The Exit of a Titan E-Book

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 125

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Testimonies from family, friends and colleagues of Ambassador Ositadinma Anaedu at his untimely death.

Das E-Book The Exit of a Titan wird angeboten von Books on Demand und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Bigraphy, Tributes, Ambassador, Ositadinma, Anaedu

Leseprobe

Dedicated to Amaka, Kamtoo and Kosi

Contents

Prologue

Ambassador Ositadinma Bartholomew Anaedu A Short Biographical Ode by Fada Onyii

Ambassador Ositadinma Anaedu at the United Nations

Positions held by Ambassador Ositadinma Anaedu at the UN

Testimonies of Colleagues from the Nigerian Diplomatic Community

My Eulogy Ambassador John Chika Ejinaka

Osita, How I wished I had Supernatural Powers! Dr. Shafiu Adamu Yauri

Goodbye to a Titan Ambassador Lilian Onoh

Goodness is Good Ambassador Abdulwahab, MNI

Nigerian Foreign Service Hall of ‘Fame Ambassador Ayo Olukanni

“World Osy” – A Heartfelt Tribute Ambassador Kayode Laro Nigerian Ambassador to France and Monaco

Utu Long, Mr Abrasive! Ambassador Ndubuisi Amaku

Firm handshakes that radiated love and warmth Ambassador Onijala

A rebel against the word “impossible”! Ambassador Umunna Orjiakor

Wondering what has become of Osy Ambassador Ayalogu

But what is Happening? Ambassador Bassey Archibong

A peaceful, social and jovial gentleman Ambassador Hassan. Mohammed

Mr Anaedu I knew Ambassador Taju Adeniyi

A Mann of God, A Man of Good, A Man of Supreme Kindness Melchiade Bukuru

Praying for more of Osy Ambassador C. N. Umelo

Praying for more of Osy Ambassador C. N. Umelo

To be appreciated while still alive! Anonymous

Ebubedike! Ebubedike!! Ebubedike!!! Ambassador Segun Apata

Ambassador Ositadinama Anaedu: A Friend, Colleague and Brother Ambassador Charles N. Onianwa (Ikukuoma Asaba) and Enyi. Mrs. Patricia N. Onianwa (Odoziaku Asaba)

Remembering Ambassador Ositadinma Anaedu. Prof. Joy Ogwu

Picture Gallery

Testimonies from Family and Friends

Where Pain and Beauty Mingle – To my wonderful Babe and Daddy to my Children Amaka Anaedu

My loving Dad Kamtochukwu Anaedu

To Daddy in Heaven Kosisọchukwu Anaedu

Our Hero is gone! Rose Ufo, the big sister

The Iroko tree has fallen!! Queen Ann

My Brother, Osita, Man of of Character! Jude Anaedu

My Gracious Brother is Gone!!! Lady Eucharia Udeh, LSM

He called me “ACHIDINMA” Chidinma Oduchukwu

He used to call me Ụkọchukwu Ebeebe (Priest forever)! Fada Onyii

Adieu, My Stepfather Obianuju Okpala

My Great Uncle Ngozi Ufo

Just hard to believe! Dr. Mrs. Gertrude Orakwue

To My Great Uncle Chioma Nnolim

The Uncle, who knew me before I knew myself Engr Emeka Ufo

You went about doing good Comas Ufo, brother-in-law

His Excellency, Ositadinma Anaedu, The PeoPeople’s Ambassador Chief Patrick Okpala (Obisaambala)

Adeiu, Rock of Anaedu Dynasty Chief Barr/Lady Matthew and Caronline Udeh, KSJI

Ebubedike, an Embodiment of Cerebral and Emotional Intelligence! Barr, Sir. Damian Udeh, KSM, Gburugburu Ikezuagu Kingdom, Brother-in Law

Osy, my Childhood-Friend and Brother Commodore Chukwuma Adogu (Rtd)

My Iroko has been cut down Emmanuel Sunday Ozoemena

The First, the Only and the Last Encounter with Osy! Rev. Fr. Conrad Ukozor

To a Great and Wonderful in-law The Ogbuewu family

Ambassador Ositadinma Anaedu – A rare Gem Uche Odozor MD/CEO Diplomatic Village, Abuja

A Good Friend Rev. Fr. Dr. John Umeojiakor

Living in a Daze without Osy Mazi Anekamobi Onyenwe & Lady Oby Onyenwe (nee Onyeguili), Agụlụzgbo and Mr. Lazarus Okammor & Mrs. Nkiru Okammor (nee Onyenwe), Enugwuagịdị

Blessed are those who die in the Lord. Lady Oby Vero Onyenwe President General, Life Member of CWO Awka Diocese Chairlady Agụlụzigbo Teachers Union (ATU)

Evergreen in the Memory Anaedu Fidelis for Nwachukwu Anaedu family

Gone too soon but marked with the Sign of Faith Msgr Obiora Ike

Osy, an Ambassador of Christ Rev. Fr Martin C. Añusi St Michael the Archangel Catholic Church, SMACC, Eziaja, Neni, Nigeria

Fare Thee Well, Osy Fr Prof. Chukwuemenam Umezinwa (Vice-chancellor, Peter University Achina/Onneh)

Prologue

Osy, A Tribute to CharacterRev. Fr. Ben Ejeh, Venice-Italy

A rare breed you were In a murky landscape Dotted with fellows without character.

