Other material components of the philanthropic push
Notwithstanding the relative locational disadvantage of the lower part of Edemoga District in Okpokwu LGA of Benue State in Nigeria, it still emerged into Nigeria’s independence in 1960 with primary schools that were comparable to its others across the country. Although many of the elite from the area who made it subsequently to Ahmadu Bello University did so to a great extent due to proximity to Utonkon which is (was) a railway town, the claim about the status of the primary schools in the area stands. Certainly, the primary schools at Akpoga, Opialu, Okpale, Ogege in lower part of the district and those at Ajide, Olanyega and Ugbokolo in upper Edemoga were standard ones.
Contextually classy classroom at St Joseph’s LGEA Primary School, Agbangwe
Most of the teachers were not only Igbos, the leading indigenous ones were in these schools were the most popular names in the area. In those days, no pupils and parents could be ignorant of Emmanuel Ogwuche, L. D Agbo, Alexander Onah, Abakpa G. Okoh, James Adoli, Ben Odeh, Dominic Ebele, Raphael Ogaje, Alexander Onah, Michael Oyiowo, Mr. Ogah, Mr. Pius Okpeh, Mr. Michael (aka M-Jolly) amongst many others.
Then the schools started going down as the Federal Military Government experimented with one policy or the other. According to information available to Intervention, primary school teachers in Benue State are now being paid their monthly salary as and when due under the Fr Hyacinth Alia administration. But decades before then, salaries were not paid, sometimes for up to an entire year. The school buildings had become shadows of what they were, many of them built by the colonial administration as in St Theresa Primary School, Opialu in 1948, Akpoga in the early 1950s and same or about that with Ajide or Okpale. Pupils sitting on the floor became a normal sight because the repairs that ever got carried out were too half hearted to mitigate the collapse.
Engr Unaji flanked by the two women commissioners, with the project manager (first from the right)
This is the background that makes it a big and important event when Engineer Innocent Unaji, an Abuja based philanthropist, led commissioners, school administrators, academics, community leaders, politicians, activists and other stakeholders to unveil and handover a comprehensively reconstructed LGEA Primary School, Agbangwe. He didn’t do that because he has so much money. By his own admission, he did it because he couldn’t believe that the LGEA Primary School, Agbangwe where he had his first taste of education could degenerate to what he saw.
The story, according to Unaji, started with a letter to the Benue State Government in September 2024 seeking permission to clear what existed at St Joseph Primary School, Agbangwe. Granted the permission by the Education Ministry, his foundation – McRay Victus Foundation – got to work promptly. The October 2nd, 2026 unveiling and handing over was the outcome. It could be called the educational renaissance of not just lower Edemoga but the entire district, still the largest and unbroken of the 22 of them in the old Idomaland.
Project manager briefs the two women commissioners in a line up of stakeholders at Agbangwe, deep into lower Edemogaland
At Agbangwe to bear witness to the moment were the Benue State Commissioner for Education, Margaret Adamu; her Information counterpart, Hon Solomon Iorpev and the Commissioner for Women Affairs, Theresa Odachi Ikwue. Others were Dr. Henry Ojobo, the Rector of Benue Polytechnic, the chairperson of Okpokwu Local Government Council, Hon Inalegwu Adah and, of course, shon of the soil, Comrade John Odah, the Executive Secretary of the Organisation of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA).
Close watchers of the event are keenly watching out for the possible contagion effect in two dimensions. The first plausible dimension is other members of the elite from the area who might be inclined to borrow a leaf from Unaji’s move and replicate his philanthropic gesture to his community. The second is the ripple effect in intertextual terms; that is one thing adding up to another as to produce a radical mitigating effect on the drawbacks associated with the location of lower Edemoga out of the radius of modernity: no roads, no established secondary school, no hospital or even functional health centers and no security as the people are basically on their own in these realms. More painfully, they are completely vulnerable to market dynamics dictated by buyers rather than sellers. So, most market days are actually days of sadness as the buyers of garri which is defining of the economy of the area could, based on profit calculus, play games to the detriment of the peasant women.
Perhaps, the lower Edemoga moment is here at last, with Unaji’s push acting as the trigger!
