SEYI GESINDE, in this piece takes a look at the activities and background of a United Kingdom-based award-winning Nigerian scholar, author

and advocate, Dr Remigius N. Nwabueze, who is City Solicitors’ Educational Trust Lecturer in Property Law, at the University of Southampton, UK.

United Kingdom-based Nigerian scholar, Dr Remigius N. Nwabueze, born in the middle of the Biafran war, precisely in 1968, at the serene village of Awo-Omamma in Oru-East Local Government Area of Imo State, is one of those who believe that good parental upbringing is essential for a child’s success in life.

This, Remigius realised on time and this made him cherish the words of his father, and firmly held on to it. His father, Chief Michael Madueke Nwabueze, though was not formally educated, but his proud son, Remigius described him as “a sagacious and witty gentleman.”

Without any form of western education, Remigius said his father had “achieved his ambition of raising kids who could aspire to the highest level of intellectual accomplishments.”

It is now exactly a decade ago his father died, and now, for his achievements, Remigius is a living testimony to what Pa Nwabueze wished his children become in life.

Today, Remigius rubs shoulders with the  intellectual elite in the United Kingdom, not minding the fact that he only relocated to the UK in 2005 from Canada where he was an Assistant Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada. He gave no special reason for his relocation except for “intellectual curiosity” as he puts it.

Apart from being an accomplished academic, Remigius is also an author. With his book, Biotechnology and the Challenge of Property, Remigius has successfully addressed the question of how the advancement of property law is capable of controlling the interests generated by the engineering of human tissues.

He was able to do this with what he called “a comparative consideration of non-Western societies and industrialised cultures.”

The book addresses the impact of modern biotechnology, and its legal accommodation on the customary conduct and traditional beliefs which shape the lives of different communities. It was his curiosity to advance in knowledge and better the lives of others, that pushed him to invest in this intellectual work.

“As it were, I wanted to drink from the very fountain of common law. The plan was that we would go back to Canada after a year, if the English environment was not conducive. We were pleasantly surprised and stayed put,” Remigius said.

According to him, “growing up was ordinary, at the Enyimba City of Aba. My mum died when I was five. We did not live in a rich neighborhood and I attended ordinary neighbourhood schools just like kids in my area.

“My father’s inspiration was spectacular. He wasted no time in assuring every one of us that money would not be a barrier to our educational pursuits, even if it meant disposing his property to raise money for that purpose. That made him extremely unique and demonstrated his innate intellectual rigour. He lacked formal education, yet he fully appreciated its importance and power.

“Naturally, he was expected to orientate his kids towards his own way of life and occupation, such as trading, yet he impressed upon every one of us that education was the only way.

“By far, my Dad surpassed most fathers with western education in terms of intellectual influence on their kids and I could not have done better with a different parentage,” Remigius said.

He said as a child he aspired to have a Ph.D degree, but from his primary four, he also aspired to be a lawyer. “That was the subject of my primary four English essay we were asked to write on what we wanted to do in the future. We lived very close to Aba High Court and, as a kid, my father and I often walked through the High Court premises.

“I saw and admired lawyers and judges and that probably influenced my choice of career; my father also had very high opinion of lawyers. From the first year at the university, I wanted to be a law teacher,” he stated.

At the University of Nigeria, Enugu-Campus, where he studied law (LL.B) in 1991, he was the best-graduating student of his class. “My plans to do a postgraduate programme overseas, immediately after my LL.B, did not materialise so I went into practice.

“About 1997, however, I obtained an LL.M from UNILAG,” Remigius said. And since it was his childhood dream to become a Ph.D holder, this he said inspired his pursuit of postgraduate degrees.

He said he chose to study abroad because as an LL.B. student at the University of Nigeria, he had reasoned that studying abroad for higher degrees was necessary to internationalise his experience, and that he thought it would be easier if he got a scholarship.

“When the University of Manitoba, Canada, offered me a fully-funded scholarship in 1999 for a research-based LL.M, I grabbed it with both hands. I obtained a similar scholarship for my doctorate at the University of Toronto,” Remigius said.

He, however, considered himself to be “extremely lucky” with a prestigious Leverhulme research award he won at Southampton University, most importantly because he is the second person in the history of Southampton Law School to win the award.

He is a recipient of various awards, research fellowships and grants, among which include the Leverhulme Research Fellowship on the Ethical and Legal Issues in the conduct of Biomedical Research in Developing Countries. Others are the Adventure in Research Grant (FLASS) on Land Policy, Development, and the Role of Trusts and the Faculty Fellowship of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of   London he won between June and October 2007.

What inspired him to dabble into issues relating to the conduct of biomedical experimentation in developing countries since his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto was his experience of Pfizer’s Trovan clinical trial in Nigeria in the mid-1990s. And this has really distinguished him among colleagues both home and abroad.