The former representative of Enugu North Senatorial District and governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the 2015 gubernatorial election in Enugu State, Senator Ayogu Eze, has died at the age of 66.
Born in 1958, Eze, who was in the senate between 2007 and 2015, died in a hospital in Abuja from a protracted illness.
Eze was a founding member of the Peoples Democratic Party.
Educational Background
Eze attended the Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, where he obtained a Higher National Diploma in Mass Communication.
He proceeded to the International Institute for Journalism, Berlin, Germany, where he graduated on top of the G55 student stream, comprising working journalists from about 14 African countries.
He also studied for a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of Lagos. He also successfully attended the executive education programmes of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he studied: “Leadership for the 21st Century: chaos, conflict and courage.”
He was at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, where he studied: “The Oxford Programme on Negotiation,” as well as the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, where the focus of study was: “Leadership in Parliamentary Oversight Programme.”
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Political career
As a founding member of the PDP, he contested and won the position of state Secretary, becoming the party’s pioneer Enugu State Secretary. The PDP won the election in Enugu as in many other states in the country in the 1999 general election. The new governor, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani appointed Senator Eze into his cabinet in 1999, making him the Commissioner for Information and Culture.
In 2001, he was redeployed to the newly created Ministry of Culture and Tourism but after his heroic effort in the governor’s successful reelection bid in 2003, the new ministry was remerged with the Information ministry to create yet a new Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism.
In another cabinet shakeup in 2006, he was dropped from the cabinet, but was called back in 2007 to serve as Special Adviser to the Governor on Public Affairs, a position he held till he was elected to the Nigerian Senate in 2007.
In the Senate, he was appointed Chairman of the Senate Committee on Information and Media, making him the official spokesman of the Senate. For the eight years he spent in the Senate, he was a member of the Constitution Drafting and Amendment Committee that made some novel changes to Nigeria’s 1999 constitution. After his reelection to the Senate in 2011, he was appointed Chairman of the Committee on Works.
Eze also served as a member of committees on Police Affairs, National Planning, Marine Transport and Federal Character and Intergovernmental Affairs.
The former senator nursed the ambition of running for the governor of Enugu State in the 2015 general election on the platform of the PDP. However, he lost the primary election to Rt. Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi. The primary election, which was riddled with controversies, ended in a series of legal actions.
Professional career
Eze had a very active journalism career, working as a reporter and staff writer with the prestigious The Guardian newspaper of Nigeria between 1983 and 1989, becoming the head of the Insight Team of the newspaper’s features desk before being deployed to head the Guardian Express, an evening paper from the stable, where he broke the news of the deportation of an intellectual and a critic of the military government, Patrick Wilmot, by the then Nigerian military government of General Ibrahim Babangida.
He later headed the Advance Desk of the newspaper, charged with producing the first edition of The Guardian newspaper, circulated mainly in the eastern and northern parts of the country. In 1989, he moved to edit the Platform Magazine, published by the late Dr. Chuba Okadigbo in Lagos.
He left the Platform Magazine in 1991 to join yet another flagship of the journalism profession, this time in the magazine sector. He joined the Newswatch magazine, easily Nigeria’s most prestigious magazine, as Associate Editor in 1991, leaving there in 1992 to join the Enugu State government as Special Adviser in General Duties to Governor Okwesilieze Nwodo. After that government was overthrown by General Sani Abacha in November 1992, Senator Eze went into the private sector, trying his hand at the produce trade and the real estate business.
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