The machinery superintending the burial formalities for Prof Jonah Isawa Elaigwu is in place and cracking its way. Although concerned more with a major aspect of the rites of passage in Abuja, the burial planning committee is to liaise and complement all other actors in the process.
Headed by Prof Sunday Ochoche as National Chairman and Prof Jideofor Adibe as the Secretary, all prominent legatees of the late Prof Elaigwu, the committee is made up of about four other professors, four retired ambassadors, labour leaders, businessmen, journalists and gender activists.
The committee and its sub-committees which have already got cracking is particularly stepping up contacts and raising resources towards achieving, in particular a ‘Night of Tributes’ corresponding to Prof Elaigwu’s towering gaze as a postcolonial voice, an intellectual of statecraft, a cultural activist and a critic.
The burial programme starts with the ‘Night of Tributes’ in Abuja on October 10th, 2025; goes over to Jos in Plateau State where the late academic was based. That will be on October 14th for the ‘Service of Songs’ before the Wake Keep at Otukpo on the 16th and the funeral service on Oct 17th, 2025.
The late Chief Audu Ogbeh
Prof Isawa Elaigwu’s burial will be preceded by that of Chief Audu Ogbeh on September 25th and 26th, 2025 across Abuja, Makurdi and Otukpa, his hometown. Both share the Idoma identity and died within weeks of each other. While Chief Ogbeh died August 9th, 2025 in Abuja, Prof Elaigwu died July 22nd, 2025 in Jos.
It could be said that their death closes an era in Idomaland, the era of the successor generation of the first set of elite from the minority cultural group known as Idoma but who raised the gaze so high: Elaigwu and Ogbeh were not just well educated, they went to the very best schools within and outside Nigeria. While Elaigwu went to Stanford, one of the best global 5 today to pick a PhD in Political Science, Ogbeh went to the University of Toulouse in France and spoke French, the language of culture and culinary sophistication and civility in the world made and ruled by the West. Both started as academics but broke barriers into statecraft and think tanking in the case of Elaigwu and agriculture and politics in the case of Ogbeh.
While Prof Elaigwu was the strict Philosopher-king impatient with sloppiness and any tendency towards cutting corners but magnanimous and accessible, Chief Ogbeh was the big minded, public spirited orator’s orator. It is expected that each of them will be escorted back home with Joe Akatu’s music blaring in front of the convoy. Only Akatu who is also late can capture the complex Idoma-mind in both men with his ontologically dense idioms.
