Reminiscences On Dele Giwa

“Dele Giwa was an exemplar of the journalist as insider, if not as participant. He relished his closeness to power and influence, and was not above flaunting it. He prized the access to news and information that it gave him … few public affairs commentators can perform effectively without it. But it also carries a price.”

Around 10 o’clock in the morning on October 19, 1986, I sat down and wrote a letter to Dele Giwa after completing my usual Sunday morning chores. My younger brother who had spent Saturday night with us and was about to return to his lodging at Ketu was to deliver the letter early on Monday. “What if he is not around?” he asked in all innocence. “Give it to his secretary,” I told him, attaching no significance to his question. About five hours later, his question would turn out to have been a stunning prophecy. For, at the time that I was composing that letter, Dele Giwa was being blasted out of this world by a parcel bomb whose origin is still undetermined.

My undelivered letter, roughly two octave pages long, lies before me as I write these lines. The contents, I am sorry to report, will not yield a scintilla of evidence, hard or soft, concerning the identity or motive of his murderers. I was only asking him to help me mollify a Newswatch staffer who was inconsolable after failing to secure a place in the diploma in mass communication programme of the University of Lagos. The young man was persuaded that if I had pleaded his cause vigorously enough, he would have been accepted. Nothing I said to the contrary moved him

Survival as linked inextricably to theirs. I will not be surprised if at the time of his death, Dele Giwa had begun to find the cost of access to power too high and to question whether it really made a great deal of difference to his work. Journalists who pride themselves on kind of access should once in a while stand back and ask themselves whether the professional rewards justify the cost.

One aspect of Dele Giwa’s life remains a puzzle. If he had any admiration for Chief Obafemi Awolowo who, all things considered, should have been his role model if not his idol, he kept it splendidly to himself. Like Awo several decades before him, Giwa had raised himself by his bootstraps and by a determination that bordered on monomania. Like Awo, he was driven by a stupendous energy and possessed a prodigious capacity for work. Again, like Awo he believed very much in himself and never doubted that he could attain any goal he set himself. And, yet Dele almost could not bring himself to speak well of Awo, at least in public. Even the probing, skeptical reporter in him could not see the so-called Maroko land deal as the hoax that it was. What forces were at work here? Over to you, psycho-historians.

©MatterArising (1992)
(Pp.294-296)