How do you forget a colleague and a friend who was more like a brother? How do you forget a co-conspirator with whom, in 1984, we decided to quit our comfort zone in Concord where he edited the Sunday Concord and I, the National Concord, to venture into an uncharted waters that in no time birthed the trailblazing Newswatch?
When they snuffed life out of him on October 19, 1986, the novelty, even the senselessness, of his assassination through a parcel bomb was a mortal mistake. By that method and its cowardly means of delivery, they had made an immortal hero out of Dele. And forever he has to be mourned. As we do even now.
Even the non-journalists who are keen observers of the profession have come to accept the notion that for journalists, normality is anathema, if not an outright abomination. Not for them, these purveyors of news, the normal life. Life that is normal, for them it is a monumental bore. No, they have developed some kind of sadistic attitude to life that is sane and sound. Such life is not the stuff of which news is made.
That was when death chose to call at the home of Dele Giwa, editor-in-chief and chief executive of Newswatch. It did not come stealthily as people have been told is the cowardly practice of death. It came with a bang. It came in the form of a bomb packed as a parcel. It knocked the door and Giwa welcomed it into his study, the nerve-centre of this ebullient journalist’s intellectual and journalistic activities. That was where he ate, read, thought and wrote. That was where he ushered in death.
As a successful journalist, he made plenty of friends in all walks of life, in high and low places. He equally made powerful enemies. Giwa represented all that a journalist should be – fearless, meticulous, observant and hardworking. But the more you conceal, the more the handicap, to say nothing about curiosity, of a crusading journalist whose second most important mission is to bring about improvement. The way to go about correcting a bad situation is to first make it known.
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