One of Nigeria’s civil society leaders, Innocent Chukwuma, died Saturday evening in Lagos, according to close friends who indicated that he was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood.
He was 55.
“With profound shock & sadness, I regret to inform you that Innocent Chukwuma passed away a few hours ago, in the evening of April 3. May his soul rest in peace,” announced Edetaen Ojo, a frontline freedom of expression advocate and executive director of the Media Rights Agenda, who was a friend of Mr Chukwuma.
Mr Chukwuma, 55, came to public attention first as a student union activist at the University of Nigeria, where he read religious studies, in the heady eighties when Nigerian students led relentless campaigns against military autocracy.
Upon graduation he joined a cluster of young activists who came to bloom at the Civil Liherties Organisation (CLO), Nigeria’s first human rights organisation led for most of the nineties by Olisa Agbakoba, now a member of the velvet rank of the legal profession called senior advocates of Nigeria.
