Professor P-J Ezeh
Chairman , Board of Directors
Peter-Jazzy Ezeh’s first assignment in the University of Nigeria Microfinance Bank was as a member of the General Purpose Committee. He afterwards worked in several other Committees before being appointed the Director of Special Duties in the Bank in 2013. He was elected as Chairman BOD and he took the office in December, 2021. Professor Ezeh has worked as a journalist in Nigeria and overseas before training as an anthropologist in University of Nigeria, Nsukka. After cutting his teeth on professional journalism in the remarkable provincial, Nigerian Mirror (Onitsha), he went on to join The Punch at the stage when that group was the only independent newspaper group in the country. In his book, The second beginning, he has been passionate about the need for newspapers to be independent if they are to merit their name. For him, the primary function of the press is to protect the weak from governmental or corporate abuse, and therefore it becomes anomalous for government, being too powerful already, to run a paper to aggrandize itself further against the populace. He left The Punch briefly in late 1983 to join the Enugu-based Satellite and left for France in 1985 as the only Nigerian participating in a 22-nation senior-journalist programme organized by the Fondation Journaistes en Europe to familiarize them with Europe in the run-up to the formation of what has now become the European Union. It is in that programme that he met and worked with some of the foremost names in current journalism who even after he later branched off to full-time academics still hold him in high esteem due to his performance then. Perhaps two events during the programme might suffice to underline two traits in Professor Ezeh’s character; defiance to reasonable risks and opposition to injustice. When his colleagues on the programme where opting for more familiar projects, he chose, against all dissuasions, to go the Arctic Circle to investigate cod fishing in the frozen Lofoten Islands on the Norwegian Sea. He probably became the only Nigerian who ever did that, all because he said he wanted to engage first-hand the myth that Nigerians surrounded the subject of stockfish. “The best way to deal with any doubtful claims, myth or any other type,” he says down till today, “is to investigate it objectively, empirically.” When it was announced that the Frenchman, Claude Simon, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, Ezeh became angry and wanted to find out why no African writer was ever been considered good enough for the prize although some of them, in his estimation, were far better than those from other continents who had won. With a shoe-string budget from his scholarship he decided to travel from his base in Paris to go and confront the officials of the Swedish Academy, givers of the prize, who during the engagement told him that no one of African origin ever came to Stockholm to raise the topic. Although they also said that representations could not be taken into account in giving the prize, nevertheless by what Professor Ezeh now prefers to describe as “a happy coincidence” the Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, won the prize the very next year after Ezeh’s efforts. After the Paris projects he returned to rejoin The Punch and rose to become its News Editor. Ezeh has been correspondents to a string of international newspapers that will take much space outlining here. He has also been a Press Fellow at University of Cambridge (Wolfson College). In 1996 the Austrians recognized his efforts in double measure. The major newspaper in Graz, Kleine Zeitung, invited him as a guest editor, and the Foreign Ministry invited him as one of the three Nigerians to give talks in its first African-focused cultural festival, Sura za Afrika, (the Swahili for Images of Africa).
For his PhD Ezeh became the first Nigerian to study a glotto-cultural group other than his through the participant-observation strategy. The research explored the interstices among linguistics, anthropology and mass communications adapting classic participant observation in a manner that made the authoritative Qualitative Research journal of London to publish the innovation in 2003 ever before he defended his thesis that was named Censorship in traditional Orring mass communication. For his pains he won the Faculty of Social Sciences Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Best PhD Thesis a year afterwards. He has gone on to develop and publish orthography for Korring in the primer that he called Lọgwa ẹ livoro ẹ Kọrịń. Varieties of this previously unwritten language is spoken indigenously in Ebonyi, Cross River and Benue. Professor Ezeh has been a lecturer in anthropology in his alma mater since 1999. In his publications he explores ways of making anthropology relevant to the needs of non-Western peoples in contemporary times. He has about 72 published non-journalistic intellectual works, including the path-finding translation into his native Igbo of Molière’s Les femmes savantes as Filamint na ndiotu ya, and journal articles on the traditional African thrift systems.
