You can guess who the twin brother to the late Dimgba Igwe is... Mike Awoyinfa.
Reading their columns greatly helped my rise to thisday...
Read the long awaited tribute to Dimgba Igwe (right) by Mike Awoyinfa (left):
This is it! The most
unimaginable nightmare! This is it! The most painful
column I have ever written or will ever write. The column I wished I
never wrote. The agonizing column. The column written
amidst sorrow, tears and blood. Please, pray for me."
You know why I am writing, you
Father of the fatherless, you Creator of all things good and bad, you giver of
life and taker. You gave him to me, now you have taken him. You
gave me a friend and a brother. Now, you have taken both. Who will
be my friend? Who will be my brother?
Sadness is now my name. Sadness
like those missing girls stolen from us in the middle of the night and taken
into captivity. Sadness is the tattoo mark emblazing my face like
Mike Tyson’s facial tattoo. I have been reading Mike Tyson’s bizarre
memoir: MIKE TYSON, UNDISPUTED TRUTH, MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY and I was planning to
write on it. But I am compelled to jettison that to write this sad
column.
Oh, my God! You know why
I am sad. My best friend is gone. My twin brother is
gone. A good man is gone. A generous man is gone. A
man who gave all his life serving God and journalism is gone. A man
who is the other part of me is gone. Dimgba Igwe is gone. What
will I do now? Who will I turn to now? Who?
Why must all my friends and heroes
in journalism die so cruelly, landing on the front page? My editor Dele
Giwa died the same way: killed dastardly through a letter bomb on October 19,
1986. And up till today, the riddle of his death remains
unsolved. It has become “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma,” to use a phrase by Winston Churchill. Like Giwa, Dimgba
Igwe in the throes of death was crying: “I don’t want to die.” For
four hours, he was bleeding on the road to Golgotha. No
ambulance. No oxygen mask. No Samaritan hospital. From
St. Raphael Hospital to the General Hospital Isolo where there was no surgeon
to attend to him, it was the story of Nigeria’s systemic failure as a
country. He finally gave up at Lagos State University Hospital,
Ikeja.
If I am angry at all, it is not
with the bloody coward who killed him and fled in panic. I will
forgive the hit-and-run killer. And the Dimgba Igwe I know, will
forgive the man who killed him. What I cannot forgive is a nation
with health institutions that can do nothing, once your life is in
danger. It’s the same story all over Nigeria. Of course,
you know that once you are taken to LUTH on emergency, you are as good as
dead. And this is a country without a functional 911 which you dial
in emergency and get help. Only in Nigeria will you commit this
heinous crime and vanish. In a civilized country, the killer would
have been caught on camera. The security agents would have tracked
the car down. Not so in Nigeria.
I remember the sad death of my
other Sunday Concord friend May Ellen Ezekiel whose death in a Lagos
hospital shook the nation. Dimgba Igwe and I were at the helm in
Weekend Concord where he was my deputy. The best decision I ever
took in life was to choose Dimgba Igwe as my deputy. He complemented
me in every way. Now, he is gone.
Like everyone else, I am
confused. I am lost. Please, pray for me. More
than any time in my life, I need prayers. Lots of them. Because I don’t
know how I can cope without my friend, my business partner, my co-author, my
soul mate, my chief critic. He was the voice of restraint—always fearing for my
life, because of my constant prone to accidents. I remember an
accident in Paris, when I stumbled, crashed on the street and seriously injured
my arm in the bid to protect my camera and photos. Dimgba Igwe was there for me
when I was down and out in Paris. And at the Golden Tulip, where we
had lodged to write Governor Fashola’s biography, I had another accident in the
night after my writing, resulting in a deep cut on my lower and upper
lips. Again, Dimgba and the hotel medical staff quickly rushed me to
hospital where I was told I could have bled to death, if the broken glass had
cut my throat. You read it all in this column!
Against this backdrop, I was the
one more prone to death. In his last interview, Dimgba Igwe told YES
INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE how he nicknamed me “Iniquity Man” because I won’t sit
in one place. As his twin brother four years older, I used to
imagine a future where two of us would be old and I would die first and Dimgba
would be there, paying me tributes, looking back at the lives we lived. But
alas, the imagined future is dead and Dimgba is gone in his prime.
The Dimgba I know was a kind man
who didn’t deserve this cruel death. If anything, he would have
hated this big embarrassment of being on front page, killed doing what he loved
best: jogging. He believed the best way to prolong life is by
exercising, by running and pumping oxygen into the heart. He was the
one who introduced me to jogging. And for more than 10 years, I have
been jogging with him. Our houses are next to each other on that
God-forsaken Dele Orisabiyi Street in Okota which has not for once seen any government
repairing it in years. Recently after returning from a first-time
trip to Banana Island where he had gone to visit our friend, Elder Ekeoma whose
daughter was marrying, Dimgba Igwe had an epiphany. He was so sad
that he would be leaving the well-tarred streets of Banana Island and be
returning home to that hell of a street in Okota. “Ogbeni, we must
work harder and have a place in Banana Island,” he told me. Dimgba
was a hard-working man, a visionary who should have lived long to reap the fruits
of his toil. The greatest honour that the Lagos State government can
do in memory of my departed friend is to tar his street. I am sure
even the inhabitants wouldn’t mind if the street is renamed Dimgba Igwe Street
after this great son of Nigeria—if the road is tarred for his sake. That
would make him happy in his grave. That was what he yearned for and
even begged our friend, the governor who gave us his word that he would
assist.
Every morning, we run on that bad
road. I couldn’t join him last Saturday because I was in the UK with
my family for my son’s graduation—a day I was looking forward to with the pride
and joy of a father. Dimgba opted to stay and take care of the home
front while I was away. Somehow, I feel guilty. If I had known
it will end this way, I would have taken my beloved brother along.
Pastor Igwe must have prayed that
morning. His first act at the break of every new day is to go on his
knees. He sings in praise of God, blesses the name of the Lord,
speaks in tongue and prays for the Lord to deliver him from all evils. But
on that Black Saturday, the devil struck. On the eve of his
death, I had called him from Ipswich and told him the books I had bought for
him. Books like JFK’s
Last Hundred Days, by Thurston Clarke, The Virgin Way, by Richard Branson, God
is not a Christian, by Desmond Tutu and an epic book on the history of
Jerusalem from the days of David up to the current day. He was so
excited. He was waiting for the books. He loved
books. Now, the evil forces have brought him to book.
Adieu, my friend, my brother. Like
King David mourned his friend Jonathan, I cry: “How have the mighty
fallen! Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not in
Ashkelon.” For a great man of journalism has passed away. Our latest
book is a book called 50 World Editors, featuring conversations with editors
around the world whom we met in the course of our travels. We were
planning to launch it, but see me now!
This morning, I came across the New
Men’s Devotional Bible you gave me on my 60thbirthday. Oh, you
really tried on my 60th birthday and I was looking forward to celebrating
in grand style your own 60thbirthday. But, see me now!
In the Bible you gave me, you
wrote: “Ogbeni, be strong in the Lord and the power of His might.” (Ephesians
6: 10)
My friend, I will be strong in the
Lord. I will fly the flag and search for heaven that you so much
cared about. Ogbeni, thank you. Good night and enjoy your
freedom.
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