Oseloka Obaze exposes his family in this interview, says his age of 61 has two sides of him as Ogbaru man

Weeks ago, I met one of the most amazing species of a gentleman. I never met him prior to our meeting but had always admired his simplicity, humility and cool demeanor from a distance. Please enjoy the excerpts of our meeting…
Let's meet you, Sir. Who is Oseloka Obaze? Let us into your background, your childhood and everything about your education.
Oseloka Obaze is a man who was born some 61years ago into a rural farming community in Ogbaru. He is a native of Ochuchu Umuodu and the son of a school teacher. My mother was a school teacher while my father was a Local Government Administrator. They were two people who valued education very highly, so, I went to primary schools all over the Eastern Region. I went to Ogidi, Onitsha, Aguata, Umuahia, Ikot Ekpene, Osu Item, and like my uncle and dad, I ended up at Christ the King College, Onitsha which was where my basic character and up bringing were formed. So, I went to CKC and everything I know I am, is basically thanks to that Catholic secondary school upbringing. So, that's who I am. I went on to study Political Science and International Relations and I went into Diplomacy and Governance. I worked for the federal government, the United Nations, and eventually worked as Secretary to the Anambra State Government (SSG) from 2012 to 2015. That's it. Today, I am a private citizen and this is my office. I run a consultancy on Policy and Good Governance and Management. That's what I do and I try to mentor all the young people that I come by. I just try to encourage them not to lose hope about our country and about our people.
You are a private person, I agree, but you're also a public figure, so, let's look at your philosophy about life as well as your ideologies.
I don't know about philosophy and ideology, but I know I have a set of core values and one of them is that I don't embark on any enterprise unless I think I can add value to what I'm doing and that's the advice I give to people. Don't get into any project unless you know you can add value. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that you can hardly be the smartest or the wisest person in a room full of people. You might have certain ideas, but life is a learning process. If you shut up your mouth for ten minutes and listen, you'll leave the room wiser. So, it's always good to listen to other people, even those who clearly are less educated or less endowed than yourself. It however takes a certain degree of humility to be able to do that. I still learn things from my children because I listen to them and because I encourage them and I still learn things from other people and that has been the premise on which I interact with people. I don't assume to know everything or have the answer to everything. I think I learn more by listening to people. That's my basic philosophy in terms of my interaction with human beings and in terms of whatever I'm doing.

You come from Ogbaru, a place that was disadvantaged by nature because of its environment.
Let's look at the average Ogbaru youth how do you assess them, generally? Well, the youth problem is a global phenomenon. There's high youth unemployment globally and it's the same in Nigeria and what you encounter in Ogbaru is a microcosm of the youth unemployment bulge. It's almost like a spread that is growing everyday and that's where the youths are clustered. A vast majority of our youths are unemployed because they are not skilled in any vocational trade and most of them are not educated, so the challenge becomes, how do you address youth unemployment? Basically, it's a fallacy to think that everybody must go to school. No. what we try to do is that everybody must attain a minimum standard of education that enables you to communicate, read, write and be literate and then, to do whatever you want to do because, there are people who are skilled. People who don't need to go to the university because they are talented football players, but you must be able to read your contract so that nobody swindles you. For the Ogbaru youths, the environment hasn't helped, both at the national and the state level and at the community level because Ogbaru is basically a farming and fishing community. Agriculture is not youth friendly as we practice it. It is not sexy, so it is not attractive. It is not glamorous, but the truth is that it could be made to be attractive. At the end of the day, it matters little to you whether you're called a farmer or an aqua culturist, fish farmer, snail farmer or a chicken farmer so long as you're making a living from that. We must however create a noble environment that allows the youth to do some of the things that are 'agricultural' in nature, but not necessarily the tilling of land and planting of yam and cassava. The value chain of agriculture is so expansive. So big that we can fit our young people into that, but we must train them. We must key them into the vision of what we want to do and make it attractive for them. A young man who is able to start the fish farm that puts five thousand Naira every week into his pocket, in the fullness of time would be comfortable, but he has to start somewhere. We must give them that lee way. So, yes, the Ogbaru youths are challenged in the sense that most of them do not have the facilities of going the way that you would want them to go. So they end up in touting and all kinds of brigandage that does not help the community and that puts them at odds with the law. That's the reality. It's something we have to face, and one that needs to be addressed.
So, let's get back to you. You didn't mention your role in the United Nations. Was that deliberate or were you just being your humble self? Kindly tell us the exact roles you played while you served Nigeria in that capacity.
Well, there were two segments of my involvement in the UN from 1987 to 1991, I was the Nigerian Mission to the UN in New York and I was basically working for the Nigeria Government. I was the Special Assistant to the Ambassador, so that gave me a lot of lee way to do quite some good work, and at the end of it, I was twice elected as the Chairman of the Special Committee on the legal aspect of Apartheid and eventually led the Nigerian delegation that negotiated the final document for the special session on apartheid and it's destructive consequences and that was actually one of the pillars that led to the beginning of the crumbling of the Apartheid Regime. But thereafter, from 1991 till I left the UN in 2012, I worked for the UN Headquarters mostly on the African Dossier initially from 1991 to 1995. Then, I became the only black man at the UN Headquarters in the Political Affairs Department who was on the European desk for ten years. So, I was in the milee of the whole conflict of Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Croatia till it all ended. I spent my final years at the UN, first as an adviser to the Under Secretary General, Prof Gambari and eventually as one of the senior officials that ran the UN Security Council. I did that from 2007 to 2012 when I became the SSG. The UN gave me the opportunity to travel around the world. I travelled to 64 countries, so I've seen the world. I know what it feels like. People often complain about Nigeria and I tell them that until you go to some other places, then you'll become very proud of being a Nigerian. You'll find out that things are not really as bad as you think they are. I would say it was really a worthwhile experience.

