Chidume’s highest academic award thrills Anambra govt; to honour outstanding academics at 30th anniversary

 

The Anambra State government has expressed delight at the award of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), the country’s highest honour for intellectual and artistic achievement, on Professor Charles Ejike Chidume.

Prof. Chidume was conferred with the award last Tuesday at State House, Abuja.

Chidume, an internationally recognized mathematics professor, beat over 1,200 contestants and received the honour last week, alongside Prof. Oluyinka Olutoye, a medical scientist, who was also announced a winner the same year, as well as Prof. Godwin O. Ekhaguere, a scientist, who got the 2021 award.

An indigene of Nimo in Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State, Prof. Chidume trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Queen’s University in Canada as well as the Ohio State University in the United States.

He died at the age of 74 last October, while serving as the acting President of the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja, which came after a successful long period at the UNN as an outstanding scholar.

Like the Nobel Prize, the NNOM honour is awarded annually only to living individuals and organisations, Chidume received it from President Muhammadu Buhari last week because, when he was selected as a laureate in 2020, he was alive.

The awards could not hold last year on account of the lockdown arising from the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

'By being among the three most recent NNOM laureates, Prof. Chidume has helped to elongate the list of winners of Nigeria’s most prestigious award for academic excellence from Anambra State', said Governor Willie Obiano in a letter to President Buhari yesterday, according to the state Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, C. Don Adinuba.

Prof. Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, and Africa’s most successful novelist, raconteur, essayist and social critic, was the first recipient of the honour when it was established in the late 1970s by the departing military regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo, explained Adinuba.

Apart from Achebe, winners from Anambra State include Dr Pius Okigbo in economics, Prof. Chukwuedo Nwokolo in medicine, Prof. Laz Ekwueme in music, Prof. Alex Animalu in physics, Prof. Chukwuemeka Ike in literature and Prof. Ben Nwabueze in law.

'It is regrettable', bemoaned Governor Obiano, ' that this award was not conferred on such world-class scholars from Anambra State as Prof. Kenneth Onwuka Dike, the first vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan who went on to Harvard as a distinguished history professor; Prof. Chike Obi, the preeminent mathematician; Prof. Ben Obumselu, the most scintillating literary scholar in Africa, before their deaths'.

Anambra and Ekiti States are the states with the largest numbers of the 79 persons who have received the NNOM since inauguration 43 years ago.

According to Adinuba, all the NNOM recipients from Anambra State will be among indigenes of the state to be honoured at the ceremony marking the state’s 30th anniversary which would have held last 27th August but for the 6th November gubernatorial election in the state.

'We will continue to honour men and women of outstanding learning', declared the commissioner, 'because education explains the difference between a developed society and an undeveloped one'.

He noted that 'it is as a result of the premium paid to education by the Governor Obiano administration that Anambra has posted far better results than any state in Nigeria in the last seven years, almost habitually winning the first position in every external examination involving schoolchildren'.

Adinuba expressed optimism that with Chukwuma Charles Soludo, a globally respected economics professor, assuming office as Governor on 17th March, Anambra State would become far more competitive in education and other sectors.