By Yakubu Mohammed
Remembering Dele Giwa? No, we have not forgotten him. 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?
How can you forget the iconoclastic reporter and editor who took
exceptional delight in speaking truth to power? How do you forget? Like we do
for the dead, we remember him every day and, as enjoined by our religion,
we pray for the dead every day.
But Dele Giwa lives in every journalist who pursues
professionalism and extols the virtues of excellence, not the one who enthrones
cant and hypocrisy and worships them like an ancient deity. We remember
Dele everyday. As we did yesterday, October 19.
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.
