By Ukpe Philip
It is almost nine years since Dora Akunyili died, but she has
continued to live in the memories of Nigerians because of her exploits during
her time as the Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug
Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
The late Akunyili turned
NAFDAC into a household name in Nigeria and across Africa due to her unparallel
commitment to public health and patriotism for country.
It now seems that her
excellence runs in the family after two of her children came into prominence
due to their individual brilliance.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, is one of her six children to carry on the legacy of the
ex- NAFDAC boss.
The visual artist working in Los Angeles,
California found her spark two years after her mother’s death. Cosby graduated from Swarthmore
College in 2004, where she studied art and biology as a Mellon Mays
Undergraduate Fellow.
She abandoned her career in medicine for fine arts at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After graduating from Yale in 2011, the
40-year-old was selected as artist-in-residence at the highly regarded Studio
Museum in Harlem.
Crosby organised her first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum.
Another exhibition was organised for her works at Art and Practice in Los
Angeles in the same year.
In 2016, Crosby was
named Financial Times Woman of the Year and in 2017, she was awarded the
prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.
Crosby’s painting, Drown, was sold at Sotheby’s contemporary art
auction in November 2016 for $900,000.
Her first painting to be
sold was Untitled and went for $93,000 in September 2016 at Sotheby’s.
In March 2017, her
painting titled, The Beautyful Ones (Series #1c), the first painting of five
belonging to The Beautyful Ones Series, was sold by a private collector for $3
million at Christie’s London.
In May 2018, Crosby set
a new auction record with the sale of her painting, Bush Babies, for nearly
$3.4 million at Sotheby’s New York. She made
over $7.39m from the sale of her prestigious paintings.
Ijeoma Akunyili, Dora’s first daughter is the latest to be in
the news as she made history over the week as the first Black Chief Medical Officer of the Jersey City Medical
Center, an RWJBarnabas Health facility, in the United States of America.
She was born in Houston and completed her undergraduate
education at the University of Pennsylvania before going on to attend the
University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Ijeoma completed her
residency at The University of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston. She
served as a former Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA) Speaker and
Vice Speaker (2012-2014).
The EMRA is a professional organization that represents more
than 90 percent of resident physicians training in emergency medicine in the
United States.
Just before making history, she served as the Regional Medical Director for TeamHealth, Northeast Group.
Ijeoma also served as the chair of emergency medicine at Waterbury Hospital, a
Level II trauma teaching hospital.
In 2019, she received the Medical Director of the Year Award for
the impressive turnaround of the Waterbury Hospital Emergency Department.
“RWJBarnabas Health is
proud to add Dr. Akunyili to its executive clinical leadership team. Her
experience managing multi-specialty physician groups in integrated health care
systems will help support Jersey City Medical Centre in providing comprehensive
health care throughout the community,” said Andy Anderson, MD, Executive Vice
President and Chief Medical and Quality Officer for RWJBarnabas Health.
Dora was appointed to
head NAFDAC by President Olusegun Obasanjo between 2001 to 2009. This was over
two years after the country returned to democracy in 1999.
The Anambra-born
pharmacist revealed she had a special motivation for attacking the country’s
counterfeit drug. She had narrated how she watched her 21-year-old sister die
after receiving injections of fake insulin as a diabetes treatment.
Dora died on June 7, 2014 at a specialist cancer hospital in
India which was eleven years after escaping an assassination attempt.
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