It has been 40 years since the satanic assassination of Dele Giwa through a letter bomb delivered to his home, but the departed iconic journalist remains as deathless as ever.
The legend still stares Nigeria and the world in the face with this poser: Who killed Dele Giwa?
Sunday, October 19, 1986 should be counted as one of the saddest days of my life.
I was then working for THISWEEK magazine, and the staff had gone to the University of Lagos to play football in the morning.
We were full of talk of our young magazine challenging Dele Giwa’s NEWSWATCH to a football match.
We got back to the office at about noon, and a lady colleague at the office said to us: “Dele Giwa is dead!”
Still sweat-sodden and wearing our football togs and boots, we rushed to First Foundation Hospitals, Ikeja and saw the goriest sight ever of the dead Dele Giwa.
Then we sped to Giwa’s house and saw the blown out window.
We finally got to Dele Giwa’s office at Newswatch where we met a weeping Dele Olojede being consoled by Tony Momoh, Segun Osoba etc.
It was such a gory day but we had to work doubly hard to make sure we produced a bumper cover story in celebration of the mourned one.
Dele Giwa could be called the rock star of Nigerian journalism of his epoch.
His star attraction was well-nigh impossible to match or beat.
Incidentally, the guru who brought him back from the United States to work in Daily Times of Nigeria, Ambassador Patrick Dele Cole, passed away this week.
It was PD Cole who totally reshaped Nigerian journalism when he poached the duo of Dele Giwa and Dr Stanley Macebuh to work in the Daily Times.
Nigerians started bearing witness to the revolutionary “Page Seven” features driven by Dele Giwa.
Stanley Macebuh transformed the Editorial Board into a formidable force of the newspaper, and laid down the rule that opinion articles must perforce not be more than 800 words.
According to Stanley Macebuh, “If anybody cannot write his opinion in 800 words it means he does not understand the subject well enough!”
Dele Giwa made column writing a star attraction, and he was over the years justly celebrated for his column “Parallax Snaps”.
The columns of Dele Giwa and his friend, Ray Ekpu, almost made everybody who could string a sentence or two want to write columns in newspapers.
When Dele Giwa left the government-owned Daily Times he found his perch in Bashorun MKO Abiola’s Concord newspapers.
He was thereafter joined in the Concord Group by Ray Ekpu, and they upped the ante of their column-writing with greater grace.
The Sunday Concord that Dele Giwa edited was akin to a collector’s item every Sunday.
After yet another arrest by the then Inspector-General of Police Sunday Adewusi, Dele Giwa penned the immortal column entitled: “Adewusi’s Men Can’t Shoot Straight.”
After departing from Concord newspapers, Dele Giwa teamed up with Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed to launch the breakthrough weekly news magazine NEWSWATCH.
The magazine became a must-read every Monday as it was almost always bought off the newsstands in a jiffy.
Dele Giwa and his men and women gave investigative journalism a new lease of life.
The magazine had the uncanny ability to scoop and break news faster than the daily newspapers.
It was incumbent on Newswatch to delve into fields where even angels feared to tread.
All the stories were presented via accomplished prose, and many other magazines aspired to follow Newswatch’s lead.
It was at the height of his powers that Dele Giwa drew the ire of the powers-that-be.
Dele Giwa was astounded to receive the notification that he was planning a socialist revolution!
Anybody who knew Dele Giwa could attest to the fact that he was more of a socialite than a socialist.
In fact, when he came to visit his friend, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, our teacher at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, he dismissed our talk of the ideology of socialism and drove us to the house where his late father had lived as a very poor man.
He swore that he would have nothing to do with poverty in his life.
When the governmental forces came up with the charge of him initiating a socialist revolution, he knew he was in grave danger and duly alerted his lawyer, the irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi.
Even as things were still neither here nor there, the security goons assured Dele Giwa that the matter had been settled, and he was asked to give the direction of his house to receive a present.
Dele Giwa was eating breakfast with the London correspondent of Newswatch, Kayode Soyinka, when the parcel was delivered.
“This must be from the president,” Dele Giwa reportedly said as he opened the parcel.
Then there was the dastardly explosion, and a bloodied and mangled Dele Giwa had to be rushed to Dr Tosin Ajayi’s First Foundation Hospitals, Ikeja, where he gave up the ghost.
Dele Olojede and Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo memorialized him in the book Born To Run.
My tears, once more…
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Image: Richard Duijnstee Pixabay (modified)
