The late newspaper publisher, politician, sports enthusiast, business mogul and family man, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, was as financially bulky as was his physical size. A commentator once described him as ‘’this hugest man’’. He was the type of man we playful children of the 60s would describe as one men because he had the size of many men put together. The saucy and mischievous among us that set of boys of my generation would describe such a man as a man mountain. That, to us, the more even tempered ones, was an abuse; it was not polite.
Apart from being all I had described of him in the first paragraph, Iwuanyanwu was also a billionaire who carefully superintended over his vast billions, preserved his vast wealth and did not die a poor man as is sometimes the story of some great men and women of means who at a certain point in their lives become careless and at the end of their lives on earth, leave little or nothing for their family members and other members of the human family. Iwuanyanwu was not like that. These and his many sidedness are what cause every of his thing to command the attention of men and women who are amazed by why he was so successful in many things that he did while he lived with us on this earth.
I can recollect that as a young newspaper reporter in the stable of the great Daily Times in the early 80s in Lagos, I was a member of the journalism clan that became compellingly aware of the Iwuanyanwu personality on the national scene. I remember with some faint amusement how Iwuanyanwu burst on the national scene. It was sometime in the late 1980s; 1987 to be precise. He came into national fame with a football club called Iwuanyanwu Nationale, a football club with a quaint Nigerianised French combination of names!
The sports journalists were having problems pronouncing his name which had not then become the household name that it later became later on in our sports and national history. He used to come on TV and in newspaper interviews lamenting how even Nigerian journalists, not to talk of their foreign counterparts, were complaining about how difficult it was to pronounce the rather long name of Iwuanyanwu.
As time went on, Iwuanyanwu became an established figure in many areas of our national life and no one, whether in sports, politics or social life had any more difficulty in pronouncing his name. Iwuanyanwu had won, had he not? In the course of his frustration with the sports journalists and the TV broadcasters, he had prophetically declared that those ones and all Nigerians should continue calling his name irreverently wrong as they were doing until they will come a time that they will be pronouncing it well and with great ease. And I think this was what eventually happened. They kept practicing and calling it until they knew how to call it with ease and without any prompting!
With this brief history of Iwuanyanwu, let us skip that segment of his life when he came to full bloom in every department of his life and left those huge footprints of steps on the Nigerian and world soil and come to his death which provides a trigger for this piece.
As is well known, Iwuanyanwu died two years ago. He did not die intestate. He left a will which was released the week before last by his lawyers. And as to be expected, that week it attracted and will continue to attract not a little attention. It bears repeating that the will of this huge man attracted the hugest attention from citizens and netizens, as citizens of the Internet are now known by the highly inventive members of the very active generation called Gen Z.
The will was released on the Wednesday of that week. I waited to see what outcomes it would generate from the aforementioned segment of our population. The following day I went to my facebook page for reactions. I was not disappointed at all. On my page, I saw over a thousand comments from citizens of the net. This is what in the language of the internet they say an issue has gone viral. To me, this was amazing. In life, Iwuanyanwu did not live a complicated or controversial life. His politics was gentlemanly; his business life was marked by integrity and ethical considerations and his social, especially his sexual, life was not scandalous. Therefore, for his will to go viral means there is something in it that makes netizens to be so passionate about the issues raised.
And what were some of the issues canvassed and what do they show about the character or philosophy of the man Iwuanyanwu?
Highlight of that will is that his possessions were fairly and justly distributed in the opinion of all his relatives and beneficiaries. There was no whimper of protest from any quarters showing that he was not a massive man with an empty head and a bad heart. Rather, it showed he was a massive man with a brilliant head and a generous heart full of wisdom, justice, fairness, equity and good conscience. The only area where Iwuanyanwu failed, well, you guess it… it was with feminists who the world over, now believe that men should sacrifice their lives and destinies completely for the comfort of women before they can be held as good men. If you fail in that regard, you are a toxic man.
And it is in the area of family life, specifically in his biased emphasis on perpetuating the Iwuanyanya generation that the late elderstatesman offended the feminists. And what did he do? The man said, not is so many words, that he is not a stary-eyed lover boy but a family builder who wants to build a generation called Iwuanyanwu and that he wants it to endure forever and ever. He conveyed this through a small condition he gave with particular reference to his wife, a second one after his first died, Lolo Frances, now 23, whom he married when she was 22.
A realist, Iwuanyanwu reasoned that given the ways of women, Lolo Frances may have a mind to want to marry one day. Should she do, he must have said to himself, he will not be opposed to it. This is fair enough. But there is one small condition. And that condition is that she will have to choose between her heartstring for marriage to another man and taking his possession along with her into that marriage. What she do, he said, is to forfeit his property. This, to my ancient mind, is a fair enough deal. But the feminist netisms will have none of this. They call the elderstatesman a churlish man. In their jaundiced opinion, he should allow another man to inherit his wife and his name and his property and if he has a mind to doing so, could reduce all of them to rubble. Not so, said Iwuanyanwu before he slept.
It is from Iwuanyanwu that I learnt that those who want to build generations often deliberately go out for it. They do not merely wish a big family name; they go all out to plan and lay a solid foundation for a respectable family. They do not allow others to come and cheaply inherit what they had laboured hard for. It is from a reading on the comments on Iwuanyanwu will that I learnt that the late Ojukwu also left such a will for his delectable wife Bianca. When you look at the lives of some great men who are dead it will help you to understand how they were able to build such a great war chest of financial assets. They are unsentimental but fair, generous and just.