Tall you strode like a Colossus Navigating a sea of soulless sharks With integrity for watchword And faith as compass Compromise, to you, a taboo.

Our paths crossed happily At God’s behest in Providence And ever bound in fraternal love Til God’s love’s eternal embrace.

You live on dear Osy For love and life in God’re eternal.

Ambassador Ositadinma Bartholomew AnaeduA Short Biographical Ode by Fada Onyii

Born in Onitsha on December 30, 1955, our parents gave him the name O si taa dị nma, ọ dịrịzie gaba meaning: since it started today to be good, it will continue to be good. And because the Igbo folk of our parents’ time and generation did not give names arbitrarily, the context of this name was that our father, having retired from the Nigeria Police Force, ventured into business, which then started to show signs of growth and promise. Hence, his name was a prayer both for intercessions already answered and for the future of the still young family to which seven younger siblings will be added in addition to his elder sister, Uchem, named after our paternal grandmother. However, everyone knew him as Ositadinma and Osita or Osy for short. His baptismal name, Bartholomew, was rarely used and found only in some official documents like certificates.

When Osy reached school age, our father wanted the best of foundation-education and upbringing for him. Hence, he decided that he be raised by a cousin, who was a teacher, Mr Marcel Obianọ, who lived and taught at Agụleri. It was during his primary school days that the Nigeria-Biafra civil war broke out. Osy was on a visit to the family house in Onitsha when the war reached the threshold of the commercial city. Consequently, he had to evacuate with the rest of the family to seek refuge in our village in Agụlụzigbo.

After the war in 1970, Osy began his secondary school education at Bubendorff Secondary School, Adazi, finishing in 1975. As was customary then, he did his Higher School at the prestigious Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha. It must be noted that his time at DMGS was as remarkable as it was historic because he became the first Higher School student, who did not do all of his secondary school education and the school certificate in DMGS, to be elected as the Students’ Union President, a position that was more prestigious than the senior prefect of the school because the senior prefect was usually an appointee of the school authorities, while the president was an elective office. Again for the fact that Osy, a Catholic, was elected as the Students’ Union President in a school that represented and still represent the height of academic excellence in Igbo Anglicanism (same was Christ the King College, Onitsha, and still for the Igbo Catholicism), was really epochal and spoke volumes.

Having finished his Higher School, he gained admission into the prestigious University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, where he studied political science, actively engaging in the University Students’ Union politics as a member of the Students’ Union Council, and graduating in 1982.

After his Youth Service at the National Assembly, Lagos, during the 1982/83 session, he got a job as a reporter and columnist for the Democrat Newspapers, based in Kaduna, in the Northern part of Nigeria. He was at this job for just a few months before he realised his dream of working in the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lagos, in December 1983. Rising through the ranks, he got his first international posting in 1990 to Hong Kong. In 1993, he returned to Nigeria and was posted to the Protocol of the Presidential Lounge at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, where he worked till his second international posting to the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 1998.

It is pertinent to note here that, after his first marriage collapsed shortly after he came back from Hong Kong, he literally got ‘married’ to his job for nearly fifteen years. Consequently, all our official and tricky efforts to hook him up with one of our numerous girlfriends (mine and those of my 7 other siblings) proved abortive until we succeeded with Amaka, his present widow and the mother of his two beautiful and highly gifted children, whom he married sacramentally in 2005, having received the canonical annulment of his first marriage more than ten years earlier.

Osy so dedicated himself to his job at the Presidential Lounge that his name became synonymous with the Presidential Lounge of the MMIA such that when postings were being considered again in the ministry, the then Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha, personally directed the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chief Tom Ikimi, to post him to the United Nations in New York. That was how his carrier at the UN took off and it was at the UN in New York that he honed his negotiating skills as an international diplomat and erudite negotiator.

