By Kio Amachree
I sometimes find it darkly amusing, and often deeply painful, that Nigeria chose to overlook my father.
Chief Godfrey Kio JaJa Amachree, QC, was one of the very first Africans ever appointed Queen’s Counsel. At a time when the highest levels of the legal profession were still closed to Africans, his elevation was historic. It signaled mastery of the law at its most demanding standard and placed him among a tiny group of Africans trusted at the very summit of British common law.
He went on to become a pioneer of Nigerian law and a foundational figure in the country’s legal history. He served as the first Solicitor-General of Nigeria, Acting Attorney-General, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Attorney-General of the British Cameroons, and later Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. He helped re-engineer Nigerian legal education, financed key institutions, and contributed to the drafting of constitutional frameworks at moments when Nigeria itself was still being formed.
During the Nigerian Civil War, his diplomacy helped persuade the United States to support the Federal Government at a critical moment. That intervention mattered. History has simply chosen not to dwell on it.
Nigeria, however, never offered him its highest legal honor: Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).
My father would not have been pleased that I am raising this. He believed in humility, restraint, and service without complaint. He would have waved the issue away and said that titles do not matter.
But my father is dead. And I do not have his level of humility.
I am raising this not for him, but for Nigeria. I am trying to establish a precedent: that future Nigerian leaders who serve the country rather than themselves should not be buried in the gutter of national nothingness. That men and women who build institutions, uphold the law, and sacrifice personal gain for public service should not simply be erased once power shifts.
My father is a clear example of what happens when a nation fails that test.
**Yakubu Gowon rewarded him.
Murtala Mohammed respected him.
After that, the seriousness ended.
The decline began under Olusegun Obasanjo.
That is painful for me to acknowledge, because Obasanjo was a close childhood friend of my mother, Nike. They went to school together, along with Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Once, my mother showed me an old classroom photograph of three children sitting at a desk in Lagos. She laughed and said, “That boy on the left is Obasanjo. I’m in the middle. And the one on the right is Fela.”
In that single photograph sat decades of Nigerian history: rivalry, ambition, ego, and unfinished business.
Obasanjo was generous to my family in certain ways. But he also removed my father’s oil block, claiming my father might “do something corrupt.” Anyone who knew Godfrey Amachree would understand the irony.
Recently, I spoke with Grace Ogbemi, who ran the day-to-day operations of Godfrey Amachree & Co. She was one of the sharpest legal minds of her generation, placed in charge by my father because he valued competence over hierarchy. She told me, quietly and without bitterness, “They never made your father a SAN.”
Nigeria did not merely forget my father. It chose to overlook him.
Last night, I dreamed of my mother. We were arguing. She was in pain. Her left side was swollen. She said I had done nothing for her. I gave her a painkiller and kept repeating, “I am your only son, Nike.” I woke up unsettled.
Perhaps the dream came from old arguments left unresolved. Perhaps from divided loyalties. Or perhaps from the deeper discomfort of watching a country erase one of its own builders.
The British honored my father. Nigeria did not.
That is not an accident. It is a pattern.
And until Nigeria learns to honor those who build the nation rather than those who exploit it, history will continue to remember the loudest, not the best.
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