Dan Ochima Agbese, wordsmith, author, co-founder of Newswatch magazine and Prince of Agila, Benue State, has quietly dropped his fountain pen leaving us to fix the foibles of this terrestrial plane. He left behind editorial shoes that would be difficult to fit in, a wife he loved, children and grandchildren and, of course, our tears of remembrance.
I was not curious enough to check Agbese’s background when faith, working through my brother, Muyiwa Akintunde, enrolled me into the Newswatch school of journalism. As I signed into that institution with hope and trepidation, faith wrote my diary and Agbese would feature in it with some of the sweetest memories.
Although I was counting out nearly a decade of background in news reporting when I enrolled, I was barely good enough to hit Agbese’s editing table from a reportorial assignment without having my work fine-tuned by at least three other editors who, as Mike Akpan (now Late) would say ‘pull the meat’ out of the heap of words garbled together with hardly newsworthy material. I remember the younger editors calling me to ‘class’ and asking me to tell them the story as I would a six-year-old before they could make a story out of my work.
Each of the icons in the Newswatch pantheon were known for their peculiar journalistic expertise and well homed in the art of fishing out the nuggets of stories from a cub reporter’s rambling thoughts. Like a magnet will attract precious metal, Agbese’s legendary fountain pen was known to fish out a dangling modifier, and a malapropism or a broken thought that has managed to pass through the hands of other finicky editors.
Agbese’s love for emerging gadgets is probably matched by his love for books. You hardly see him without one. He read in the office as he would on flights, local or intercontinental and in-between editing. He’d dangle your copy before you when he had summoned you without as much as glancing towards you as he tells you to go and fix your mess. A copy does not pass to the lithographer until Agbese had put his handwritten cursive ‘okay’ on it.
Returning from an Abuja assignment one afternoon, I had submitted my copy on General Sani Abacha’s preparation to host the Constitutional Conference where I had stumbled on a scoop. Akinrinade had read through my copy and passed it. Agbese had okayed the panelbeated copy for publication but hours later, his secretary had returned to the newsroom to tell me that the Editor-in-Chief wanted me. With professional trepidation, I had openly complained that my copy had passed. Nevertheless, I had followed like a lamb going to sure slaughter only to be handed his cherished nought-nine-nought, a heavy pre-GSM mobile phone. ‘You have a call from London’, he said, as usual barely taking his eyes off his work. Trembling from not knowing how to use the gadget, I protested that I didn’t know anyone in London who could have called me on the Editor-in-Chief’s line. He raised his bespectacled face from his work to tell me to ‘just take the phone, if you don’t know the person on the line, then you can give it back to me’. It turned out I was being informed of my admission to the Journalists in Europe programme in Paris.
Barely a year later, I returned to Lagos, a city I still loathe till today, glad to be sent back to Abuja where I had been promoted and transferred before leaving the shores of Nigeria. Every week, Agbese and indeed all my line and encouraged me to put in my best to turn in a copy. They constantly put me in touch with news sources and guided me through covering conferences, interviews and navigating disasters.
One accolade I cherish till date is a letter from Agbese confirming me as Reporter-of-the-Year. It came with a generous sum of N10,000. He had implicit trust in my ability both at the reportorial and personal level and would often send me to his friends. At every moment I was given money for Agbese, he would share it with me or completely relinquish it to me.
One of the impressive memories I have of the quartet of Ray Ekpu, Agbese, Yakubu Mohammed and Soji Akinrinade was how they initiated me to the Mama Put restaurants in Abuja’. On one of their trips to the capital city, they had asked me to take them to lunch, that they paid for, I had suggested the restaurant at Sheraton Hotels and Towers that I thought fitted the best of Nigerian journalism. They had laughed at me, asking where I usually ate. I told them I ate at bukas whenever Mrs. Asaju granted the permission for me to break with her cooking. To my shock and consternation, they had ‘ordered’ me to take them to where I ate. This was my introduction to Abuja’s sprawling local cuisine where cooking was done not from a cookbook, but from the repertoire of the local chef working with unseen ancestors to blend the condiments with the food to create a perfect meal that sauntered down the oesophagus, sending streaks of sweat oozing from every pore of the body.
My classily dressed bosses would insist on riding on my rickety tokunbo, a Toyota Corolla from the airport, and around town instead of ordering a cab with air-condition and panache.
From behind his laptop, Agbese carved prose laced with Juvenalian bites that captivates the attention of the reader. He laced his expressions with local flavour and probably creates the best captions for stories I have ever known anyone to do. He was at home with street lingo as he was with the high-class world and works of the academia. I vividly remember two titles from his Editorial Suite, a piece titled They, and how Nigerians are good at breaking the rules of grammar, turning pronouns into nouns and adverbs into different figures of speech. His seminal work titled Thin is In recalls a society breaking from the tradition of liking svelte women as against the robust ones.
Agbese’s pen is casually biting, with a tinge of hope for redemption. The highest point of my 20-year column in Daily Trust was a letter he wrote asking for my permission to reproduce a humour piece I had written about Dame Patient Jonathan’s penchant for rewriting English. It features in his seminal publication, The Columnist’s Companion: The Art and Craft of Column Writing.
It is a huge shock that Agbese finally left the way of all mortals, quietly on his bed in his home in Festac Town, Lagos. An Agila prince, and Awan’Otun Agila, Agbese bowed out at the age of 81. He had served journalism all his years, and the nation with his jabs. His journalism started with degrees from the University of Lagos and Columbia University in New York from where he rose to edit the Nigerian Standard and the New Nigerian. He touched the broadcast field as General Manager of Radio Benue, Makurdi. He was founding editor of Newswatch and its Editor-in-Chief, a title he kept until April 2010.
He was a prolific chronicler of history who left us with many works including Style: A Guide to Good Writing. He has filled the vacuum he now leaves with so much material that generations after him will be sucking from his professional tit. He is missed by virtually everyone with who he came into contact either professionally or in personal capacity. He has left at a time when the nation could still make do with his professional acumen and personal integrity.
Oga Dan – rest thee well!
Asaju wrote from Ottawa, Canada
