Dele Giwa

The May 1986 riot at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, in which some innocent students were killed by the police, presented an occasion for Giwa to indict the government, to attack the police and to dismiss the then Minister of Education, Jibril Aminu, as an architect of violence against reason, an enemy of students and lecturers, the bigot of a special kind, a man who was determined to destroy the Nigerian university system. The then Vice-Chancellor of ABU, Ango Abdullahi, too did not escape his barbs. He believed that the future of Nigeria belong to its youths: “Children such as most of the kids in our universities are like spring itself, the prime of life that must be tended like a beautiful flower in bloom. They represent the future of the fatherland, the segment of the population in whom the government and the people plant their hopes for the future.” Giwa must be sad in his grave that many Nigerian students in our public universities are learning under what Jean-Paul Satre, the brilliant French philosopher and literary theorist has called ‘nervous condition.’

How come the vile and corrupt walk our streets as heroes and heroines? Why don’t we teach them a hard lesson or two? Instead, we are amused, while some even protest on behalf of the rogues. There must be something abnormal about a people who troop out to dance for a governor who has been proved by a legally constituted authority to be a looter of the state’s treasury. Giwa once observed that Nigerians behave that way because “they have been shocked to the state of unshockability.” Also, he said that Nigerians “regard themselves as passing sojourners on the geographical amalgam called Nigeria. It is like standing away at a distance and looking like riveted spectators at the greatest inferno in the world. Nigeria is on fire and the citizens are amused.” Pause for a moment to consider the metaphor of a people who stand akimbo and laugh while their only house is on fire. People who do that need an urgent psychiatric attention. Don’t they?

To him, part of the deep trouble with Nigeria is the curse of oil. Because we started getting the bulk of our revenue from oil, “the farmers left the farms and the youth came to town. Nobody wanted to touch dirt and carry baskets of cocoa, groundnuts and palm kernels. Why? Come to the city and live the easy life. Life was too easy, and nobody waited long enough to ponder the question of where oil was leading the nation. Oil made everything possible, including the Nigerian Civil War.” He then advised that Nigerian and mankind for that matter “must make peace with the soil and damn the arrogance and deceptiveness of oil.” In his other essays, Giwa wrote against many of our other ‘nervous conditions’: the inanities in many sectors of our national life. And he summoned his compatriots to high ideals.

As I write this, I have on my desk, an illuminating anthology titled Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs. John Pilger, the editor, writes in his lucid introduction:

Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job: who push back screens, peer behind facades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour…
In these days of corporate multimedia run by a powerful few in thrall to profit, many journalists are part of a propaganda apparatus without even consciously realizing It. Power rewards their collusion with faint recognition: a place at the table, perhaps even a Companion of the British Empire (read MFR, OFR, CFR etc). at their most supine, they are spokesmen of the spokesmen, debriefers of the briefers, what the French call functionnaires.

If Giwa were alive at this giddy time, in this pond of a country which is now full of bigger sharks, would he have allowed himself to be transformed into one of those corporate pen pushers and journalists described by Pilger as “spokesmen of the spokesmen,” or sheer functionnaires of a powerful few? Through his writings we know the cause for which Giwa was asking people to lay down their lives. But since he once told Professor Toye Olorode, a University of Ife Marxist, in growing anger during a well attended symposium on campus, that he was a Realist, could he have shunned the temptations of wealth, of power and the attendant compromises as an avowed Realist? I honestly do not have a straight answer. But I take consolation in the following exhortation of Salman Rushdie at a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1996:

In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas there must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place – that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show me, prove it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists – for power for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors – that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve.

That was what Giwa too believed. He rose from a humble background to the peak of his profession through hard work. He earned his first degree in English at Brooklyn College (where Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi taught him briefly) and second degree in Public communication at Fordham University in the Bronx all in America and worked for about four years as a journalist with The New York Times before he came down to Nigeria. He was a flamboyant extrovert who did not know how to keep any secret. His generosity of spirit was electrifying. According to the critical yet forgiving reports of his life in Dele Olojede and Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo’s Born To Run: The Story of Dele Giwa ( a book that the publisher, Chief Joop Berkhout of Spectrum, had to withdraw from the market because of tremendous pressure from the General Babangida junta), we know that Giwa loved the pleasures of life so much and never for a moment wanted to be reminded of the privation he suffered as a kid growing up in Ile Ife. A very sensitive man, he could hold tender moments for a long time. He said in his contribution to the University of Ife Symposium: “I know that poverty is a terrible thing and I would not want to share in it again. I grew up poor, and would not like to live the way I grew up.”

This man who liked to brag about his intellectual power, who loved to say that he was the best journalist in Nigeria, never suffered any fool gladly. He did not glide gently through the world. By the time he was letter-bombed at 39, a truly unique morbid incident in Nigeria at that time, he was just beginning to realize some of his tall dreams. It behooves those of us who are journalists today to do our work excellently as a mark of respect not only for this martyred journalist but also for Krees Imodibe, Tayo Awotusin, Bagauda Kaltho, Godwin Agbroko and others who were killed in the course of doing their duties as investigative journalists. For as Giwa’s essays on journalists and journalism show very clearly, he insisted on nothing but the best from his colleagues. For instance, writing on the senseless murder of Bill Stewart, an American television reporter who was murdered in Nicaragua in June 1979, Giwa threw this challenge in his Press Snaps column in the Daily Times of 4 July 1979: “Any journalist, be it in Akure or somewhere in the Soviet Union, should feel concerned at the wanton killing of any journalist anywhere in the world.” We all must rise to this challenge. To unravel the mystery of Giwa’s assassination is one way of paying part of the debt we owe his living memory. We must cut to the heart of the case of one of our most gifted colleagues. That will be the best tribute to pay him.

*Mr Kunle Ajibade is Executive Editor of TheNEWS and P.M.NEWS. He is the author of the award -winning Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes and What a Country!