Mark Icha: Making his mark in life

His life as a dutiful family man, a brilliant engineer and an incorruptible bureaucrat in the old Kwara State and later Kogi State, was the stuff of legend. In a country where it is a lot easier to cheat your way though life, Mark Icha chose to be different. He lived a simple, Spartan life […]

His life as a dutiful family man, a brilliant engineer and an incorruptible bureaucrat in the old Kwara State and later Kogi State, was the stuff of legend. In a country where it is a lot easier to cheat your way though life, Mark Icha chose to be different. He lived a simple, Spartan life devoid of privileges, unconscionable comfort and undue attention. He took life very seriously and he would not be found wasting personal and public resources and time on frivolities. He was meticulous, organized and law-abiding.

“One of his children was once driven to school in his official car without his knowledge’’ his son-inlaw, rtd Major S. S. Omadibi, remembered in a tribute recently.

“He requested the driver to calculate the number of kilometres covered so as to be able to pay the government back for the unofficial use of the car.”

Omadibi also remembered how Mark Icha as a Permanent Secretary in the Kwara State Civil Service, wrote a reminder to a government official to return or pay for some bags of cement he had borrowed from the government stock some months earlier which he had conveniently forgotten to return.

As Chairman of Kwara State and later Kogi State Water Board, Mark Icha shunned the luxury of office air conditioners and refused to take the Chairman’s allowance until all the relevant taxes were duly deducted.

It was hardly surprising therefore, that Mark Icha was one of the few civil servants who survived the 1975 purge. He retained his position as General Manager and Chief Executive of Kwara State Water Board because of his honesty and dedication to duty.

Born about 1920 at Nagazi in present day Adavi Local Government Council of Kogi State, Mark Icha attended Christ the King Primary School in Okene, Okene Middle School (now Abdul Aziz Atta Memorial College, Okene) and Kaduna College (now Barewa College). He joined the Public Works Department after his secondary school as a Technical Assistant in 1945. He was soon off to the United Kingdom on scholarship to study civil and structural engineering. While in the UK, he got married to a home girl from one of the prominent families in Ebira, the former Theresa Ojiah.

His six-year stay in the United Kingdom must have had a profound impact on him. It strengthened his innate convictions that life is more meaningful when it impacts positively on other lives. He was also convinced that a simple, upright and contented life brings happiness. He realized that the United Kingdom became a world power as a result of hard work, visionary leadership and a dedicated and selfless public service. The emerging leaders of the young Nigerian nation, Mark Icha reasoned, would require a good dose of these values in order to build a strong and powerful country like Britain.  It was easy for Mark Icha to imbibe these values because they were at the core of catholicism, a faith he had embraced in his primary school days in Okene.

Engineer Mark Icha returned to Nigeria in 1958, determined to serve his country selflessly and to the best of his ability. He worked with the Northern Regional Civil Service as a civil engineer, serving in Kano, Kaduna, Minna, Yola, Jos and other cities. He returned to the UK for a post graduate degree in public health engineering at the University of New Castle Upon Tyne in 1963.

By 1964, Mark Icha had become the pioneer Chief Water Engineer of the Northern Region.  He moved to Ilorin in 1967 following the creation of Kwara State. He served the young state in various positions, becoming Permanent Secretary, State Ministry of Health and the pioneer General Manager of Kwara State Water Corporation, a position he held until his retirement in 1979. For his meritorious service to the nation and admirable personal integrity, Mark Icha was awarded the national honour of Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) in 1983 by the Shehu Shagari administration. Although he had not sought national recognition, he was touched that his modest contributions to nation building had been rewarded.

While living quietly in retirement in Okene, Mark Icha remained true to his principles as an austere, quiet and fair-minded person. A burst pipe had stopped the flow of water to his house in Okene and as a mark of respect to their old boss, the Okene Water Board tried to supply him water from a tanker. He declined. He wanted to know if such courtesy would be extended to those in similar situation.

As should be expected, not everyone was a fan of Mark Icha. In his own tribute at Mark Icha’s funeral recently, Oniyangi John Adeiku admitted that many people ‘’misunderstood’’ Mark Icha and considered him ‘’difficult to associate with‘’. But Adeiku quickly added that ‘’Papa was simple, humble and a real gentleman’’ who would not ‘’tolerate nonsense from any quarters’’. Many people in Ebira criticised him for being too strict, too straight and for refusing to exploit his position either to enrich himself or his people.

But he was also widely admired for his consistency, commitment to the public good, personal integrity and spirituality. Deep inside all of us, Mark Icha was the man we all wished we were; the man who bravely overcame the human urge to cheat people or the system; and the man whose strength of character delivered him from temptations. For, it takes a great deal of efforts and character to be incorruptible in Nigeria.

One of the lessons of Mark Icha’s long and eventful life is that it is possible to live honestly when everyone around us is cutting corners; that it is possible to serve your country diligently without expecting anything else beyond the wages of your labour; that greatness in life is not measured in terms of the size of wealth one has accumulated in a lifetime but in the little, intangible things that truly count, such as integrity, service, commitment and piety; and finally, that if a critical mass of Nigerians imbibed the values that marked out Mark Icha, we would have a country that we can all be proud of.

It was philosopher Immanuel Kant who once famously retorted that from the crooked stick of humanity no straight thing was ever fashioned. Mark Icha was an exception. March Icha was straight to a fault.

He passed on peacefully a few weeks ago at age 90, leaving behind his wife, Theresa and eight children and as many as 24 grand–children.

Dr Onukaba is a Nigerian writer and journalist