By Onoise Osunbor
(First published in Sunday Concord, February 21, 1988)
“If there is one achievement I have successfully accomplished, it is to prove wrong the myth that you cannot be a successful journalist and be a born-again Christian.” These are the words of Dimgba Igwe, the Sunday Concord Staff Writer among the prizewinners at the first UAC Merit Award for Journalists.
People often perceive journalists as permissive, loving wine and women, but that is not the life of Dimgba who is deeply religious—a real born-again Christian. Stylistically, he is an impressionistic writer who applies his pen like a brush in the hands of a painter, carrying the reader along as he tells his story. One of his works is a masterpiece he wrote on Dakar, the capital of Senegal. And he wrote it without talking to anyone. He says: “The story I have done that I am likely to read over and over again is the one on Dakar.
It was impressionistic. The reason was that I couldn’t speak French. But at the same time I wanted to do a story about
the city. I had limited resources and I couldn’t hire taxis
for too long. In any case, I came for a different reason
entirely: to attend a conference. I merely had to sneak out to do it. In this context, what I did was to look at the
city from my own perspective, descriptively, without injecting my own opinion
into it. That way, I would not be guilty of not talking to
people, and at the same time succeeded in doing a story.”
The Sunday Concord writer picks as his best story so far, the report on
Ayi Kwei Armah, the Dakar-based novelist from Ghana. The reason, “the man had this policy never to
grant any press interview. That was possibly, his first, made possible by Dr.
Ola Balogun. I had to rely on memory as we talked over lunch. He refused to be recorded until I had asked the
questions I considered most useful to my story. When it was published, people liked it, and on
this score I have had to make contributions to the degree projects of two
undergraduates of the University of Nigeria. They had the impression that by interviewing Ayi
Kwei Armah, I suddenly became an authority on that side of African literature.”
As his best story so far, was it this which won him that UAC Prize? Dimgba replies no, saying the winning story was “The Tragedy of Luxury Bus Business” which he did on the horrible luxury bus disaster on Ogan Hill, near Abudu in 1986. He said of this entry: “The choice is one of the reasons I suspect I didn’t win the first prize. I didn’t like it. Even before the panel, I told them so. I put it in at all because Ewaen Osarenren asked me.”
*Impressed, Dele Giwa Hires Dimgba Igwe
How Dimgba Igwe impressed Dele Giwa into giving him a job in Sunday Concord is another story worth telling. “In 1982,” he recalls, “when I travelled to the Yankari Games Reserve on an excursion as a student of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, I asked Clement Iloba, now of the Guardian Express to let us do a story on the place. I had never had prior training in writing magazine stories but getting to Yankari, I realized that the setting fitted for a magazine. I had by then been influenced by the style in the Sunday Concord and I wrote it in the way they would. We wrote it together and were surprised that Giwa not only used it but also pumped our hands and it gave us confidence.
In 1983, when I left school, I went back to the Ministry of Mines and Power where I worked in the Stores section. I then took four days off to do a story about how children struggle early in the morning to go to school in Lagos. I joined them in Molue bus and observed as well as interviewed them. After submitting the story which got published, I was told Dele Giwa wanted to see me because he considered the story a masterpiece.
Mike (Awoyinfa) and others still insist it was, even though I do not think so. When I came to collect payment for the article, Giwa asked me: ‘Will you care to work for Concord?’ To me, the question was like asking me now if I would care to work with Newsweek or TIME magazine. In less than 24 hours I was given an appointment letter as a staff writer on February 1, 1984.”
Any regret so far? Dimgba laments: “In this job, you are suddenly blown out of proportion. People think that if you write so much on so great an issue or people, then you have to be very rich. But the truth is that the pay is very poor. If you hire writers who meet people of high social standing and expose them, you have to pay them well to meet up. But we hardly survive.” The other regret is that he has a flair for writing so much as to want to write novels, but “this job is so jealous and time-consuming that it doesn’t give you room to think about any other thing.”
As
a writer, Dimgba developed himself through hard work and with the financial
support of his brother Martin Igwe, a Reverend in Kaduna. He attributes his inspiration to work hard and
succeed to the fact that “as a Christian, I am a representative of God on earth. If I don’t do well, people will say, “and he calls
himself a Christian.” This accounts for his dedication to work.
Fondly called Pastor Dimgba by his editor and friends, Dimgba Igwe was born on May 16, 1956 at Okafia, Igbere, Imo State. He attended the Igbere Presbyterian Primary School, and the Igbere State High School. He passed his A-levels in 1979 while in the civil service. Dimgba who lost his dad at the age of four, was once a rice farmer and had opted to be a trader before his brother intervened to say: “I will not allow such a good brain waste.”
In 1978, he was admitted to the University of
Nigeria, Nsukka to read Political Science but he turned it down. The cause was that “I felt that if I read it, it
would destroy my journalistic influence and I had the natural pull to it.” So, rather than go for that course, in 1981, he
got into the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, and in 1984, the Sunday Concord job came and rounded it up.
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