People · 1915 to 1990
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Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe met Eleanor Roosevelt, served as a minister, tried to topple Zik and became Biafra's roving ambassador. Nigerians remember him best for sentences nobody else could have said.
Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe was born in 1915 into the family of Mbadiwe Odum, in Arondizuogu. Back then the town sat in Orlu Division. Today it's in Imo State. Power wasn't new to the family. His uncle, Igwegbe Odum, was a warrant chief under the British, one of the local men the colonial government used to run things.
His schooling moved him all over the south. He started primary school at St Mary's Catholic School in Port Harcourt and finished at a government school in Aba. After that came Hope Waddell Training Institute in Calabar, Aggrey Memorial College in Arochukwu, Igbobi College in Lagos and the Baptist Academy in Lagos. Some of the names around him were people Nigeria would hear a lot more about. At Baptist Academy, Samuel Akintola was on the staff. At Igbobi, his schoolmates included Taslim Elias.
When he finished school he tried trade first, and in 1937 he set up the Mbadiwe Produce Association. Then he left for America, where he studied for some years at Columbia University and New York University. While he was there he helped set up an association of African students. It did well enough to catch the eye of Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, and she received him and his group at the White House. That's a long way for a young man from Arondizuogu to have come.
He came home and started another business, plus a research institute on African arts. But politics was where he was headed.
Mbadiwe joined the NCNC, the party led by Nnamdi Azikiwe. In 1951 he was elected to the Eastern Region House of Assembly. He won again in 1954, and soon after he became Minister for Lands and Natural Resources. In 1957 he was made Minister for Commerce. He was rising fast.
Then, in the middle of 1958, he took a huge gamble. He and Kola Balogun tried to remove Azikiwe as leader of the NCNC. In Eastern politics at that time, going against Zik was about as bold as it got, and it didn't work. Mbadiwe didn't go quietly, though. He set up his own paper, The Daily Telegraph, as a voice for his protest.
What's striking is that the quarrel didn't finish him. He later came back to the party and was made Minister for Trade and Communications. He also worked as a special adviser to the Prime Minister on African affairs. In 1965 the Prime Minister himself, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, came to commission Mbadiwe's landmark house at Ndianiche Uno, which he named The Palace of the People. Even the name of his house had a flourish to it.
When the Eastern Region broke away and became Biafra, its leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, made Mbadiwe a roving ambassador, travelling to make Biafra's case. He held the job until the war ended. Years later, in President Shehu Shagari's second term, he got another grand title: "Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary". The columnist Jide Omotinugbon notes he was "the only one who did not have a before or after", meaning nobody held that title before him or after him.
He married three wives, and he had six children: Betty, Greg, Paul, Chris, George and Francis. He died in 1990.
For all those offices, what most Nigerians remember about K.O. is the way he talked. He loved big, rolling English, and he used it like a performer. He called himself a man of "timber and caliber". He called himself a political "juggernaut". People still quote his lines, decades on.
The most famous one goes: "When the come, comes to become, the unbecome must become." Another, quoted by Omotinugbon: "illogicality and logicality would produce tautology." Try to work out exactly what they mean and you'll go round in circles. That was half the fun. The words sounded important, they had rhythm, and they were his.
It wasn't only a joke, either. One columnist wrote that Mbadiwe "kept professors and students scrambling for imitation". In those days, the stories go, traders in Onitsha who hadn't had much schooling would repeat aloud what Zik and K.O. had said, enjoying the sound of the words in their mouths. Political speech was a kind of entertainment, and the people who could do it well became stars.
There's something very Nigerian about how he's remembered. The country tends to forget its ministers, and plenty of men who held real power in the 1950s are names nobody knows now. Mbadiwe held office, fought the most powerful man in his party, came back, and served a breakaway republic in a war. But the reason he hasn't been forgotten is a handful of sentences that make people laugh and shake their heads at the same time.
So next time someone at a party stands up and gives a speech full of long, impressive words that don't quite add up, you might hear someone at the back mutter his name. A boy from Arondizuogu who went from the White House to the Palace of the People left behind a style of talking that still has a name.