After this stint at the UN in New York, he returned to Nigeria in 2002 and resumed at the Ministry of External Affairs Headquarters in Abuja. Not quite long afterwards, he received a call from the Office of the then National Security Adviser, Gen. Aliyu Mohammed Gusau to resume at his office. He stayed at the Office of the National Security Adviser to the then President Olusegun Obasanjo until his second stint with the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007, where he worked until his official retirement from the Nigerian Civil Service, having put in the mandatory 35 years of service. However, because of his invaluable experience and expertise, the then Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) decided to retain his services at WIPO as his Strategic Adviser, where he finally retired in 2018.

After Osy’s retirement from the UN, he devoted his energy and time to something he considered very important to humanity, namely human health. Without being a medical practitioner or having had any formal training in orthodox medicine, Osy used his life health challenges to develop and devote himself to healthy eating practices and techniques.

Because various sicknesses like high blood pressure and diabetes are in our family history, Osy inherited these sicknesses at an early age. I can still remember vividly that, whenever he travelled, his medications always had a separate travelling bag. However, in order to rid himself of so much medication, he had to resort to alternative medicine by changing his eating habit. Although he was never into alcohol, smoking and junk foods, he went an extra mile to start eating organic and mostly vegetables and herbs, with the result that he lost much weight. However, without taking any drugs again, his health so improved that his work rate actually doubled and he rarely fell sick apart from the occasional seasonal flu. From this personal experience, he became so convinced of the efficacy of alternative medicine, that he embarked on a mission to educate anyone he came in contact with on his experienced and researched findings, which he articulated in his opus magnum, a 684-page book on healthy living: Your Microbiome (Bacteria) is a Wonder of Nature: Activate and Optimize – Eating for Healthy Longevity, published in 2020. However, I must confess that this obsession with alternative medicine made him lose sight of the need for regular orthodox medical check-ups, because he was rarely sick and always in terrific state of health. He felt absolutely in control of his health. And that was the negative aspect of it. That was why his malignant prostate cancer was not discovered on time until it became too late. This experience can be likened to what Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, experienced with his pancreatic cancer.

A little digression may be pertinent here because, just like in our family, certain illnesses, like pancreatic cancer, ran in Steve Jobs’ family too. When I stumbled on an answer by Leo Chelliah, CEO at Dreamguys Technologies to a question on Steve Jobs’ cancer, I found it ad rem to how Osy handled his sickness too. Leo Chelliah writes:

From his early life onwards, Steve Jobs was very obsessive about the way he lived, he would do quite a lot of intermittent fasting, juice fasting, prolonged fasting etc., which are actually good ways to improve your body. Based on his official BIO, he actually switched from drinking tea to just drinking really hot water, because it’s mostly the same satisfaction you get. If you really try for a couple of days you would know it’s actually true. So his obsession with how to live was actually a really good way of living life. However, what went wrong is, when he found out that he had pancreatic cancer, he went deep in thinking of the actual disease and did searches/research as much as possible, and he concluded, that eradicating a disease like cancer would be done right through not cutting yourself, rather doing cleansing and natural remedy to reverse the condition, which actually would have to be the right way of fixing this disease. But our humanity is not yet advanced enough in natural remedies and reversing the condition, and as a whole society, we are obsessed with fixing the disease rather than reversing a disease. Thus rather than accepting the reality that he had to open up his body and fix the disease, he obsessed with reversing the condition. Again there is not enough proof we could reverse cancer right now, but that’s what he thought was the right way and obsessed about it.

Actually, Steve Jobs created really good products because of his obsession with how a product should be used, true to its nature, eradicating the unnecessary and making the product true to its use. His obsession with products got us really good products. But his obsession over how a disease could/should be cured, even though it was right in what he was doing, time was not in his favour. Within 9 months of identification, further scans showed the cancer had progressed and it was aggressive. Still, that was for that moment, and due to his obsession, he had struggles accepting the medical ways and kept opposing things which he didn’t accept were right, causing his disease to overtake him sooner. That was a man obsessed with doing things right!!!

(cf. https://www.quora.com/If-Steve-Jobs-knewhis-genetics-were-high-for-pancreatic-cancer-whydidn-t-he-search-help-in-the-earlystages?q=steve%20jobs%20pancreat, culled on 20.02.2023)

Unfortunately, this is similar to what happened to Ambassador Ositadinma too. He was absolutely convinced that his methods were working. And, from all indications, which he shared with us in the family, his methods were working; a method that brought down his prostate count from more than 2,000 PSA, when it was first diagnosed in May 2022, to less than 30 PSA count in the first week of December, 2022. However, his condition so dramatically changed in that first week of December that he had to be admitted in the hospital. And on the 11th day of December, on the Gaudete Sunday – the Sunday of Joy, it pleased the Lord to call him home and relieve him of the pains and sufferings he was going through. However, that was not before Ujunwa, the baby of the house, was able to organise a priest, Father Conrad Ukozor,