A Servant Leader Goes Home: A Tribute to Charles C. Ifeanyi (1934-2026)
A Servant Leader Goes Home: A Tribute to Charles C. Ifeanyi (1934-2026) By C. Don Adinuba It says a lot about the kind person Chief Charles C. Ifeanyi was that when he retired as the second or third person in the hierarchy of the entire Nigerian Customs Service, he had no house anywhere in the world. Most Nigerians would find this fact extremely difficult to accept because ours is what social scientists call a low-trust society, or a society with a very low stock of values like integrity, honour, loyalty, and trust. When we, however, remember that General Yakubu Gowon was our Head of State for nine years until he was overthrown in a military coup in 1975 and yet he had no house anywhere, or that Dr. Michael Okpara was the Eastern Region Premier from 1960 to 1966 but had nowhere to call his own house till 1983 when friends contributed money to build one for him in his village in today’s Abia State, you would begin to understand that Chief Ifeanyi was one of the few truly ex...