Innocent Chukwuma, Nigerian activist, pivotal pro-democracy campaigner and leading justice reform pioneer

Innocent Chukwuma, who died on the eve of Easter Sunday, on 3 April 2021, shortly after being diagnosed with leukaemia, was arguably the most influential strategist of his generation in Nigeria’s human rights movement and one of the pivotal advocates for more accountable government and the end of military rule in Africa’s most populous country. He was also Africa’s leading expert on police and law enforcement reform. 

Unusually for a country where civic activists are barely credited with any impact in life or thereafter, President Muhammadu Buhari, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo and the foundation of former president Goodluck Jonathan have led the lamentation of his untimely passing at the age of 55. 

On a bright morning in May 1991, a squad of men from the Nigeria Police Force invaded a family home in Oko-Oba, Agege, a densely populated settlement on the outskirts of the commercial capital, Lagos, in search, they claimed, of a violent robber. When they left less than one hour later, they had killed an entire family of father, mother and six children. The Oko-Oba massacre became one of the police’s trademark crimes, nearly three decades before impunity for crimes of unlawful policing drove Nigeria’s young people into the #EndSARS uprising in October 2020.

Public outrage over the Oko-Oba massacre forced the Nigerian government to reach a settlement with the family, agreeing to a payout of about $1.91-million. I was involved in the negotiations as a lawyer with the Nigerian Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). 

At the time Chukwuma, a young graduate interning with the CLO, expressed quiet outrage at the fact that there were no more serious consequences for the police officers who committed the killings. To him, the episode made human life seem cheap in Nigeria. On formally joining the staff of the CLO later in 1991, Chukwuma made it his mission to convince the organisation to take a more ambitious view of the need to prevent and mitigate police atrocities.

Chukwuma credited his father, a produce dealer from southeastern Nigeria, who died while he was still an undergraduate in 1989, with the inspiration for his consequential life in civic advocacy and social justice. 

As a prefect in his final year in high school, he led a protest of students against the theft of their food by a joint enterprise of the food contractors and school authorities. When he was expelled from the boarding house, his father intervened as his advocate to inquire from the school authorities what crime his son had committed. After patiently listening to the school principal’s version of the protest, the old man asked the question: “But did he lie?” His father’s intervention eventually persuaded the school authorities to allow him to take his final examinations, an experience which, he always testified, taught him the first lessons in civic advocacy and the need to always ask the questions that matter.

During his life of consequential advocacy, Chukwuma made a habit of asking questions that mattered and a virtue out of modelling answers to them. At the University of Nigeria, he emerged as a member of the last generation of credible student leadership in Nigeria, becoming the head of the student union parliament. Their contest of wills with the university authorities and later with the Nigerian government prolonged his sojourn in university by one year, at the end of which he needed a court order to graduate. 

Upon graduating with a degree in theology, he joined the ranks of activists in the CLO, where he pioneered a police reform programme. With Nigeria under military rule, he also became an indispensable member of the team that fostered the building of a coalition of Nigeria’s disparate pro-democracy champions into a united front called the Campaign for Democracy (CD). 

At the end of January 2021, Chukwuma retired from the Ford Foundation. He planned to proceed to Oxford University where he had secured a fellowship at the Blavatnik School of Government to write his memoirs and also do some teaching. In an earlier life, he had worked briefly as a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.