Everyone has been invoking his name since his death July 26th, 2025 but what do they mean when they do that? This is the question that only August 20th 2025 will answer.
That’s the day later this week (precisely Wednesday) the world has set aside for tributes to the sage of Pan-Africanism. The committee which masterminded the event has called it ‘The Evening of Tributes’
Prof Oculi at work a few years back @ Nigeria’s 62nd independence anniversary
It is the day his academic colleagues of yore, civil society activists, family members and former students will be speaking on him in a global valedictory.
Nobody can be certain about what the valedictory will make of Prof Oculi but if the trend so far is anything to go by, his sense of Political Science, his innovations or approach to lecturing, his Pan-Africanist praxis and his emphasis on power resources are the likely credit lines that will be stressed. The night of tributes is thus likely to be a tracking of memory far, far back not seen or heard in recent time.
The cross-cutting edge to it will be another dimension to the virtual spectacle. As already hinted, Prof Oculi straddled multiple domains: academia, civil society, Afrocentrism, literature and articulatory practice (particularly the simulation of leadership through the Mock-OAU/AU Summit). It is sad that the society is just coming to realise how striking some of his innovations were/are after his demise but, as they say, it is always better to be late than never at all.
That was him!
The Night of Tributes to Prof Okello Oculi is combining the virtual and the in-person. The invite to the event has listed The Electoral Institute (TEI) as the venue for those attending the in-person version. TEI is on 565/565, Independence Avenue in CBD, Abuja.
Interestingly, TEI has, on several occasions in the past, been the venue for the annual celebration of Pan-Africanists who were not his formal students but who could be called his proteges. These are Prof Abubakar Momoh who died in May, 2017 when he was the incumbent Director-General of TEI and Dr Tajudeen Abdulraheem whose Pan-Africanism earned him the referent “Africa’s first president”.
What about Prof Oculi and Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o sharing same quarters in the heavenly Garden?
The joke has been that Uganda donated Prof Okello Oculi to Nigeria while Nigeria reciprocated by donating Dr Tajudeen Abdulraheem to Uganda. While Okello Oculi was teaching and incubating qualitative leadership in Nigeria, the late Tajudeen was enacting ‘One Africa’ from Uganda. The coordination of that process made him into some kind of a President-General for Africa. But, more than that, his conviction that Africa could and should fuse into a mega structure which knows no identity barriers made him the African president we never had.
Very interestingly, Prof Oculi is the one who maintained that Tajudeen Abdulraheem’s laughter had the force of the machine gun as far as African liberation is concerned. Oculi was paying his tribute to Tajudeen who died in a mysterious accident in 2009 in Nairobi. Every year, Oculi was never absent from the annual ritual of remembrance of both Tajudeen Abdulraheem and Abubakar Momoh.
Wednesday August 20th, 2025 is thus the Okello Oculi Moment. By that is meant the point when the Oculi element attains its most privileged and uncontested signification.
