• Home
• Columnist
• Videos
• Artist
  • Musicians
  • Actors
  • Comedians
• Notable Nigerians
• Legend Dies
• Articles
  • Nigeria Articles
• Photos
• Submit Article

As a journalist, editor and columnist, Dele Giwa wrote incisive articles and reports that brought him fame and earned him considerable following of readers

Long before even the first edition of Newswatch magazine hit the news stands in 1985, Dele Giwa had earned fame throughout Nigeria for his ingenuity and writing talent. His skills, wit and fearlessness were a regular feature of his writings, which, with regard to Nigeria, where he returned to after his sojourn abroad, spanned seven years. At different times in his career, he wrote variously on many subjects such as politics, philosophy, crime and death, in a career that took him to the Daily Times and Concord, before Newswatch.

But Yemi Ogunbiyi, his bosom friend, said Giwa’s talent as a writer began manifesting during his high school days at Oduduwa College, Ile Ife, and later, Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, NBC, Ibadan, where he worked as a news staff. “The years at Oduduwa College and the NBC, made important impact on his life. Under the guidance of the late Hartley Sutton, his senior English teacher at Oduduwa College, (who was a Caribbean immigrant), he took up writing seriously for the first time. Sutton had just started a new press club magazine, The Torch, and Giwa became its pioneer editor, in addition to serving as a member of the editorial board of the school magazine, The Ooduan.” Ogunbiyi added that “while Sutton laid the foundation of what was to blossom into a life-long career in journalism, it was the late Alhaji Saka Fagbo, his boss at the NBC, who (in Dele Giwa’s own words), was his ‘first journalism teacher.’ Fagbo loved him and took more than a nodding interest in his work.” 

 Giwa later travelled to the US in 1971 and earned a degree in English at the City University of  New York. He then later joined the  New York Times. For a young, black African to secure a job with a reputable newspaper as the New York Times was a big deal indeed but not many Nigerians knew him, given that he lived abroad. But this was soon to change when he returned to  Nigeria in 1979.

In his  book, Murder of Dele Giwa, the Answered Question, Richard Akinnola wrote that “during his journalism career, particularly in Nigeria, Dele Giwa ran an incisive and popular column- Parallax Snaps, a column which he wrote at the Daily Times, carried to the Sunday Concord and then to Newswatch.”  It was during those years, between 1979 and 1986,  that Giwa wrote his way to fame: attracting  a considerable  following of  readers with his “breezy writing style which was straight to the point and therefore easy to handle,” according to Ogunbiyi. He added that Giwa was “brash and brazen, without necessarily being arrogant, audacious and bold, without  being impudent and haughty.” The result was that Giwa “literally dripped of  self confidence,” and  “compelled you in his ebullience to notice that a  new ‘kid’ was in town.” 

Gore Vidal, an American novelist and essayist, wrote that “style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.”  This largely was true of  Giwa. He was not afraid to speak his mind through his writing. Ray Ekpu, Giwa’s colleague and friend, once said that one always knew where Giwa stood on any issue. “You could always know where he stood on a particular issue because he was frank. He didn’t hide his feelings. He didn’t have this hypocrisy that is so prominent in Nigerian life,” Ekpu said.

Looking at  Giwa’s works, it is obvious that courage was a theme that ran through many of them. He was not someone who spoke tongue in cheek, or a stylist who couched his thoughts in flowery language in order to avoid bluntness.

In one of his articles that appeared in the July 14, 1986 edition of Newswatch titled: “Those Days Are Gone,” Giwa noted that tribalism is a dye which colours everything in Nigeria. “Every action taken to kill the cancer of tribalism has only succeded in strengthening it. Think of national character, quota and national balancing, and see the damage it has done to merit in Nigeria, and ultimately the havoc it has done to the progress of Nigeria...the country is in love with fielding its last eleven, which may be its one millionth eleven. And that is why Nigeria is where it is now, with its golden days gone.”

In another article, “Death of Innocence,” Giwa, in a story that is as relevant today as it was 25 years ago, given the ceaseless looting spree across the land, wrote that “deception has become the new order. Stealing is no big deal, almost everyone has turned into a thief. You can hardly get anything done without someone expecting you to bribe him, and everyone discusses it in the open.”

His boldness was again on display in “God’s Experiment,” where he talked about the Second Tier Foreign Exchange Market, SFEM, policy that was introduced by the military administration of Ibrahim Babangida. If SFEM failed, Giwa wrote, everyone would be in trouble. But it could be worse for the government leaders who risked being “stoned on the street.”

Such serious issues of national importance, whether bordering on government policy or societal malaise that needed to be addressed, at times, gave way to humour. Giwa, to some people who knew him, was a lively and humorous man, and this was evident in his works. His piece about one of his colleagues, Dupe Ajose, who was the chief accountant of the Concord Press, comes to mind. “Ajose and I were always arguing over the primacy of journalists in a newspaper company,” began Giwa. “It always went like this: Dele, I can’t sign a claim of N30 for a trip to Ibadan.”

“Dupe, you have to sign it, the only way to get to Ibadan in a hurry is to hire a taxi.” She would then readjust herself in her seat behind her large desk. “I don’t like this receipt given by the taxi driver,” she would say, using her pen to punch the offending item. And I would take the voucher and look at the offending item, and I would say: “But you know that taxi drivers don’t carry receipts. Our reporters have to write the particulars of the drivers and the amount and get the drivers, most of whom can’t write, to sign the receipts.” “Hm,” she would say, “you journalists, especially you, are impossible.” And she would sign, and I would say: “Hm, you accountants, especially you, are impossible...”

