Leadership (Abuja)
Emmanuel Onwubiko
10 November 2008
opinion
Chapter three particularly is a story of how the little Alex successfully passed his first school leaving examinations and the common entrance examination to enter the prestigious Annunciation Catholic School, Irua, but because his parents could not raise the required thirty seven pounds, he could not enroll into the school of his choice.
He fought his way by dint of brave intellectual work to gain admission at the Pilgrims Baptist Grammar School which charged seventeen pounds school fees for day students. Alex was drenched on the bicycle he rode to write the entrance examination to the Baptist secondary school and help came his way through a mutual friend of his by name Mr. Eri Osazuwa[ now a Professor] who resided then in a two-room apartment in the junior staff quarters of the school. Osazuwa welcomed him, helped him dry up himself and gave him a delicacy of cooked beans with pap for breakfast. Alex sat for the written aptitude test as well as the interview and passed. Because his Parents could not afford to pay for him to become a boarding student, he chose the option of coming to school for the first three years as a day student and the remaining two as a boarding student in compliance with the tradition and rules guiding the school. Chapter three of this book showed that the little Alex literarily learnt the ropes of how to become a man at an early stage in life.
These experiences gave him the inspiration to look inwards and to decide to use his talents as a consummate and hardworking boy farmer, good hunter and his adventurous skills to read his books because as he told the author during the interview sessions that led to the documentation of this book, "you need no one to advise you to read. You have to help yourself". But above all else, I think Alex's inspiration to read seriously and become somebody in later life is a blessing from God because the easiest route taken by most pupils in similar situations is to while away time doing nothing about his academic pursuit but to indulge in some criminal tendencies in order to find a short cut to wealth and opulence.
Most children of the poor who are not seriously disciplined as kids will not have the inspiration to work twice as hard as their contemporaries especially those from above average homes.
The Central Bank of Nigeria's Governor Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo recently gave a lecture where he presented a scientific discovery he made that virtually ninety percent of kids from very poor homes end up being poor and the dynasty of poverty keeps expanding. Chapters one to three of the TRANSMUTATION OF A LEGAL GENIUS is a lesson in resilience and courage of a boy Alex who literarily challenged his 'CHI' (God) for creating him in an environment where poverty is written in bold capital letters and he worked so hard in order to attain the long term position of a successful Nigerian. Alex's father and mother were denied western education by the special circumstances of their births and they decided to ensure that their children would get good education, no matter what it took.
In the case of Alex's paternal grandfather, Pa. Izinyon Abu, who was one of the few, in fact, the first man from his rural community to roof his house with corrugated roofing sheets, a feat that was a high rarity in his days, he did not want his son Stephen to depart from him and go to pursue western education because he actually wanted to pass on his great farming skills onto him so that he (Stephen) can carry on from where he stopped. At one of the few times when Stephen wanted to run away from home in order to enroll himself to school through the help of some colonial officials, his father threatened to divorce his mother Madam Aiwanlehi, the first of the four wives to Pa. Izinyon Abu who died before Alex was born. Because Alex's father did not want to hurt his lovely mother, he stayed back with his father to the last minutes when he, Pa. Izinyon Abu, died but not before pouring blessings on Stephen, the father of Alex Izinyon.
The book is, indeed, a documentation of the everyday experiences of a lot of Nigerian kids. Interestingly, each page of the book is loaded and pregnant with meanings. Page 44 showed when the young Alex wanted to read law and sought help from some rich people in Benin City in the early eighties but who turned his request down with looks in their faces which literarily said HOW CAN A SON OF NOBODY READ LAW?. But this experience has increased in our contemporary times when the Law Schools are strictly meant for the children of the rich and affluent because of deliberate hiking of school and admission fees charged to students who troop out in their thousands from the faculties of law across the nation's higher institutions. From page 41, the author articulately wrote down how Alex embraced entrepreneurial skills as a writer and sole marketer of his book on secondary school literature.
Earlier on page 31, we saw how Alex distinguished himself in his Secondary School examinations and became a teacher in the junior secondary school. During the Senior Secondary School final examinations, Alex noticed some students who feigned injuries from car accidents with heavily bandaged hands but used those bandages to conceal their text books from where they dubbed the answers to the questions asked. When he protested to their supervisors, they (supervisors) threatened to expel him (Alex) from the examination hall if he wants to become the whistle blower.
This scenario showed the longstanding history of examination malpractices in our climes. In chapter five, the author told her readers how Alex won her heart when he came to Ewatto Grammar school in Edo State, where she was teaching, to do attachment in order to raise some funds to fund his university education alongside the generous support that he received from his parents who never stopped working hard at their farms and stalls to raise money to train the young Alex and his siblings. The meeting of the two lovers happened in 1983 when the University of Ibadan vacated as a result of student riots.
Chapter six tells the story of A DREAM COME TRUE when in 1985 Alex started his legal training at the Nigerian Law School in Victoria Island Lagos State. Alex had two white shirts which he ensured were properly washed and ironed, two black suits, few pairs of black shoes and some ties. To save cost, we were told in the book that he had to trek from Igbosere to Race Course, Tafawa Balewa where he took a straight bus to Victoria Island.
