“With profound shock & sadness, 8I regret to inform you that Innocent Chukwuma passed away a few hours ago, in the evening of April 3. May his soul rest in peace,” announced Edetaen Ojo, a frontline freedom of expression advocate and executive director of the Media Rights Agenda, who was a friend of Mr Chukwuma.
Mr Chukwuma came to public attention first as a student union activist at the University of Nigeria, where he read religious studies in the early eighties when Nigerian students led relentless campaigns against military autocracy.
Upon graduation, he joined a cluster of young activists who came to bloom at the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), Nigeria’s first human rights organisation led for most of the nineties by Olisa Agbakoba, now a member of the velvet rank of the legal profession called Senior Advocates of Nigeria.
At CLO, Mr Chukwuma, a father of three daughters, one who graduated in law and was called to the bar last year, met people like Chidi Odinkalu, a lawyer, academic and former chairman of the Nigeria Human Rights Commission.
Mr Odinkalu remembered the departed civil society leader, Sunday morning, in an interview with PREMIUM TIMES, as a treasured companion and faithful friend. “I knew him for nearly 35 [and] I am grateful for the privilege,” Mr Odinkalu said, recalling that “In all things, as my late mum always said, we must learn to give thanks … he was a man of decency.”
