Mr. Theophilus Okechukwu Akaneme is a former Chairman of the Onitsha Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (ONICCIMA), the second biggest and most active Chamber of Commerce in Nigeria, after the Lagos Chamber. A newspaper publisher and printer, he is co-founder of The Bridge, a regional newspaper which he publishes in Onitsha, South-East’s commercial and industrial hub, with his friend and former classmate. Both also own a printing press, which they have been running since graduation and fresh from the National Youth Service (NYSC) in 1987. Married to a university professor with whom he has grown-up children, Akaneme is the studious, serious-minded, no-time-for-frivolities type, often given to following the due process in all his official and private engagements.
From the foregoing, doesn’t Akaneme come across as a very responsible man, certainly the type not to neglect his duties to his environment and government? Of course he does – and I can vouch for his sense duty and personal integrity because Akaneme was also my IMT Mass Com classmate of ’86. But, all that organised, well-planned lifestyle came crashing in the early hours of Friday, October 11, 2024, when some officials of the dreaded Anambra State Waste Management Authority (ASWAMA) knocked on his door.
According to eyewitness accounts, on that fateful October 11 last year, ASWAMA officials practically woke Akaneme and his family from sleep, as it was their persistent banging on the door that made the journalist-publisher come down from his first-floor apartment to open the door, still dressed in his night wear. Upon opening the door, five early-morning-drunks armed with cudgels, and an Ak-47-totting police officer, swooped on the businessman, demanding to see his ASWAMA monthly environmental sanitation payment receipt, if he said he had paid.
Unfortunately for Mr. Akaneme, he didn’t have the receipt at home but in his office nearby. Unfortunately because once they heard that he didn’t have the receipt at home, they pounced on him and began to manhandle him, a leading light of the organized private sector in Anambra State! His pleas to be allowed to go back upstairs and change into formal clothes and walk down the street to provide the receipt, or follow them to their office, which seemed to be what they wanted, fell on deaf ears. They insisted on dragging him, almost naked and like a common criminal, to their office where he would be made to pay a heavy fine for ‘non-payment’ of his environmental sanitation levy and or be locked up disgracefully until such a fine was paid.
As it turned out, it was all about the money that the contractor handling that part of town for ASWAMA stood to make. Obviously, the more people were dragged to the ASWAMA office for ‘payment defaults’, the more fines they were made to pay and, needless to say, the more frequently the contractor smiled to the bank. And it didn’t matter if a life was lost or rendered useless in the process. Eyewitnesses said that Mr. Akaneme’s insistence on being allowed to properly dress up before following the environmental officials to their office infuriated the police officer who, amid the blows to the head and body that the journalist/businessman was already receiving from the goons, went behind him, viciously grabbed him by his armpits and, with the force of a trained killer, twisted Mr. Akaneme’s trunk, instantly breaking his spinal cord.
Needless to say that, as a result of the vicious attack, Akaneme immediately collapsed, completely demobilized, causing the ASWAMA officials to scamper into their pick-up and flee, leaving their victim lying in pain and almost lifeless in front of the door to his apartment. The incident happened so fast that it was only after the ASWAMA goons had fled and an eyewitness noticed that Akaneme could neither get up from the ground where he was left lying, nor even move any of his limbs, that his household was alerted to what had happened to their breadwinner, just by their doorstep.
The Theophilus Okechukwu Akaneme-ASWAMA saga is fairly well-known in Anambra State. It was well reported, indeed, was all over the social media, when it happened. As a matter of fact, the Anambra State government and the police state police command would have conveniently denied that the incident ever took place, had “some right thinking members of the public, Onitsha Chamber of Commerce (ONICCIMA), the mainstream press and social media and influencers, among others, not begun to hype it in the public domain,” as a brief on the incident by ONICCIMA put it. It was well over a month after the incident that ‘the Soludo Administration came out of its shell’, with the State Commissioners for Health and Environment separately visiting Mr. Akaneme at Memphys Hospital, Enugu.”
“Sequel to the visits referenced above and whatever other investigation(s) the government carried out, the 37th Anambra State Executive Council Meeting of December 10, 2024 deliberated on the issue, inter alia. After the meeting, the Anambra State Commissioner for Information, Dr. Law Mefor, addressed the Press. As it concerns the subject matter here, he said: ‘The Government will be picking the entire bill, not just the bills accumulated so far, but until, up till he leaves the hospital’,” ONICCIMA further narrated.
THE PROBLEM now is that the Anambra State government has not fulfilled its promise to the injured Akaneme and his family. Or, let’s say, not well enough. And this is why one is making this appeal to his Excellency the Governor.
