The Southerner – OPEN EYES
Thursday, March 12, 2026

There are people who enter your life not as passengers, but as architects, men and women who quietly lay bricks in the corridors of your mind, building rooms you did not know you needed. Dr. John Macaiah Okoni was one such man.

Born on August 24, 1967, in circumstances that would have broken a lesser spirit, he came into the world already acquainted with loss. His mother was still carrying him in her womb when the Nigeria-Biafra war erupted, and his father conscripted into the Biafran Army never returned from the warfront.

John Okoni never knew his father. Yet rather than allow that wound to define him as a victim, he wore it as an armour. He grew into a man of uncommon intellectual ferocity and unapologetic ego, not as a flaw, but as a declaration that he had refused to be diminished by the world’s early cruelties. His birth, set against the backdrop of war and fatherlessness, was perhaps an omen that he was destined to live loudly and depart painfully early.

I first encountered Dr. Okoni on November 18, 2015, a day I have never forgotten. I had come for screening at the University of Abuja, and while my course mates lingered outside his office door, whispering nervously about the man’s reputation for being thorough and unsparing, I knocked. The voice that answered — coarse, commanding, almost theatrical , said everything. “YES, COOOME IN!!!” He kept me waiting in silence for nearly three minutes, his pen moving across a page as though I wasn’t there.

Then, suddenly: “BIG HEAD! Let me see your documents.” He reviewed my file, noted my JAMB score of 247, and with a rare softening of his formidable exterior, said: “No wonder you are on the first batch of the admission list, you’re brilliant. I hope you will prove that here as well.

Congratulations!” I walked out of that office with my head high. That day, without either of us fully knowing it, was the beginning of one of the most defining relationships of my academic and personal life.

Dr. Okoni was a radical scholar in the truest sense; radical not in the theatrical sense of performance, but in the Latin meaning of radix: root. He went to the root of things. As a lecturer, he tolerated no mediocrity, no intellectual laziness, no comfortable half-truths. He was hush when he chose silence, proud in the way that men who have earned their knowledge tend to be, energetic with ideas, bold in pronouncements, and uncompromising in his assessments of both students and systems.

His philosophy, unapologetically Protestant in nature, shaped not only his faith but his worldview; a belief that individuals must account for themselves, that the grace of institutions is not guaranteed, and that a man’s dignity is his own to protect. On the door of his office hung a phrase that has never left me: “Always Make Yourself Happy, Because Nobody Else Will” — a maxim he attributed to “Okoniologys,” a word he invented, a school of thought he embodied. That phrase was not cynicism. It was radical self-possession.

As my project supervisor and Head of Department, Dr. Okoni’s intellectual engagement never felt bureaucratic. When I published my debut novel, My Journey to Mother Iya (The Goddess) on March 24, 2018, it was Dr. Okoni who offered what remains perhaps the most incisive appraisal of its thematic core. He wrote: “People get away with evil acts because Mother Iya, who epitomises the traditional god, has been rendered inactive by our atrocities.

The lack of instant justice encourages the lingering of injustice, nepotism, tribalism, favouritism and other negative ‘isms’.” That was Dr. Okoni, he did not merely read your work; he interrogated it, excavated it, and returned it to you enlarged. He was the kind of academic Nigeria increasingly struggles to produce; a man who understood that scholarship is not decoration but a living, breathing confrontation with the world’s failures and possibilities.

Between 2015 and 2025, the nature of my relationship with Dr. Okoni evolved in ways I did not anticipate and will always be grateful for. What began as a student-lecturer dynamic gradually deepened into mentorship, then friendship, then something rarer still, the kind of confidant relationship where truth is exchanged without ceremony. We argued oftentimes over matters of social-political leanings. He was not a man who softened difficult realities for your comfort, and yet, in his own way, he cared. He knew struggle intimately, having faced significant personal trials, including turbulence in his family life, with a candour and resilience that modelled for me what it means to remain upright when the architecture of one’s private world is shaking. His intellectual life never wilted under the weight of his personal suffering.

If anything, it sharpened him. In him, I saw the portrait of a man who refused to let pain make him small.

Dr. John Macaiah Okoni’s biggest fear was to die young. Countless times he had mentioned to me that since his father died very young, he would wish to live long enough. However, he died on May 26, 2025, at the age of 57, a number that sits like an accusation against fate. He was 57 when the world lost him, and the gap between that number and what he still had to give is staggering to contemplate.

He is survived by his wife, children, brothers, sisters, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, and a generation of students across the University of Abuja who were shaped, sharpened, and sometimes scandalized by his unrelenting standards. His burial is set for Saturday, March 14, 2026, with his body leaving the Federal Medical Centre, Otueke, in Bayelsa State, to his hometown of Amuruto in Kugbo, Abua/Odual Local Government Area of Rivers State, for internment. The journey of a man born in war, who carried fatherlessness as a lifelong companion, is to end in the soil of his ancestors, a homecoming both final and poetic.

To Dr. John Macaiah Okoni: you were difficult to love and impossible to forget. You were the kind of teacher who does not flatter and that, in retrospect, is the greatest compliment I can offer you. You saw something in a young man who scored 247 on JAMB, and you said so, bluntly and briefly, before returning to your work. That moment, small as it seemed, planted something.

Thank you for your mentorship, which was never sentimental but always sincere. Thank you for your friendship, offered in the unconventional currency of directness and trust. Thank you for being a confidant in seasons when few others were willing to bear witness. Thank you for reading my work and challenging it. You were a radical scholar who died an untimely death, but not an incomplete life.

You lived loudly, thought deeply, and left marks that cannot be erased. The door of your office are closed now, but the words you placed upon it “Always Make Yourself Happy, Because Nobody Else Will” remain open, still teaching. Rest well, Dr. Okoni. You earned it, my rugged-dogged Prof.!