(A column I wrote on Oct 13, 1988, two years after Dele Giwa’s death)
IF it’s not Earl Klugh deftly playing his acoustic solo guitar, then it would be the twin voices of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel singing sweetly at the background as he sat by his typewriter writing his Parallax Snaps column in a sublime harmony of music and prose.
If it’s not Simon and Garfunkel doing Bridge Over Troubled Waters then it could be my John Lennon cassette which he borrowed long ago at the Sunday Concord and never returned. John Lennon singing Give peace a chance, but, ironically, a paranoid fellow by name Mark Chapman who saw himself as Lennon’s alter ego violently killed the avant garde poet and singer of the Beatles fame. Like Lennon, he was eliminated by God-knows-who, in the prime of his life.
From nowhere to somewhere, he rose. From obscurity into limelight. From nobody to somebody. From the dismal depth of poverty, he used his creative power to free himself from the bondage of poverty to enter the age of the Benzy journalists. If doctors, lawyers, accountants and every other professionals could earn high enough to live comfortably and ride in Mercedes Benz, couldn’t journalists? That was Dele Giwa’s credo.
He rode two brands of Mercedes and lived in relative comfort as a journalist before he was killed in bizarre circumstances through a letter bomb delivered to his home, almost two years ago.
Why should I be writing about Dele Giwa at this point in time when the second anniversary of his death is still a week ahead? One should be writing on something else; on the ‘coup’ which the nation witnessed last week when the nation was plunged into total darkness. What else is it, if not a coup, NEPA’s coup, a moral equivalent of a coup that held Nigerians hostage in the dark for days and days?
You couldn’t go to work because you couldn’t iron your shirt and trousers. You were cut off from the outside world because you couldn’t tune in to the radio or television. The mosquitoes had a field day as usual because the electric fans and air conditioners couldn’t function without light. All night long, the loud disturbing sound of generators from the homes of the affluent roared in monotone to murder the sleep of those who couldn’t afford generators.
In another geographical setting, in another society, a day without electricity is sufficient to cause civil insurrection. In America, many years ago, it led to chaos resulting in the looting of shops. Countless litigations followed with everyone claiming damages as a result of power cut which lasted barely a couple of hours.
All these wouldn’t happen in Nigeria, because NEPA has made stoics out of Nigerians and driven them to the state of “unshockability” as Dele Giwa put it. For many Nigerians, NEPA’s absence for three or four days doesn’t really mean anything. They’ve grown accustomed to having to live months without electricity. What does NEPA’s coup mean to somebody in Maroko who has never enjoyed public power supply, who relies on electricity solely from those commercializing their generators and charging high according to points?
All through his journalistic career, Dele Giwa did not stop lamenting the plight of his country perpetually trapped in NEPA’s dark alleys. In 1982, when NEPA workers plunged the nation into darkness when they were fighting for Christmas bonus, Giwa wrote in the Sunday Concord, a condemnatory article titled The NEPA Blackmail saying: “For any number of reasons, NEPA employees, of all Nigerian workers, don’t deserve any type of gratification payment. They run the most inept utility system in the world. They don’t behave like people who love their country and fellow men and women. They just don’t care…
“The mark of distinction for the NEPA workers is inefficiency. But when it came to blackmailing the nation, the NEPA workers succeeded in planning a water-tight strike that caught the nation and the Federal Government unawares. And when the government tried to circumvent the blackmail, it found that the NEPA employees had been too efficient in blocking all its avenues out of the quagmire.”
Six years after that article, nothing has changed. NEPA is still the same old capricious dictator sitting somewhere in Kainji or wherever, ruling over us all, switching light on and off at its own will. NEPA is the power above every other power in Nigeria today. And we are all under its mercy, the rulers and the ruled. That is what we should learn from last week’s nationwide total blackout.
Now to the heart of the matter: How has journalism fared in Nigeria two years without Dele Giwa? Two years without Dele Giwa and the market is exploding with magazines and newspapers of all kinds, multiplying at the speed of mushrooms. And the “Children of Dele Giwa,” that is the journalists who passed through the hands of this legendary journalism guru are making their mark in the field, passing on the breezy, colourful and people-oriented style of journalism which he bequeathed.
If there is any single person who did much to influence the art of feature writing in Nigeria of today, he is Dele Giwa. He made it clear to his staff that feature writing isn’t commentary or analysis or editorial or opinion writing or thesis or an academic paper. Feature writing, by his own standard, is going out there to observe life, talking to people, to the man in the street, to the high and low, and in the end sitting down to write a human angle story. Feature writing to him is not just sitting by the desk and manipulating hard facts. Dele Giwa hated a drab article. He wanted to see action, drama, excitement, adrenaline all injected into a story to give the reader maximum reading satisfaction.
He was the first to introduce into Nigeria the idea of Sunday magazine journalism which almost every paper in Nigeria today has embraced, although they call it all kinds of names. Two years after, Dele Giwa is as fresh as ever. What is a more befitting legacy for a journalist to continue dominating the news after his death? Today, anything related to Dele Giwa would still hit the front page. Books have been written about him, books dedicated to him, records made for him, poems. Even Dele Giwa look-alikes have shared in his glory.
For me, I would like to remember Dele Giwa as someone who best articulated the dreams and yearnings of today’s struggling journalist fighting a war against poverty. The modern journalist, says Giwa in his Parallax Snaps column (Sunday Concord August 16, 1981) “wants a newsmaker to respect him. He wants to dress well and he wants to live in a good house and drive a nice car. This calls for money. And, so, increasingly, he asks for more money and more perquisites.”
Finally, I want to remember Dele Giwa as someone who brought excellence into Nigerian journalism. The best way to immortalize him is to institute in his memory a prize for journalistic excellence like the American Pulitzer. Somebody has to do that. And right now!