Dimgba Igwe, The Enigmatic Born-Again Journalist

 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. 

*Dimgba Igwe 

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.  

Remembering Dele Giwa

 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?

*Dele Giwa 

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.