thought to need.

Intervention is aware that almost everyone consulted on that possibility wondered if Prof Elaigwu would ever accept to serve as Och’Idoma, given his frustration with social decay of late. The response had been that it was not a case of whether he was going to accept or not but that Idomaland was giving him an assignment. However, the idea died as suddenly as it erupted long before the selection process produced the incumbent, Dr John Elaigwu Odogbo, Och’Idoma v. Agaaaaaaaba-Idu!

Aside from Director-General and Chief Executive, National Council on Intergovernmental Relations (NCIR) which has already been mentioned, Prof Elaigwu was also an Executive Committee Member, Research Committee on Federalism and Federation; Chairman, Board of Trustees, United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR); Member, Presidential Advisory Committee, The Presidency and a Director, New Nigerian Development Company (NNDC) of yore.

In the evening of his life, he became so religious. What remains to establish is if he published a book that he had started writing and which he spoke of. Some sources spoke of a book he published about two years ago. years but there is no knowing now if that is the same book he mentioned to Intervention in one conversation some four years back.

As Prof Zabadi pointed out, he wrote even more after becoming a Professor of Political Science. Stuff!