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Felix Ibru, first civilian Gov of Delta State is dead
Olorogun Felix Ibru, first elected governor of Delta State and former President General of Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) has passed on at the age of 80 after a protracted illness.
He was born on 7 December 1935 at Agbarha-Otor in the Ughelli North local government area of Delta State to Chief Peter Epete Ibru and Chief (Mrs). Janet Omotogor Ibru, the second of seven children.
His brother Michael Ibru is the founder of the Ibru Organization, a major conglomerate.
He was educated at Yaba Methodist School, and later Igbobi College where he was Head Boy in 1955. He won the Elder Dempster Lines Scholarship to travel to the United Kingdom.
After his secondary school education at Igbobi College, Ibru proceeded to the Nottingham School of Architecture in England where he qualified as an architect in 1962.
As a traditional chieftain of his homeland, Felix Ibru bears the honorific title of Olorogun and often uses it as a pre-nominal style. This title is also borne by many of the members of his large family in the same way.
While a student in Nottingham, he was elected the first Black President of the British Council with responsibility for Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire.
As a result, he was presented to Queen Elizabeth II and his Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace in 1960.
Shortly after his qualification as an architect in 1962, he worked briefly with the Jewish Agency SOCHNUT, on various projects relating to farm settlements (kibbutzim and moshavim) and prefabricated buildings in Jerusalem and Haifa.
He later enrolled at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology for post-graduate studies and qualified with an MSc (Arch) in 1963.
He returned to Nigeria at the end of that year and took up an appointment with the Federal Ministry of Education as the first resident Lecturer in Architecture at the Yaba College of Technology.
He was elected member of the Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIA) in 1969, registered by the Architects registration Council of Nigeria in (ARCON) 1971, and elected Fellow of the Nigeria Institute of Architects in 1995.
Olorogun Felix Ibru was elected first civilian Governor of newly created Delta State on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1991 during the regime of President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) and was sacked by the late General Sani Abacha, along with other elected politicians in 1993.
He was unanimously later elected President General of the Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) during which peace and stability and quality leadership was restored to Urhobo land.
In 1997 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) by the Delta State University and a Fellowship of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR).