The Onyemaizu family of Umuibe, Amagu, Oru-East local government area of Imo state will on the 29th of September, 2022, bid farewell to their patriarch, the late Pa Innocent Elesiokwu Onyemaizu who died on March 11, 2022.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “it is not the length of life but the depth of life”, and in the words of Chuck Palahniuk, “we all die; the goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will”.
The above praxis underlines the life and time of the late Elesiokwu. A community leader, businessman,devout Catholic, a man of peace and stabilizing factor, Pa Elesiokwu, during his lifetime, was popular as “Bude” and “Ijeelu” respectively. He acquired the alias, “Bude” during his heydays as a palm oil merchant in Benin while “Ijeelu” was given to him by his admirers in his community, Amagu.
Pa Elesiokwu enjoyed the blessing of long life, having left the stage at the glorious age of 93.
For the family, his death is the end of an era.
Until his demise, Elesiokwu was the only surviving child of his father, Onyemaize, the only surviving grandchild of his grandfather, Obinnakwere and the only surviving great-grandchild of his great-grandfather, Onyebuagu.
Born in 1929 in his community, Amagu, Elesiokwu was the last born of his parents. Losing his father at a tender age, the task of raising the young Elesiokwu fell on his doting mother.
Raising him alongside his other siblings was tough for his widowed mother hence Pa Elesiokwu didn’t quite enjoy the luxury of extended education.
With his education terminating at Standard Two, the young Elesiokwu would later leave for Benin, the present-day capital of Edo state together with his elder brother, the late Augustine Onyemaizu, in search of greener pasture.
The two brothers later veered into trading- buying and selling palm oil in drums which they sourced from home and transported to Benin to sell.
However, the booming trade would be truncated in 1967 following the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war.
Like millions of Easterners living outside the then Eastern Region, the war forced Elesiokwu and his young wife, a damsel at that time, the late Mrs Cicilia Onyemaizu from Omuma, also in Oru-East LGA, whom he married in 1958, to return home.
Upon returning to the Eastern Region which had by then declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra, Elesiokwu joined the Biafran Army. He fought in various sectors of the war including Ohaofia, Abiriba, and Onitsha among other places.
His Biafran Army unit, then stationed at the Borromeo axis of the commercial city, took part in defending Onitsha till it fell to the superior firepower of the Nigerian Army.
A few months into the end of the war, Elesiokwu sustained a bullet wound and was evacuated to the hospital. After recovery, his Commanding Officer graciously issued him a pass to visit his young family whom he had left nearly three years earlier.
However, as God would have it, the young soldier never returned to the war front because the war came to an abrupt end a few days before the expiration of his pass.
After the war, Elesiokwu picked up the pieces of his life by returning to his palm oil business.
By the 90s, he quit the palm oil business and concentrated on farm produce.
A devout Catholic and a member of the Catholic Men Organisation, CMO, Pa Elesiokwu is survived by children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and numerous other relations including Chidiebere Levi Onyemaizu, who until he was appointed the Senior Special Assistant on Print Media to Cross River state Governor, Professor Ben Ayade, was the Deputy Editor of a Lagos-based news medium, The Source Magazine.
In his condolence message, Professor Ayade prayed to God for the peaceful repose of Pa Elesiokwu’s soul and urged the family to accept their patriarch’s demise with equanimity.
Before his death in March, Elesiokwu was the oldest person in the Onyebuagu kindred and the second oldest person in his immediate clan, Umuibe.
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