By Adagbo Onoja
IT WAS to be expected that each stage of Prof Peter Obekpa’s rites of passage was bound to be emotionally involving. He has bonded across too many frontiers, from the inter-personal to the familial, the communal, the medical, the religious down to the political.
Sure, he wasn’t a professional politician but he held political appointments as a one-time Commissioner for Health in Benue State as well as Chairman of the Benue State University Teaching Hospital.
Many members of the circle of leading lights from Idomaland were his friends or relations who were politicians. In fact, his relation, Abutu Obekpa, one of the two ministers from Idoma land in the regional government in the First Republic, decided for him the option of the medical profession.
His night of tributes was thus bound to be a mixed grill in terms of ethnic, religious, cultural, professional, gender and generational diversity. There was no surprise therefore in the overflow of qualifiers: astute trainer, brave surgeon, workaholic, highly disciplined, very liberal and the leader whose power did not lie in authority but in in his liberalism, and so on and so forth, although the point was well made or implied too that he was a man distinguished by ability to operate in extreme spectrum of being a soft but also a hard person.
Dr. Charles Ugwuani (hopes the spelling is correct), the representative of the National Hospital, Abuja and a student of Prof Obekpa, said at the tributes session that the late boss was someone who would not take anything sub-standard. For Obekpa, “There’s a correct way of doing everything,” he said. The second of such sayings is: “why wait till tomorrow what you can do today?”
Throughout his life, these remained articles of faith. It was not dogmatism. It was the outcome of the quality of professional grooming the Obekpa generation received during their own time. That came out in three essential quantities Ugwuani also mentioned that Obekpa never compromised on. These were surgical intelligence, surgical ethics and his practice of the principle ‘informed consent’. For Obekpa, it is not just asking the patient to sign to be operated upon but for the patient to understand the implications of what signing meant and why the next step is the only available option.
But farther and perhaps as equally important as the principles of practice were his communitarian orientation, always telling doctors migrating in search of greener pastures to come back as soon as possible because “Nigeria has a growing population in need of medical attention”. He himself who had opportunity to remain in the United States returned to Nigeria for the rather communitarian paradigm that at death, she wanted genuine folk mourners around his remains.
There was the most sensational testimony/tribute by Lady Hanka Okpeh. She had been in the Morgue for three days, taken there for dead before it was discovered by the Morgue Attendant that there was a corpse moving her body parts.
When she was fished out, an expert opinion insisted her only saving grace was in being taken to Prof Obekpa at the Jos University Teaching Hospital. That was how she came back to life.
If Prof Obekpa were a frivolous medical operative or one of those claiming healing powers, he could have been going about claiming to have the capacity to bring people back to life, using the lady, Mrs Hankah, whose picture appears below, as her irrefutable evidence.
Whether it was Prof Ramil, Nkechi Nwacha, Owoicho Oche, Regina Morgan, Charles Ugwuani, Augustine Sule or Hanka Okpe, the verdict never changed about Prof Obekpa.
Besides the tributes, the presences at the January 8th, 2025 event at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Abuja spoke to the Obekpa symbolism: Chief Audu Ogbeh, General Chris Garba, Mr. and Mrs Paul Amodu, Prof Ode Ojowu, Dr. Luke Odeh, Chief Noah McDickson, Comrade John Odah, Barrister Otanwa and so many faces lost in the crowd.
Prof Obekpa, who died on December 1st, 2024 straddles the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the University of Jos, Benue State Government, the National Hospital Abuja and his own two health facilities. While one is in Abuja, the other one is in his community back home in Ogbadibo LGA of Benue State.
He will be most missed by sick folks who sought his attention. Most of them brought with a feeling that they cannot survive. When they arrive, Prof Obekpa will make a casual remark, using an Idoma proverb or wise saying that lightens their spirit because of the deeper meaning of what he says but which could not have been that deeply understood in English. Even by that alone, he had an approach the folks will hardly and cheaply find after him.
The tributes on January 8th, 2025 in Abuja is the Abuja version. In Otukpa, his hometown in Benue State, attendance and activities will be thicker, what with the concentration of Prof Obekpa’s students across the medical establishments across the state and political big wigs.
May he travel well to the land of the ancestors.
Culled from Intervention with slight adjustments to the original headline and paragraphing.
