Onoh mourns Segun Awolowo, says he was detribalized

President Bola Tinubu’s former spokesman in the south east, Dege Josef Onoh, has made tributes on the death of Mr. Segun Awolowo, the grand son of the legendary Pan Africanist, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

Segun passed-on November 20 2025, following an auto crash. He was aged 62 years. A lawyer and public‑servant, Segun made his mark as the Executive Director/CEO of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) from 2013 to 2021. He spent his career pushing Nigeria’s “Zero Oil” export diversification plan, helping to grow non‑oil sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and solid minerals.

Beyond NEPC, Segun served as a special assistant to Presidents Obasanjo and Yar’Adua, and later as Secretary for Social Development and Transport in the Federal Capital Territory Administration. In 2021 he was elected President of the National Trade Promotion Organisations for ECOWAS, and he also acted as Secretary of Nigeria’s National Action Committee on the African Continental Free Trade Area.

Quoting from William Shakespeare, Onoh said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Yet, Onoh said that Shakespeare, in that moment, underestimated the weight some names carry across generations.

He maintained that the name Awolowo is not merely a name; but a covenant with Nigeria—a promise that public service must be selfless, that leadership is sacrifice, and that a nation is built brick by brick with integrity, not looted plank by plank for private mansions.

Eulogizing, Onoh said, “Segun, my brother, my friend, my confidant—today I mourn not just a man, but the quiet closing of an era where tribe was never the lens through which we saw one another.

“You were Yoruba. I am Igbo.

And yet, in all the years I knew you, those words never once entered the room before we did. You called me “Denge” with the same warmth you reserved for your own blood, and I called you “Egbon” with the same reverence I would have shown an elder from my father’s compound in Enugu-Ngwo. No explanations were ever needed. No translations. No politics of origin. Only the politics of purpose.

“We shared the same stubborn dream: a Nigeria that works for all her children, not just for the loudest thieves in the corridor. We inherited it from different fountains—yours from the immortal vision of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Mama HID, mine from my Grand father Chief Gabriel Okwo Onoh, my late parents Chief C.C. Onoh and lady Caroline onoh my dearest mother—who taught us that family honour is measured not by bank accounts in London, but by how much of yourself you give away for strangers who will never be able to repay you. I’m forever glad you were a part of my family and never failed to always reach out to my parents in their life time.

“You carried that burden lightly, with your gentle smile and self-deprecating humour, but I know how heavy it truly was. To be an Awolowo in today’s Nigeria is to be constantly reminded that the bar your grandparents set is now treated as an inconvenience by those who mistaken public office for personal inheritance. You never complained. You simply kept building—quietly, faithfully—long after many would have walked away in disgust. Which you consistently encouraged me, you were the unseen Angel who convinced me to promote the candidacy of President Tinubu in the South-East when you called me by 10.45pm on the 1st of August 2023 despite your reservations but in your words ” he contributed in the struggle for the democracy we enjoy today and despite any short comings he may have, let’s give him a chance to prove himself for the people to judge and not us”.

“And you kept building bridges too. To me. To Ndigbo. To anyone who still believed that Nigeria’s problem is not tribe but greed. In you, I found a closer brother than many who share my dialect, In private conversations that lasted into the early hours, you worried more about the future of Igbo apprentices in Lagos than many south-eastern governors ever did. That is the Segun Awolowo I knew—the one who judged men not by where the stork dropped them at birth, but by the content of their character and the courage of their convictions.

“Today, that species feels endangered. Detribalised Nigerians still exist—H.E. Olusegun Obasanjo, the Ooni of Ife, Chief Bode George, Segun Showunmi, H.E. Peter Obi, Sen.Ben Obi, Sen.John Mbata, Rt. Hon.Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, the Akwue Isama, Onitsha Molokwu Azikiwe son of the great nationalist Rt.Hon.Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr.Kunle Abiade, H.E. Chris Ngige, H.E. Rochas Okorocha, H.E. Amb. Ben Amobi. and a precious few others—but the list grows shorter with each funeral. You have now joined the ancestors while we, the living, struggle to keep the flame you carried so steadily.

“I will miss your voice on the phone at odd hours: “Josef, how now?”
I will miss your counsel that was always wise yet never condescending.

I will miss the way you could disarm tension with a joke, then slip in the hard truth before anyone noticed the knife.

“But I will not say you are gone.

Men like you do not die; they become the conscience of a nation that keeps trying to forget it has one. Your grandparents’ legacies did not end with their passing; they multiplied in you. And now yours will multiply in all of us who refuse to let Nigeria become a country where everything—including brotherhood—is monetised.

“Rest well, Egbon mi. The name Awolowo remains priceless. And because you lived, the idea of a detribalised, selfless Nigeria remains possible.”

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