- It is shameful that 30 years after, we are yet to know whodunnit
He was clearly ahead of his time. He was young, dashing, ebullient and swashbuckling with it. He was a man of the word, as well as of the world. A newsman’s newsman imbued with that gung-ho Yankee spirit; perhaps the result of having studied in Brooklyn and had a stint with the New York Times, USA.
Giwa returned to Nigeria in the 70s and regaled his compatriots with his American brand of no holds barred kind of journalism. At a very young age he held senior positions in Daily Times and National Concord before he led a team of like minds to set up Newswatch magazine. Giwa, Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed were among the shining lights of Nigeria’s print journalism of the late 70s and 80s and Newswatch, a weekly journal epitomised the tribe.
Giwa was not only at the head of this plucky team, he was the catalyst of an interesting new time for Nigeria journalism. He was at once a newshound who instinctively knew what news item would ignite public imagination every week – and Newswatch sold like essential staple at its height. Giwa was also a master of the prose who relished the American simple, fleeting style. His weekly column Parallax Snap was a treat to millions.
Coupled with his celebrity status as a professional journalist, he also kept up a jet-set lifestyle: trendy dressing and high life. He loved the good life, carousing with the high and mighty and getting too cozy with people in power that he must also hold to account as a journalist. He did not keep a decent, professivonal distance from the personages he reported.
But all these may not have mattered had the unexpected not happened. On the cool Sunday morning of October 19, 1986, history was made in Nigeria – albeit, a dark one. A letter bomb sent to Giwa’s residence on this day terminated a seeming enchanted life and career.
The question then was whodunnit? Who killed Dele Giwa? Of course, the nation never got any answer; that peculiar gruesomeness, first of its kind in the land could never be unravelled till today. Thirty years after, with the assassination yet unravelled, the question today may well be: who didn’t kill Dele Giwa?
It was in the heady days of military administration and with a head of state of the time, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida preferring to be addressed as ‘President’. According to the only witness to the deathly transaction, Mr. Kehinde Soyinka, who was the London correspondent of Newswatch at the time and who was in Giwa’s study with him, upon the receipt of the killer parcel, Giwa was said to have remarked: “This must be from the President”. An account also said that the letter bore the seal of the president of the federal republic.
The heinous murder was mired in conspiracy theories and seeming official cover-up. For a blast that left a surfeit of leads and a littering of plausible proofs, no conclusive investigation was carried out and the matter was never given any closure. Spirited efforts by late activist lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, to investigate the case were stalled and stone-walled at every point.
Giwa, who was a few days earlier accused of stockpiling arms by the military authorities, was also accused of possibly blackmailing the military president over a drug case. The now notorious story of a certain Glory Okon who was alleged to be a courier for the wife of the ‘president’ and who was supposedly arrested, allegedly sprung from detention and later touted to have died was deeply linked to the Giwa murder.
Suffice to say that Giwa’s life, times and tragic demise were stuff for block buster movies. We urge the authorities to reopen the case and get to the root of it, lest history may hold us all culpable for that most ghastly phenomenon. We dare add that there must be lessons in it for all.
Professional journalists and indeed all professionals holding positions in public trust must at all times show themselves to be above board.