Was there any part of that job you found hazardous? What were your main challenges?
Well, yes. It's not all fun and games. I was in Angola in 1992, leading the UN Team to supervise the election there. We finished the election, sat in Rwanda for some days and it was so tense. The night I left, I decided I was not going to sit around anymore. I could feel things other people could not feel because for some of them, it was their first visit to Africa, but I could sense the tension in the atmosphere. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife. On the night I left to return to New York, before I got to Lisbon in the morning, there was shooting all over Angola and people asked me how I knew, because I left on time and I told them that those of us who came from that part of the world know that when people who are supposed to be shouting on top of their voices and losing their head do not say anything, you know there is trouble and you know it's time to get out, so I got out. In 1994 when they did the election in South Africa, I led the team that went to South Africa where they had black and black violence. I wasn't supposed to go. I was actually supposed to be in New York, back stopping for people who were going but my director, then from Ghana said to me, “Obaze, if you don't have election in the kwazulu province, then there'll be no election in South Africa. Nobody wants to go to Mpumalanga because they were scared for their lives, but we have to go. So, you lead the team”. I still have the news report on that. I went with a few people and it was dangerous and scary, but we did pull it off and luckily, the elections proved valid, sufficiently free and fair and resulted in Mandela being elected president. I've also been to war-torn parts of Somalia, Sudan, Kosovo and it's not exactly refreshing when you're sitting in a helicopter flying over a territory like Kosovo and their soldiers lining up on their stomachs with machine guns, looking down to see if somebody is trying to shoot at you. I travelled quite a bit with the Security Council to Africa, Sierra Leone, Congo, DRC etc and they were quite exhilarating , but you prayed every time you took off and when you landed safely, you would thank God. Luckily, we survived unlike quite a number of our close colleagues and friends that died. Given the opportunity I would do it all over again, that notwithstanding.

How did you now adapt to working in Nigeria after having worked in an organized setting like the United Nations?
Don't forget I grew up in Anambra State. I told you I lived all over the place. I grew up in East Central State and went to school in Onitsha so I understood the good and bad mentality of our people. So, it was easy to adjust and even though I had been away abroad for over thirty years, I made it a point to bring my family home for Christmas every year, so I was in touch with the grassroots. The motivating factor besides the fact that governor Peter Obi asked me to come and work with him in the last two years was simply the fact that everywhere I had gone, all the accomplishments, all the self sufficiency, all the attributes that people extol to be great virtues of development were brought about by individuals. They were built, whether they were governance structures or physical structures and I came to the conclusion that if it could be done elsewhere, we could also do it here our own way. So, when the opportunity came to serve, you just had to buckle down to do your best the way you know how. The rest is for the people to judge. If I've added value in any way, then so be it. I just recently published a book in which I reflected on some of the things that we did here and some of the challenges that we faced and the rest is for history to judge.

Can you tell us a little about the book?
They are actually two books. One is a collection of poems I've written over a long time.  They are a mix of poems that talk about core values, trust, friendships, family, parenting, places like Ogbunike cave and Agulu Lake, Lagos, Nigeria, New York, events, people I have encountered like Abacha, Ojukwu, K.O. Mbadiwe, Okokon Ndem etc. I just captured events that I experienced and that's one aspect of the book. The other book is a collection of essays, speeches and op-eds on good governance and while I was SSG, I talked about some of these issues that are very topical- the Petroleum Industry Bill, technology transfer and how much we are doing with it, the politics of the day, ethics in governance and things like that. They are there and they are just about my own humble contribution to the on-going debate about our nationhood and nation building.

Tell us about your family. Are they resident here in Nigeria, considering how much you travelled over the years?
The world is a global village, they are all over the place and luckily, because of technology, we don't feel separated. Every one of them is out of the house and the youngest is in the university in her second year. All five of them are doing well in their chosen careers. I have not influenced any of them to pursue a particular career. As it is, I don't know if any of them will follow me into Diplomacy or into Politics. I think, only one will also follow their mother into Medicine. One is a business executive in the finance world. The other one is in the sports world, one is more or less into physiotherapy and the other one is an artist. He's doing a lot of things and is actually more inclined to architecture. They're all doing fine and they are first and foremost, Nigerians and they would tell you that they are from Ochuchu Umuodu in Anambra state. They happen to have dual citizenship. They are Americans. They come and go from time to time. For now, they live in the US but there's no divide because I can sit here and in one second I can speak with them, exchanging SMS with them. I just spoke to one of them who's travelling with my wife. They just boarded the plane to fly back to New Jersey from California. They're doing okay and better than me. 
To be continued

Photo Uche Amunike of Fides and Obaze during the interview