Such lively exchange between a journalist and an accountant, however, didn’t continue for long  because Ajose suddenly died. Giwa  was pained. He lamented that Ajose was only 33 years and that “ she was too young and, in every sense of the word, too innocent to die like that.” Death, as scary as it is, was a subject that Giwa never shied away from, even as he, in a sense, appeared perplexed by its audacity. He had, even before the demise of Ajose, written about the death of his namesake, Dele Udo, a star athlete. “A dirge to the memory of Udo is not because of what his name is or because he was a star. One would feel sad for the death of anybody, be they, those who died in the Black Maria or anybody shot “incidentally” by policemen. A loss of life is always a cause of sadness.” In yet another article, Giwa appeared to paraphrase the statement when he said that “one life taken in cold blood is as gruesome as millions lost in a pogrom.”

In Death and Destiny, another of his popular works, Giwa had waxed almost lyrical as he recalled  the impact  Murtala Muhammed, Nigeria’s former head of state, made, in so short a time he was in power: “When the unexpected happens and man is always surprised by death, although everyone knows that it shall come when it shall, even a child in elementary school finds himself dabbling in verses...what really can man do about death and such matters over which he has no control, except to resign himself to saying to Hell...!” He regretted that “good men, men of purpose  who are true heroes, do get cut down in midstream on their way to achieving greatness.”

Considering the attention he paid death as a writer, it would seem, even to a casual observer, that Giwa had a foreboding of death. His death via a parcel bomb, came as a shock to many Nigerians, as the method was considered novel at the time. But ardent readers of his column might recall that Giwa had, in fact, written about the death of a foreign journalist who was killed through a bomb that was planted in his car. The article appeared under the caption, Random Musings, on July 31, 1983.

The victim was an American journalist from the state of Arizona called Bolles. “Not realising that a bomb had been planted under his car, he started it and before he could hear the bomb, he was blown to hell. That’s what his pen did to him, which was proved not to be mightier than the mafia’s bomb...” The thing about death though, Giwa had noted, long even before his own death in 1986, is that it “loses its impact when it visits by appointment.” That’s why it “creeps on its victims with stealth and delivers its blow with utmost surprise to ensure that it’s impact is felt. Death looks for a happy home where it can turn the happiness into grief; ensures that for days the household will have nothing to discuss but the blow of death.”

In a paper he delivered to mark the 10th anniversary of Giwa’s death, Ogunbiyi pointed out that a striking feature of Giwa’s works was “his penetrating fore-knowledge about even his own death,” and that he didn’t know of any other Nigerian columnist that had written so “elaborately about the subject of death as Giwa did.” Still, another underlying theme in Giwa’s works, according to Ogunbiyi, was the “human condition”—about “corruption in high places, about human degredation, about power and its delusions, about freedom and its denial, about competence and its absence in our national life...” But, he adds, even  “a deadly serious journalist,” like Giwa could occasionally “come across as boring and tedious.”

Giwa also had a knack for dramatic intros, which were at once poignant and fascinating. “Now you see them, now you don’t. They are a myth...,” he had begun, in Son of Dog, another of his popular work. Such interesting openings easily lured the reader into the body of his works, where his points are then marshalled out in his typically audacious style.

His writing skills and style, his courage and passion for journalism, and even curiously, the manner of his death, is known to have inspired many people to take to journalism. One of them is Osa Director, a former Kano State correspondent of Tell magazine, who later rose to become editor-in-chief of Insider magazine. He would never forget that day, October 19, 1986, when the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA newscaster announced the killing of Giwa through a letter bomb. It was a blow the young man found hard to digest. Giwa, along with Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed, were some of  Director’s favourite writers. To now hear that Giwa had lost his life in the most gruesome manner, was  hard to bear. Numbed with shock that night, Director “left the living room for his bedroom with a heavy heart crying,” the first time he would shed tears for a man he had never met in his life.

Devastated as he was, Director resolved to travel to Ugbekpe Ekperi to witness Giwa’s burial. He did, and it was just while he strolled away from the slain journalist’s graveside that the probing question came up again, for he believed that Giwa was killed for what he stood for. “Now that Giwa is dead, will the truth, or rather, the pursuit of truth, die?” There and then, Director resolved to honour Giwa by becoming a journalist himself. When, the next year, 1987, he completed his degree programme in Biochemistry at the University of Benin, Director, unlike many of his colleagues, was not thinking of any laboratory or health or medical institution to work for, but to become a journalist.

Felix Umoru is another man who was attracted to journalism by Giwa. He admitted being a fan of the columnist long before he joined hands with three of his friends to establish Newswatch. “I was in secondary school when he was at Sunday Concord as the editor. Then, eventually, as the editor of the Sunday Concord, I was always making sure that I got a copy of the paper so  I could read it. As a writer, Giwa was flamboyant,  bold and dogged, and I was inspired to go into journalism. So, even while I was still in form two in secondary school, I made up my mind to become a journalist and of course, I went ahead to study Mass Communication.”

Not only that, Umoru had looked forward to  joining Newswatch to work  under Giwa’s supervision, but that  did not happen, as the merchants of death soon stormed Giwa’s Talabi St