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I usually do not
get calls during church service on Sundays. In fact, to ensure I do not
fall prey to the temptation of receiving or making calls, I hand the
phone to someone to hold for me.

On this particular
Sunday I handed the phone to my wife and promptly concentrated on the
ministration going on. Around 9am or thereabouts, I was nudged by one
of our ushers who later told me my wife wanted to see me.

When I got to her,
she told me that my friend Ken Ochonogor had called. It was surprising
because even though in the years I have known him he has called me at
different times of the day and different days of the week, he had never
called me on a Sunday morning.

On instinct I decided to return the call suspecting that he must have a very important reason for calling.

What I heard nearly knocked me out.

“You hear say Emeka
Enechi don die? Uncle T (Tayo Balogun, Vice Chairman of Lagos State
Sports Council) just called to tell me that Emeka died this morning”.
He proceeded to give details of what happened but I wasn’t listening.
What I kept hearing was: “You hear say Emeka Enechi don die?” The words
hit me like a sledge hammer. Emeka dead? It was unbelievable.

If you asked me to
point out a 100 people I thought will die the next minute, Enechi will
not figure among them. Why? He was so full of life; so vibrant that you
thought he would live to be over a hundred years old. Sadly, at 40
years, his journey had ended.

Quite tragic
indeed. It is made even more heart wrenching when you realise that here
was an individual who was involved in an automobile accident in which
the vehicle somersaulted several times and he sustained only a slight
injury on one of his hands; he told friends and colleagues he was okay
and then died a few days later because the medical personnel who
treated him were careless and failed to administer anti-tetanus
injection! It is simply unbelievable for an individual so full of life
to exit this world in such a manner. I It will take quite a while for
this to sink in for most of us related with him on a personal level.

A jolly good fellow

Emeka was
everybody’s friend. As we say in Nigeria he was ‘like water wey no get
enemy’. He was one of those rare breed who would go the extra mile to
help. I remember in January this year, I was in Abuja ready to go to
the Angolan embassy to apply for visa to cover the Africa Cup of
Nations; for some reason, I did not have an accreditation from CAF to
cover the event.

I called Emeka, who
incidentally was in Abuja for the same reason and asked him to see if
Suleiman Habuba, CAF’s media man, can assist. Emeka readily agreed and
tried repeatedly to get Habuba on phone. When his efforts failed, he
told me to go ahead and take my chance at the embassy and added that if
I managed to make it to Angola he would ensure that Habuba looked into
my case.

There many sides to
Emeka, fondly called ‘Biafra’ by friends and associates, made him such
an interesting individual. One of the remarkable things about him was
that he was carefree to the extent of being forgetful. In Japan where
he had gone to cover the 2002 FIFA World Cup jointly hosted with South
Korea, he forgot his wallet containing nearly all the money he took to
that country and his passport at the airport. Somehow, they managed to
track him down and returned everything to him intact.

He was not so lucky
however this year when we went to Ghana for the Globacom/CAF African
footballer of the Year Awards. We were already in the vehicle conveying
us to the hotel when Emeka strolled up to the vehicle imploring us to
wait for him while he goes back into the airport to search for his
missing wallet. He didn’t find it in the end but that didn’t dampen his
spirits in any way.

I will miss Emeka a great deal. I used to call him chairman after
his stint as chairman of the Lagos state chapter of the Sports writers
association of Nigeria (SWAN). Indeed, it was during his tenure that I
came to appreciate him more because although some people ganged up
against him, eventually making it difficult for him to return for a
second term, he bore no grudges. To the very end he remained the easy
going and jolly fellow that he was.