Dimgba: The challenge in his death

LATEST UPDATE: Dimgba: The challenge in his death

It was too difficult for me to sur­mount the shock of the news of the tragic event that was Dimgba’s death to say any meaningful thing on it. Even as I now write, it still feels so unbelievable. A friend in one of the major national dailies called me on phone just minutes after the grisly story got to their news desk. I was too horrified to listen through the account.

I screamed at the men­tion of Dimgba and death, “Dimgba who?! Did what?!” It must have been something like 10 minutes before I summoned the courage to call the colleague back and managed to listen through the macabre story. Yet, I still couldn’t gather my nerves to write. It felt like my writing would confirm the worst that had already happened, anyway. It is a pity that the prevailing ineptitude in our social system should cost us the life of one of the most re­markable journalists I have ever come across.

Dimgba and I met when he was a stu­dent of the Nigerian Institute of Journal­ism and I was the Assistant News Editor in the Daily Nation newspaper that the lawyer, Dr. Nwakamma Okoro (SAN), had tried to run in Aba, then in Imo State. Dimgba had come over as an intern and I was put in charge of such functions; training of cub reporters and students that came for industrial experience. Dimgba and I took to each other immediately. It was impossible not to. There were so many things in common between us. Interest in certain writers (I still have his copy of Graham Greene’s Stamboul train that he loaned to me; I being something of a Greenophile); determination to give ourselves more formal education in spite of initial financial odds and, of course, interest in journalism. When, following the collapse of the Nation, I moved over to the then national capital, as the Lagos Chief Correspondent of The Satellite, Dimgba invited me to his one-room apartment at Orile Iganmu. He was single then and it didn’t matter to him how long I was prepared to stay with him. Every night was a seminar of sorts between the two of us. Each would stick to his guns on most of those topics and would do so without bitterness. And there laid the fun and excitement. It felt like the intellectual equivalent of the artheletes’ training sessions.

He was still with the Federal Ministry of Commerce but his talent, as a diligent reporter had begun to show. He wrote not a few lead stories for the Sunday Concord under the editorship of Dele Giwa, his archmodel. We made sure that when I got my own apartment, it was just a couple of blocks away from his so that we could continue our vivacious nightly “seminars”.

His rare blend of devotion to the Christian faith of the Pentecostal variety with intellectual interests was always there since I knew him. I would take a decidedly agnostic stance and he his brand of born-again theology. Ironically he referred to this when in May last year he wrote a tribute in reaction to the death of our other friend, Pini Jason, relatively not too long before his own tragic end. After describing me as “a bookworm” he went on to accuse me, tongue in cheek, of being addicted to anthropology and so ended up going to the university to, in his words, consummate my passion.

After reading about his new position as a leader in his church, I sent him an email, recalling those days too. I had told him, “I saw it pretty early for you and it strikes me that, as our essayist would say, it is morning yet in your achievements. Congratulations on your new ecclesiastical position, which I just learnt of in your last column. The ease with which you have managed to juggle excellent career records in journalism and your uncommon commitment to church matters is astonishing.”

And I really did see the potentials in Dimgba from the get go. To illustrate, before our Daily Nation days, I had cut my teeth on national journalism in the Punch group and the West Africa and New African magazines, both based in London, would occasionally publish my contributions. When Alan Rake, the Editor-in-Chief of the latter, asked me to recommend a part-time correspondent, I did not search far. Dimgba jumped at the offer. In no time, he became one of the most prolific of those of us writing from the continent. But he did that, using the nom de plume, Josiah Uguru.

By the time the Weekend Concord phenomenon came about, I had rejoined The Punch and was in due course sent to head the Enugu regional office. But I kept in touch with Dimgba. He could not come to town without looking in on me at home or in the office, as the case might be.

I used to tease him on why all his Igbo names evoked such fear and awe. Dimgba means the master wrestler. Ugu­ru means the harmattan, usually in this onomastic sense used as the metaphor of strength, on account of the powerful wind of that West African season. Igwe is the Heavens or monarch, depending on context. He would protest with a smile that he had no hand in choosing any of those names.

But they all come across, as very divinatory names. The man took life’s challenges head on in the manner of a first-rate wrestler, and all those obstacles would invariably vanish as if swept away by a harmattan gale. From an initial sta­tion where he could not have the benefit of a formal high school education, he taught himself and went on to be one of the greatest names in the Nigerian newspaper world. His contributions to Nigerian journalism can now be a valid topic for PhD theses anywhere. Some of his works are used in serious journal­ism classes. Personally, I have used the world-class primer, The art of feature writing, that he wrote with his alter ego, Mike Awoyinfa, as a set book in a uni­versity’s writing class.

The theistically inclined would say Igwe carried on, as if he were a Heav­enly denizen, who only happened to be here with us lesser mortals as a tourist. Igwe, as a monarch would just be as apt. He has written his name in gold in the history of Nigerian journalism. He was a king in his own right in that realm. His domain was the tabloid. He helped shape that genre to Nigerian needs.

No one can put the reality of this calamity better than Mike Awoyinfa, who, in his inimitable style, said in his threnodious speech during the visit of the former Governor of Abia, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, to Igwe’s grieving family: “It has happened; we can’t change it,” the Sunday Sun (14/9/14, p. 6) quoted him as saying. Undebatable! But the man would not have died in vain if we, as individu­als and as social aggregates learn the lesson in his life and death.

If Nigeria uses the occasion of his death, as a wake-up call to begin to repair its institutional decay; to provide the basic infrastructure for decent living fit for modern times; to learn to live like a 21st century nation-state should, we would have paid Pastor Igwe the greatest tribute.

•Dr. Ezeh teaches anthropological linguistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

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