Eddie Iroh

No further disputations or altercations would be entertained in the matter of office allocations.
Signed
Eddie Iroh
Managing Editor, The Guardian
Circa February 1984

AT The Guardian writing was artistic, impressionistic and elegant. It spread to all interactions, speech, the written word for publications, even office memos were not exempted. For days, we pilgrimaged to the Managing Editor’s to read the crisp delivery. There were more.

We had escaped to the bunker, as some of us referred to the underground newsroom that also harboured our library. I call it escape because Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor were incarcerated in Kirikiri Prisons for reporting a story “the veracity of which is not in doubt” as The Guardian maintained. The same Buhari, who is promoted as a lover of truth thought that a story about change of guards at the Nigerian High Commission in London was not what Nigerians should know.

Those were sober days as we awaited their trial. They were eventually jailed. The locus of their arrest was our newsroom upstairs, an open hall, as newsrooms should be, that you could peep into, while making a routine of clearing with the receptionist. Buhari’s security men arrived, mingled in the newsroom and took our colleagues away. The regime excelled in spiriting people away.

While the movement downstairs had been planned, the incident hastened it. The fortified newsroom in the pit came with challenges. Many of the top guns, we had at least five former Chief Press Secetaries to Governors, and Dedem Kanayo Esinulo, a former media aide to General of the Peoples Army, Dedem Gburugburu Chukwuemeka Odimegwu-Ojukwu.

Some of them lost their appointed spaces upstairs, hence the “disputations and altercations” that Eddie managed from his cubicle, where he edited The Sunday Guardian, tormenting Taiwo Obe (whose journalism skills were honed at the Institute of Management & Technology, Enugu, where else?) to subedit the copies to the standards that met that prophecy (adverts) on billboards, “Sooner or later, you will read The Guardian”.

Eddie defied descriptions or compartmentalisation. A novelist, television producer, among other things in-between, he was daper, natty, and puffed a cigar like mentor-in-chief, Stanley Macebuh. He crafted excellent prose that often tilted to verse. His one-line paragraphs had consummate staccato effect. He was electric. He was urbane.

He spoke English with an accent that challenged everything you thought about him. He glowing records in Biafra would be a story for another day.

If dared on the dance floor, he floored you flawlessly. My everlasting memory of that was the 1982 twists and turns he executed to the discofied version of Eddie Grant’s Walking On The Sunshine, a top of the chart number across continents. Venue was Pini Jason’s in Ijesha, Lagos.

In later years when he moved to London, a reporter encountered him in Lagos. He wanted to know if Eddie was to edit a gossip magazine that the promoters linked to him. Eddie dismissed the charge as “low quality rumour”.

Happy birthday sir. May your gun never run dry.

Ikeddy ISIGUZO is Editor-in-Chief of The Oracle Today, an Onitsha-based weekly