The former deputy governor of Central bank of Nigeria (CBN) and presidential candidate of YPP in 2019 generall elections, Professor Kingsley Chinedu Moghalu described late Mbazulike Amaechi the first republic aviation minister as a titan of Nigeria’s independence.
According to the statement signed by himself professor Kingsley Moghalu saddened to learn of the death of the elder sateman, at 93, of Chief Mbazulike Amaechi, frontline politician in Nigeria’s First Republic and our country’s first Minister of Aviation.
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Popularly known as “The Boy is Good” (as former President Nnamdi Azikiwe described him after Amaechi foiled an assassination attempt on the Great Zik earlier in the latter’s political career), Amaechi was a frontline nationalist who hosted Nelson Mandela in his home in Lagos in the 1960s when Mandela was on exile as a political dissident in South Africa.
I was privileged to have visited Amaechi in his country home in Ukpor in Nnewi South LGA in April 2019, and to have soaked in these and other stories of our national history, including an intimate first hand account as a member of a group of five close associates who, along with the Great Zik, received Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s delegation to Zik to persuade the latter to form a coalition of Zik’s National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) political party and Awo’s Action Group (AG) party to form the national Government after the 1959 elections, and why Zik ultimately instead entered a coalition with the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) to form Nigeria’s post-independence government with Tafawa Balewa of NPC as Prime Minister and Head of Government and Zik as President and Head of State.
In Mbazulike Amaechi, the last of the Titans of Nigeria’s nationalist struggle for independence has departed. May his brave soul Rest In Peace.
