Dele Giwa

To read Giwa’s gutsy pieces, especially those on the innocence and potential of youths, freedom of speech, the practice of democracy in our country, the selfishness and greed of members of our National Assembly, the high rate of unemployment, the curse of oil, the poor state of our infrastructure, the need for a regime of meritocracy, the call for public service reform, the terrible image of our country abroad, the failure of Nigerians to believe in their country, the need for courage and solidarity among journalists and the escalating waves of crime in Nigeria, is to be confronted by the bluntness and the timelessness of a gifted writer’s truth. He was generally light, breezy and chatty. Even a casual reader would not fail to notice the felicity of his prose and their exact revelation. He was not a poet but he sometimes wrote in the cadences of a poet. He was not a playwright yet he sometimes made the best use of the language of drama in his columns. As a buff of popular literature, a lover of music and a film enthusiast, he occasionally adorned his essays with moving lines from songs, novels and films. He admired creative artists like Ken Follet, James Clavell, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Norman Mailer, George Orwell, George Benson, John Denver, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder (he even named Aisha, his daughter, after Wonder’s daughter) and several others, because they inspired him at one time or another. Giwa paid close attention to the literary quality of his journalism. And he was well respected by his colleagues for it. He trained his eyes on the foibles of his society and persuaded his readers to rise above them. It was as if he was inevitably asking us to employ his own seductive hopes and powerful social imagination to illuminate our grim conditions.

How does a writer reach for excellence? How does he commit himself to reasoned courage? These questions lubricated Dele Giwa’s path as a columnist. His first Preface to Cover in Newswatch titled “Guts, the Right Stuff” on Wole Soyinka, one year before Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in Literature and one year before Giwa was cut down gruesomely, attempted to answer that question. Soyinka, he said, “is not keeping quiet. He is forever squealing, squealing like Gunter Grass in Germany, another artist who hates tyranny in all its colours. He is squealing like Jacobo Timmerman, the Argentine Journalist who writes in blood his experience in jail for squealing on tyranny… Enough Soyinkas from Maiduguri to Calabar and from Lagos to Sokoto may set us free of the leeches eating at the soul of Nigeria.” To him, a writer is ‘the right stuff’ if he has a sense of outrage against injustice. He wasn’t satisfied that “not enough Nigerians have the guts to get angry and squeal.” Yet he strongly believed that “Nigeria needs squealers, those who are prepared to commit seppuku (Japanese for suicide) for the father land.”

Obviously, it was not just from writers that he expected this virtue; he felt that it was something that every responsible citizen should possess. In the Sunday Concord of 2 August 1981, he argued most coherently about a sense of patriotism that was lacking in many Nigerians. And with a sense of outrage he lamented our history of perfidy and subservience:

When the European came to Nigeria and the rest of Africa, the black man sold out to him, capturing some of their own and selling them to the white man for pittances. That’s when the black man lost the fight. At the same time that the Japanese was exploiting the white man’s “barbaric curiosity,”

Nigeria and the rest of Africa were busy selling out, getting nothing in return. Today, that sell-out is the reason for Africa being referred to derisively as under developed. Nigeria, for one, has a chance to get up and go, if for nothing else but for its oil wealth, but something that can be called a lack of national will is tying down the nation. This has nothing to do with the government, as much as it has everything to do with the Nigerian who doesn’t seem to believe in his fatherland, who seems too ready to make a quick buck at the expense of the nation… if only the Nigerian – whatever his or her station – will think less of himself and think more about the nation, maybe then Nigerian will begin that tough march into the future. The question, really, is: How many Nigerians are willing to commit seppuku for Nigeria?

He kept hammering on the need to commit seppuku, the need to love the country much more than ourselves because without it, he reasoned, the country would be destroyed by its greedy, selfish and arrogant rulers. Exactly six years before he was murdered in his library in Lagos, Giwa had written a piece titled “Modest Proposal” in which he criticised the corruption, the waste of resources and selfishness of our National Assembly members. He might well be talking about the current members of the Assembly:

Why are these fellows wasting the tax payer’s money gallivanting around the world? It constitutes an incredible joke to see a Nigerian legislative committee on internal matters going to the United States. To do what? Nobody suggested that democracy would come cheap. Even if the system were designed for its money-saving possibilities, the sets of legislators elected in 1979 saw their elections as means to live like rubber barons. Since coming to Lagos, the National Assembly members have displayed such selfishness that their only legislative achievements were in fighting for higher salaries for themselves, and trying to empty the national treasury by voting dizzying amounts for themselves as allowances. Because the president and governors who constitute the national executive council said that the legislators couldn’t make the nation poor in their efforts to make themselves rich, the legislators embarked on a single-minded exercise to amend the constitution…

All that pales in comparison to the lawmakers’ penchant for overseas travelling which brings about the modest proposal. Members of the National Assembly should introduce a bill proposing the transfer of the assembly to either New York or London where they could all live and from where they could be visiting Nigeria. The American Government may not object to the proposal since that would give it the chance to watch the lawmakers and educate them on the presidential system. Or, in the extreme, to ban any legislator from embarking on a foreign visit at the expense of the tax payer for at least one year.

As a sophisticated liberal humanist, Giwa wrote in a moving manner about the unfortunate army of unemployed graduates in Nigeria. As an employer of labour himself (Chief Executive Officer of Newswatch) he lamented the heap of application letters in his office. That was when General Ibrahim Babangida placed an embargo on employment —a policy dictated by the International Monetary Funds. In writing about applications for employment which “have taken on a note of entreaty for survival,” he blamed Professor Emmanuel Edozien, who was once a Minister of Economic Planning under Alhaji Shehu Shagari. How could a genuine professor of Economics have refused to heed Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s timely warning in 1980 that Nigeria’s economy was heading for the rocks? Giwa wondered. He believed that if the economy had been carefully managed, there would have been jobs for many people. But he did not stop at that. He also blamed Nigerians for their laziness. His words: “Nigerians, let’s face it, like easy answers and easy money. Nobody really wants to work hard. Now that the oil is drying up, and that’s the truth, many people are afraid of hard work that must follow if this country is to find a way. And in the middle of indecision, people are suffering: The hard days are here, and nobody knows what to do. People are feeling sorry for themselves, for most people have forgotten the meaning of hard work.”

