A few months before Professor Dora Akunyili was appointed National Conference member, she sent me a text message with a United States number to say she had just been through a major health challenge but was improving. I eventually met her in Nigeria some weeks later.
For someone who had been through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked remarkably strong, and was clearly vibrant. She definitely was not the same Dora that was shown on the internet when she took her place at the National Conference shortly after I visited her. It was subsequently argued on the social media, partly out of genuine concern by some, and partly out of other considerations by others, as to whether it would have been better for her to excuse herself from the rigors of the conference and proceed wherever, to take care of herself.
I read some of her responses to those suggestions at the time, and I said that was vintage Dora. Dora was too full of life to live it incrementally. Her passing away in the manner, time and context in which she took her final bow, brought to mind Dylan Thomas’ plea to a dying relative:
“Do not go gentle into that good night...
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”
I knew her from a distance as Transport Minister in 2000. The then Director General of Nigeria Maritime Authority (now, NIMASA) came to argue that the Ministry should offer a helping hand to Dora in beefing up her personal security. I agreed.
We were honoured to lend our modest support to a public officer of unusual courage. Our paths crossed a few more times subsequently, first, when she served as a Director for Mobilization in the Yar’Adua/Jonathan Presidential Campaign and I was the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Secretary; and later, in a mid-term Cabinet reshuffle by the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua when I was Foreign Minister and she subsequently was announced as the new Information Minister.
After her oath of office and assignment to the Information portfolio, Dora Akinyuli came over to me and said, “Brother, I didn’t expect to be Information Minister. I know nothing about that place. I thought with my background I would go to Health Ministry and make a difference. What do you think?”
I advised her to take it. As Minister she had moved on from simply being a technocrat comfortable in her area of specialty, to becoming a leader who was a game changer with any challenge coming her way. I told her that the same Dora that transformed NAFDAC and made it a household name would do similar things with the Information Ministry.
It is fair to say she brought verve and vision to an obviously challenging cabinet position. Her self-confidence was contagious. And she took no prisoners! Dora was a rare spirit in the often prosaic world of politics where unprincipled compromise often trumped up naïve idealism. She represented a prospect of reconciliation of these two extremes. No one in the Cabinet really disliked Dora. She did not allow you get away with that option. She was too full of life for that. And she extended that sense of unlimited optimism and the inherent beauty and dynamism of the Nigerian hope into everything she did.
She embodied a new voice and a new swagger in our polity- a voice that addressed our better nature; and a swagger that affirmed we could be going places. Nations and societies that do not have a Dora Akunyili attempt to birth them through some myth.
We are privileged in Nigeria that we did not wait for a myth to produce her: Dora was the event herself. As we mourn and celebrate her, we hear echoes of Christopher Okigbo that she “leaves us here on the shore, gazing heavenward for a new star approaching. The new star appears, foreshadows its going, before a going and coming that goes on forever.”
Dora, - your star continues to report!
SOURCE: www.thisdaylive.com
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