Peter-Jazzy Ezeh’s first assignment in the University of Nigeria Microfinance Bank was as a member of the General Purpose Committee. He afterwards worked in several other Committees before being appointed the Director of Special Duties in the Bank in 2013. He was elected as Chairman BOD and he took the office in December, 2021. Professor Ezeh has worked as a journalist in Nigeria and overseas before training as an anthropologist in University of Nigeria, Nsukka. After cutting his teeth on professional journalism in the remarkable provincial, Nigerian Mirror (Onitsha), he went on to join The Punch at the stage when that group was the only independent newspaper group in the country. In his book, The second beginning, he has been passionate about the need for newspapers to be independent if they are to merit their name. For him, the primary function of the press is to protect the weak from governmental or corporate abuse, and therefore it becomes anomalous for government, being too powerful already, to run a paper to aggrandize itself further against the populace. He left The Punch briefly in late 1983 to join the Enugu-based Satellite and left for France in 1985 as the only Nigerian participating in a 22-nation senior-journalist programme organized by the Fondation Journaistes en Europe to familiarize them with Europe in the run-up to the formation of what has now become the European Union. It is in that programme that he met and worked with some of the foremost names in current journalism who even after he later branched off to full-time academics still hold him in high esteem due to his performance then. Perhaps two events during the programme might suffice to underline two traits in Professor Ezeh’s character; defiance to reasonable risks and opposition to injustice. When his colleagues on the programme where opting for more familiar projects, he chose, against all dissuasions, to go the Arctic Circle to investigate cod fishing in the frozen Lofoten Islands on the Norwegian Sea. He probably became the only Nigerian who ever did that, all because he said he wanted to engage first-hand the myth that Nigerians surrounded the subject of stockfish. “The best way to deal with any doubtful claims, myth or any other type,” he says down till today, “is to investigate it objectively, empirically.” When it was announced that the Frenchman, Claude Simon, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, Ezeh became angry and wanted to find out why no African writer was ever been considered good enough for the prize although some of them, in his estimation, were far better than those from other continents who had won. With a shoe-string budget from his scholarship he decided to travel from his base in Paris to go and confront the officials of the Swedish Academy, givers of the prize, who during the engagement told him that no one of African origin ever came to Stockholm to raise the topic. Although they also said that representations could not be taken into account in giving the prize, nevertheless by what Professor Ezeh now prefers to describe as “a happy coincidence” the Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, won the prize the very next year after Ezeh’s efforts. After the Paris projects he returned to rejoin The Punch and rose to become its News Editor. Ezeh has been correspondents to a string of international newspapers that will take much space outlining here. He has also been a Press Fellow at University of Cambridge (Wolfson College). In 1996 the Austrians recognized his efforts in double measure. The major newspaper in Graz, Kleine Zeitung, invited him as a guest editor, and the Foreign Ministry invited him as one of the three Nigerians to give talks in its first African-focused cultural festival, Sura za Afrika, (the Swahili for Images of Africa).
For his PhD Ezeh became the first Nigerian to study a glotto-cultural group other than his through the participant-observation strategy. The research explored the interstices among linguistics, anthropology and mass communications adapting classic participant observation in a manner that made the authoritative Qualitative Research journal of London to publish the innovation in 2003 ever before he defended his thesis that was named Censorship in traditional Orring mass communication. For his pains he won the Faculty of Social Sciences Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Best PhD Thesis a year afterwards. He has gone on to develop and publish orthography for Korring in the primer that he called Lọgwa ẹ livoro ẹ Kọrịń. Varieties of this previously unwritten language is spoken indigenously in Ebonyi, Cross River and Benue. Professor Ezeh has been a lecturer in anthropology in his alma mater since 1999. In his publications he explores ways of making anthropology relevant to the needs of non-Western peoples in contemporary times. He has about 72 published non-journalistic intellectual works, including the path-finding translation into his native Igbo of Molière’s Les femmes savantes as Filamint na ndiotu ya, and journal articles on the traditional African thrift systems.