In May 1985, when Nigerian journalists celebrated thirty years of the founding of their union, Chief Chike Ofodile, the Minister of Justice in the Buhari/Idiagbon era was invited to talk on Decree 4 and press freedom. Ofodile spoke in support of the decree. In a rather bitter reaction, Giwa stood Ofodile’s logic on its head. He said Ofodile’s position was very dangerous. He asked: “How does Ofodile expect the press to assist the government in enforcing accountability if the press lost its right to protect the sources of information?” In its arrogance of power, the Muhammadu Buhari/Tunde Idiagbon regime inflicted on Nigerian journalists the decree that forbade frank thought and unvarnished reports.

In a piece he wrote on armed robbery in Nigeria, Giwa suggested that the police were losing out mainly because they were not as sophisticated as the robbers:

The robbers know how the police operate, but the police don’t know how robbers operate. They know too well that the police are immobile. They man roadblocks and check vehicles and the occupants in much the same way all over the city. If you are stopped and you put on your inner light and wind down your window before you are asked, and you grin at the police they will ask you to open your boot. And that’s it. No effort is made to look at you if you have any bulge under your jacket or your buba. And nobody looks in the glove compartment of your car or takes a peek under your seat where a weapon could be concealed. And of course the roadblocks are in specified positions. Even if they are moved around, the robbers will survey their areas of operations before setting out. And they thus know the routes that are free. That is why they win and the police lose.

The situation remains essentially the same. If Giwa were still alive he would have observed a more citizen- friendly police officer at the checkpoint who stops you and asks, “How is your family, sir!” And if he sees a press sticker on your car, he would say excitedly, “Ah, press! I bow and tremble, sir! Your boys are on duty! Just anything to buy pure water, sir!” Yes, our police are not well paid, they live largely in slums, they lack the sophisticated equipment to combat modern day armed robbers, but they also lack the decency and moral courage to wage a ruthless war against those robbers with whom they sometimes sit in secret to share the loot.

Giwa had his own encounter with armed robbers when they snatched his Honda Prelude in April 1982. The car was less than two weeks old when the carjackers robbed him of it. His reporting of it is a true measure of his gift:

The mallams had just finished sweeping the front yard of the house and were getting ready to open their kiosk for the day’s business. The horn was saying that the gate should be opened and that one fateful minute of waiting while the hook was moved and the gate opened. In that one minute, I looked up into my rear view mirror, lest another car was held up trying to drive past. Then I saw it, a metallic brown Peugeot 504 SR car with three rather gentle looking young men inside. No panic. Earl Klugh was still playing, but a little sense of discomfort touched me as I thought the opening of the gate was holding up the gentlemen who were perhaps waiting to drive past and go their way.

 

I saw that the plate number read something like OG- something -JA, and I knew that they could not have been my friends, and so could not have come to visit me. For the car did not drive past as I turned into my driveway and the mallams were opening the garage for me to drive in. They followed me, bumper to bumper. Even then, I sensed no danger. After all, the Prelude was mine; I bought it with my hand and salty sweat. Before I could turn off the engine, two occupants of the car materialized at the window on the passenger side of the car.

I frowned, and the next thing I saw were two narrow nozzles of hand guns. One was aluminum in colour, and the other was black like an ugly snake. The first split of the close encounter brought a rush of confusing emotions; anger, humiliation and a sense of loss; but no fear. “Your hands up, and get out,” that was from the guy with the aluminum gun, the type called Saturday Night Special in the United States. The guy was well dressed, a gold chain dangling from his neck, but his face was contorted with a nervousness that dilated his pupils. His friend, the other one with black gun, was silent and he was the one that told me with his menacing visage to listen to the clean-cut fellow with the aluminum gun. “Out and keep up your hands, or I will kill you.”

It’s a kind of gentlemen’s agreement and I knew that if I failed to make a choice, get out and keep up my hands, then he was free to kill me. So, I obeyed. He got in that beautiful white lady. But he had a problem. The car was automatic, meaning it had no clutch and that you couldn’t move the car from Park to Reverse or Drive without pressing a small button on the shift to move the car.

These guys, no matter how long they have been at it, stealing people’s cars and threatening death if the hands didn’t go up, had never stolen an automatic shift car and didn’t know what to do. I was looking at him as he struggled with the gear, and a wave of perverse relief ran through me. “Show me the reverse,” the man with the aluminum gun yelled. I was happy and I began to move fast into my residence, even as I sensed that the third man in the getaway 504 covered me with a heavier and more sinister-looking automatic gun. “Shoot, damn it,” a silent sound said within me. But sadly, the car suddenly jumped back and the get-away car screeched back and they all drove away like phantoms, with my beautiful white Prelude. LA6343 KE, like an eagle, flying after the 504.

That recalls the one he had written earlier in Sunday Concord of 2 November 1980 in which he observed among other things: “Ten years ago threatening letters from armed robbers challenging whole neighbourhoods to a duel would have made screaming headlines on the front pages of most newspapers, unlike nowadays when they are virtually ignored by the media in that they have become too commonplace to be regarded as news.” Many of the robbers have since become kidnappers, oil robbers and mercenaries for Boko Haram and ISIS. Worse still, some of them have moved to law courts and churches to continue the robbery spree.