ONICCIMA further disclosed that following Information Commissioner Mefor’s promise early December last year, the Soludo Administration in late December released the sum of N20m for Mr. Akaneme’s hospital bill, prompting an appreciative applause for the Administration by concerned groups, family and individuals for the gesture of undertaking to pay Akaneme’s medical bills and for the release of the first sum of N20m.
“For instance,” ONICCIMA stressed, “Onitsha Chamber of Commerce, which Mr. Akaneme had led as its 9th President, organized a press conference the very next day, December 11, where it appreciated ‘the Anambra State Government under the leadership of His Excellency, Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, for this act of benevolence and care, as this has been at the core of advocacy of stakeholders since the incident on October 11, 2024’,” later releasing an additional statement to that effect.
But, alas, that was where it ended. Since then, the government at Agu Awka would appear to have completely switched off on the Akaneme family. Apart from the fact that the government has ignored all entreaties to prosecute the people who committed the heinous assault on the former ONICCIMA Chairman’s person, who are still walking about freely, the Soludo Administration seems to have wittingly and remorselessly abandoned Mr. Akaneme to his fate, possibly to die. For, even at the time the first N20m was released by the government, what was in the medical bill was in excess of N28m.
“As at March 9, 2025 the outstanding bill to pay was N33,218,689,” ONICCIMA agonized. “The bills that the hospital issued intermittently were all sent to the government through the Commissioner for Health, Dr. Afam Obidike. Mrs. Ifeoma Akaneme, a professor and wife of the victim, Mr. Okechukwu Akaneme, has continued to send distress messages to the government over her husband’s plight but to no avail.
“On March 10, 2025, Memphys Hospital wrote to the Akaneme family, giving them 48 hours to clear the debts and warning that further treatment for Mr. Akaneme would be based on pay-as-you-go basis.
“Onitsha Chamber of Commerce, on her part, tried many avenues to get the Soludo Administration to provide the needed lifeline for Akaneme, as the government had promised, but still to no avail. On February 27, this year, ONICCIMA wrote to the Anambra State Governor pleading that the accumulated bills be paid, and that the option of medical treatment overseas be explored. But the Government did not bat an eyelid.”
ONICCIMA further lamented: “The Onitsha Chamber of Commerce, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 wrote again to the government, seeking audience with the Governor. The request till date has not been granted.
“Earlier, on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, the leadership of the three city chambers of Awka, Nnewi and Onitsha had held a meeting with the Anambra State Commissioner for Industry, Mr. Christian Udechukwu. The Okechukwu Akaneme matter took the centre-stage. It was extensively discussed. An obviously distraught Commissioner Udechukwu told his guests at the meeting that the authority concerned would hear their appeal soonest, assuring them that the Soludo Administration would answer the distress call. Till now, the mouth of the authority concerned has not told the OPS leaders that his ears heard their plea.
“We can go on and on and on, on the spirited efforts made, and which have continued to be made, to get the government to save the life of a man their contractor rendered as good as dead. As the minute ticks by, so does the life of Okechukwu Akaneme, whose spinal cord was shattered by Anambra State Waste Management Agency contractors and some policemen in Onitsha on Friday, October 11, 2024.”
Please, Prof Soludo, save Theo Akaneme.
The last time one heard about the Akaneme matter, the Enugu hospital had stopped treating him unless the accumulated bills were cleared. And they would not let him be taken away by the family either, unless the bills were cleared or “an appropriate” collateral was provided, a pathetic development that reminds of the sad rhyme in Fela’s ‘Double Wahala for Dead Bodi’.
There is something really sad about the Okechukwu Akaneme saga. It is also, in my view, the irony of Soludo’s Anambra. Here is the nation’s most business-savvy State about to let one of its most decorated organizers of Corporate Anambra and a responsible taxpayer die of injuries sustained from assault on his person by some state government’s tax collectors, apparently because Anambra State government places little or no store by citizens’ lives, and that of an important citizen at that!
As CBN Governor, Chukwuma Soludo was not only widely admired but was also a friendly and empathetic public servant. Instructively, he loved the media and the media, which was hooked on his “good messages”, loved him back. How could the same Soludo watch with seeming remorselessness as such a worthy Anambraian as Theophilus Okechuwku Akaneme is treated so shabbily by his state government, which, it seems, couldn’t care less whether he dies of the injuries he sustained from an assault by callous taxmen?
Prof. Soludo, please don’t let Okechukwu Akaneme die. Anambra has enough money to save a worthy son like him from dying so cheaply.
@AbeyaNews
