Tribute to Dan Agbese

BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

I’ve just received news of the death of Dan Agbese, whose deputy I was when he was editor of the defunct New Nigerian in the early eighties. His death at 81 is a huge loss to the country’s journalism and punditry.

As my tribute to my former boss and long-time friend, I reproduce below a slightly edited version of the tribute I paid to him when he clocked 70, eleven years ago, plus a telling reaction to the tribute from a reader.

May Dan’s gentle soul rest with the Good Lord. And may He also give all of us the fortitude to bear his loss. Amen

An illustrious wordsmith at 70

Yesterday, one of Nigeria’s most accomplished journalists and wordsmiths, Daniel Ochima Agbese, clocked 70. He was born on May 20, 1944 into Agila royalty in Okpowu Local Government of Benue State. It speaks volumes of the man’s character that few of his acquaintances and the millions of readers he must have gathered in his long – but hardly materially rewarding – career as a columnist, journalist and author, ever knew he was a prince. All his life he’d always referred to himself as simply Mister, apparently because he did not suffer from the superiority complex of your typical Nigerian Big Man.

Yet Dan, as those on a first name basis with him call him, had sufficient virtues to make him feel proud and superior to most Nigerians. To begin with, God gave him a good head and a way with words. This was obvious from his academic career which begun in earnest when he returned to the classroom in 1970 after a three-year teaching career followed by another year as a library assistant and ending with a four-year stint as a staff writer with the New Nigerian during its heydays in the late sixties.  Before all this he had attended Government Teachers Training College, Keffi, between 1960 and 1962.

It was as a staff writer under the tutelage of Malam Adamu Ciroma, the first indigenous editor of the New Nigerian and the creator and principal author of the famous humour columnist, the anonymous Candido, that Dan left to pursue a degree in Journalism at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), the second university in the country after the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), to establish a degree course in the profession.

At UNILAG, Dan became a prize-winning student and, upon graduation in 1973, earned himself a second-class upper division. That, in combination with a three-year stint as the chief sub-editor of the Nigeria Standard, then published by the then Benue-Plateau State, must have earned him a place in 1976/77 to do a Master’s degree at probably the best Journalism school in the world and custodian of the most prestigious journalism awards world-wide (The Pulitzer) – the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York City.

As with UNILAG, so it was with Columbia; there he became the best of the 16 international students in the class and among the best of its entire 160 students.

Dan’s fascination with and love of the written word probably dated back to his days as a library assistant at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria – possibly before. His move from there to the New Nigerian seemed then natural enough; after all, the written word is the principal commodity of both.

Once he returned to class to read journalism, it seemed he had made up his mind to stick with it as his lifetime career and forget about being a librarian. However, as the man himself said in an interview with the defunct Verbatim newsmagazine (October 21, 2013), he developed second thoughts about remaining a journalist while still a student at Columbia.

“Actually, as far back as 1977, when I was in graduate school in the US,” he said, “I didn’t think I was returning to journalism, I thought I was going into book publishing. This was because I had had a long association with book publishing from the period of my youth service in 1973/1974. I was a reader for Heinemann educational books in Ibadan, and so I picked up a lot of interest in writing books. And I had hoped that if I returned, I would set up a book publishing company, but it didn’t work out that way.”

As things turned out, Dan stuck to Journalism. However, even though he did not become a book publisher, he wrote several of them. Indeed, he wrote enough to make him the most prolific author among Nigerian journalists since time.

So far the man has six books to his credit, three of them (The Reporter’s Companion, The Columnist’s Companion and Style: A Guide to Good Writing), practical guides to Journalism that should be compulsory reading in all our Journalism schools, one (Nigeria, Their Nigeria), a satirical dig at Nigerians and their country after the fashion of that famous evergreen, How to be a Nigerian, by Peter Enahoro whose editorship of a national newspaper at 26 in the early sixties remains unbeaten, and two (Fellow Nigerians: Turning Points in the Political History of Nigeria and IBRAHIM BABANGIDA: The Military, Politics and Power in Nigeria, to date, the most authoritative and most definitive biography of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.

Dan has also edited three books, Newswatch Conversation with Babangida, The Energy Crisis in Nigeria and In the Service of My Country: Selected Speeches of Abdullahi Adamu, the two-term civilian governor of Nasarawa State.

All books are a reader’s delight for their readability, insight, humour and precision. 

Among Dan’s virtues were not only his good head and a way with the written word. The man also possessed the courage of his convictions and a diligence for accuracy, balance and fairness in pursuing news stories. I saw these and other virtues first-hand as his deputy when he edited New Nigerian between 1982 and 1984.

Before him, I had acted as the editor for 11 months. I was denied confirmation because the management and chieftains of the ruling National Party of Nigeria said I was too headstrong. Instead, Dan was brought in as editor at the time he was the Director of Information in Benue State, then also ruled by the NPN.

Clearly, there was politics in his appointment, but it was an appointment no one, certainly not I, could quarrel with; Dan was older and much more experienced as a journalist than me by the time he was appointed.

Four years after his appointment, if those in authority thought they had a lapdog for an editor, it became obvious to them that they made a great misjudgement. Day in day out Dan published stories and ran editorials that they found uncomfortable. When he was not running such awkward stories, he was rejecting stories the authorities tried to foist on him that were clearly more public relations than news.

For example, when the late Chief M. K. O. Abiola resigned his membership of the NPN after his humiliation following his bid for its chairmanship against the favoured late Chief Adisa Akinloye, Dan ran it as the lead story, much to the great annoyance of the party. On another occasion, he rejected a story based on a document allegedly signed by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, which purported that he was training people in a forest in the Western Region for a coup against the Federal Government. While the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria in Kaduna made hay with the story, Dan demanded incontrovertible proof that the document was genuine before he would publish the story. He never got the proof, and he never published it. In the end, it turned out that the document was fake and its source, a big con artist.

Predictably, Dan’s editorship of the New Nigerian did not end on a happy note. Sensing the authorities had had enough of his unyielding insistence on professionalism and might push him out anytime, he decided to jump. Thus, his departure in 1984 to co-found Newswatch, which eventually hit the streets in January 1985 as Nigeria’s first weekly newsmagazine to be owned principally by professional journalists themselves.

The rest, as they say, is History. Newswatch ran without missing a beat for 27 years, except for its ban by the authorities a couple of times, once for a period of six months, due to its hard-hitting stories and scoops.

Since its controversial takeover last year by Chief Jimoh Ibrahim, the controversial business mogul, Dan and his colleagues have established a book publishing company, May5Media, which has since published two books, one, Moving in Circles, a selection of their columns, and the other on the life and times of the rebel leader, the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu.

Shows you, doesn’t it, that old journalists and old writers, like old soldiers, never die.

Here’s many more returns of yesterday to one of Nigeria’s best writers, humourists, satirists and, above all, most professional and most courageous journalists.

Mohammed Haruna is a national commissioner at the Independent National Electoral Commission.