The support he got from his wife whom he married at a low key wedding on August 3rd 1985 using borrowed brown Volkswagen [incidentally, this book under review is brown in color], minimized Alex's dependence on the sales he made from his book which he wrote while in the University. Alex was called to the bar on October 1986. Alex served in Benue State in the 1986/1987 batch where he was posted to teach at the Federal Polytechnic Idah, but because there was no law faculty in that school and he desired to practice law, he requested redeployment to a private law firm of Igonoh and Co. The author said the owner of that law firm was a good man who was then four year old at the bar. After tutelage Alex settled down in Kaaba, in the present day Kogi State and he was the first resident lawyer in that town that only had a magistrate court and later a High court. Ironically in the book we were told in chapter nine how Alex became the first resident litigation lawyer in Abuja to be raised to the prestigious position of a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1999. Abuja was then not taken serious by a lot of lawyers who viewed Abuja based lawyers as lazy and only engaged in property businesses and not hard core litigation. Alex Izinyon substantially proved these critics wrong when he combined his academic work as a law teacher at the University of Abuja and his private practice allowed by the University rules, to become a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, a highly coveted and competitive professional award. Majority of the lawyers who attained this position then were either based in Lagos State or atleast in Southern part of Nigeria where virtually sixty percent of serious litigation cases took place. In chapter seven, the author succinctly recorded instances of how Alex brilliantly defended some of his clients. One of the celebrated cases was a criminal appeal conducted before Justice Timothy Oyeyipo, the then Chief Judge of Kwara State, supported by Justice J.A. Fabiyi, now of the Appeal Court and late Justice Leslie. It was a criminal appeal from the upper Area court where the appellant was convicted and sentenced to some years of imprisonment without any option of fine. He had been represented at the trial court by a lawyer who was Alex's senior by over five years. The first thing that struck Alex, according to the author of this book, was that it was shown on record that the accused was brought before the court and his plea was taken, his lawyer stood up and entered a plea of not guilty. That was sufficient for him to initiate an appeal. This knowledge he garnered based on the research he did in West Africa Court of Appeal Reports WACA in the law library of the High Court in Lokoja. On the day of the appeal, the panel was so fascinated by his presentation that the presiding judge could not help but demanded to know where he was then practicing. He put Alex to task to satisfy him with legal authority to his preposition which was handy to him. The appeal was allowed and judgment set aside. Because of his numerous successful litigations in that sleepy town of Kaaba, he was nick named by a then presiding judge Justice Ogbole as the 'YOUNG GANI FAWEHINMI'. GANI FAWEHINMI is the great Human Rights lawyer who has made good name for himself. Incidentally, in the later segment of the book the author forgot to tell us of the remarkable encounter Alex had with this legal luminary Gani Fawehinmi when Alex represented the then Delta State Governor James Onanefe Ibori while Gani represented Goodnews Agbi and another plaintiff that went to court to seek the disqualification of Ibori from recontesting the Governorship for the second tenure in 2003 because of their allegation that a certain James Onanefe Ibori who was convicted in 1995 of theft charges at an upper area court in Bwari Abuja was the same James Onanefe Ibori who was then the Governor and who also wanted to seek another term. Originally, the plaintiffs did not name Ibori as a party in the matter but when the then Governor briefed Alex he successfully got the Abuja High Court's order for the joinder of his client as a necessary party in that matter that lasted three years and went to the Supreme Court twice because in the first instance that the appeal got to the Supreme Court, the nation's apex court ordered de novo [fresh] trial and the outcome of that de novo trial proceeded to the supreme court where Alex's client won resoundingly. This is one of the greatest lacunae in this book. Another is the failure of the author to also document the media perspective of ALEX IZINYON because he was not just a lawyer of note who fell from the moon; he was largely created by the media. That he was a creation of the Nigerian media is not to say that he attained unmerited greatness as a lawyer. He is a good lawyer. There are several good lawyers in Nigeria but only very few get the media spotlight. Alex is a great beneficiary of the Nigerian media who noticed his brilliant presentations in courts in the nation's seat of power and followed every step that he took in the various courts.
These generous and sometime critical media coverage that Alex received and still receives from the Nigerian media was not mentioned and worse still the rich resource materials from media interactions and the coverage of the style of Alex's court presentations were conspicuously missing in the book TRANSMUTATION OF A LEGAL GENIUS. Another edition of this book ought to be written which will include all the missing links especially the Nigerian media dimension. Costs must not be spared to do thorough research to include the basic media interventions in the professional life of Alex Izinyon because it is illogical to leave out this strategic aspect if we truly want to tell the story of how Alex navigated through the valley and shadows of poverty and lack to be where he is now. Most rich clients read the media reports of cases before deciding on who to choose as their lawyer. This fact is indisputable. But the style of presentation adopted by the author makes the author's work a master piece which should possibly be adopted into a film by the Nollywood movie producers and showed across the World for lessons of resilience to be disseminated to humanity to show that Africans are also hard working people. The book was richly printed with good historic pictures of the person of Alex Izinyon from his early childhood up until he became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria. Of course, the book is also a testimony from a wife who sincerely believes that her husband is a study in a good family lifestyle and ought to be emulated for all the right reasons.
In the next edition of this book, a team of researchers including Journalists like some of us who covered Alex in Courts should be commissioned to do thorough and deeper work because Alex Izinyon should not just be seen from the eye of his spouse since he is not just a family and private man but a great and distinguished career litigation lawyer who is constantly in public eyes.
The book has just two typographical errors which may largely not be the fault of the author but rather the 'printer's devil'. This is indeed a remarkable feat to find a book of 131 pages with just two typographical errors. One of such errors was on page 123 where the first paragraph did not end with a full stop punctuation mark. These errors did not take the beauty away from this work.
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