Master crafter. Writer extra ordinaire. Wordsmith per excellence. Like his friend and colleague, Ray, he was a polished, well disciplined commander of language. He knew how to make words do his bidding just as the famous footballer, David Beckham, knows how to bend the ball to do his wish with spot kicks. Ray (Ekpu) is on equal footing with the MASTER. He is also a king of Verbal Dexterity.
We all knew Dan had blue blood flowing in his vein, being of Idoma Royalty stock, but he never donned garlands of royalty. Neither did he wear a princely bracelet on his sleeves to show he was of a royal breed. All for a just cause..
The tiger does not proclaim its tigritude to the world, goes a saying, instead it projects it in the elegance of its poise, gait and ferocity of attack. Dan did not need the services of a megaphone to showcase his pedigree. Instead he projected grace and humility in his dealings with people within his sphere of influence.
Yet, he had a commanding presence. You can’t but give him his due. Oga Dan knew his onions. Peeling them for others to sniff at was a welcome opportunity on his table. The literary menu was always there to whet your appetite to seek, strive and learn for the advancement of NewsWatch, the magazine he cofounded and nurtured with Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed.
Theirs was a combination of different cultural backgrounds, talents and interests but a common objective to establish a magazine of international standard in content and style but with a deft touch of local flavor. A kind of ideal fusion of brilliant minds who wanted to harness their erstwhile milestones achievements in journalism to cast GOLDEN TOUCHSTONES of professional excellence for others to take a cue from.
It was a perfect team. Giwa, the charismatic American trained journalist, brought his mastery of picturesque, nay cinematic, writing style imbued with a knack for details to the table of investment. Mohammed, a seasoned newsman to the core, who had proved his mettle on the Concord group of newspapers as an astounding editor, was an equally strong pillar in the FOUR SQUARE configuration. The philosopher king was Ray while Dan was the doyen of brevity, point blank accuracy and sardonic humour (in his satirical pieces) that could drill a gaping hole in a diaphragm made of concrete.
A major thing the four musketeers brought into newsmagazine production was the introduction of the avant garde PREFACE TO COVER, a philosophical assay into the week’s cover story, a kind of preview of the central theme. It’s both a stand alone as well as an integral part of the story.
The three were masters of the art of PREFACE writing and they guarded it as an intellectual trove which Oga Yak was capable of, too, but he was apparently excused from the rigors of “philosophy’, as it were, to face squarely the job of news gathering and presentation, the major task of the magazine. And he did a great job of it. To assist him was Soji Akinrinade aka General of the (writing ) ‘forces’ in the newsroom.
I reported directly to Ray in the Back of the Book section of the magazine. We both shared some attributes, literary and personal, known to the trio (Dan, Ray and Giwa). Soon I was co-opted into the PREFACE writing group reporting directly to Giwa as the editor in chief and CZAR of the PREFACE ‘cult’ , as it appeared to other members of staff. Then, the UNFORETOLD happened!
Barely two years of experimenting with investigative journalism and avant garde literary style, TRAGEDY came not stealthily but with a bang! The parcel bombs came seemingly from nowhere but surely and definitely from evil men, (strangely still at large 39 years after!) barely two years into the magazine’s existence, to blast off the arrow head of the journalistic revolution, a sort of “ counter revolutionary insurgency” against intellectual professionalism (as well as professional intellectualism.). Newswatch has not been the same ever since. Mission accomplished for the parcel bombers , DREAM KILLERS?
Nature abhors vacuum. Newswatch did not die with the parcel-bombed chief executive. Dele Giwa’s death brought Dan in as the head of the NewWatch organisation and editor in chief. Now I had a new helmsman to report to as PREFACE writer. It was a new ball game entirely. It was like starting all over again. Dan was too thorough for me. He would make sure you dot all the proverbial i’s and cross the cliche t’s. No long unwinding, if not unwieldy, sentences. He loved them short. Dan, the boss, could start a piece with one word, the shorter, the better, he would say. To him brevity is it! It is the soul of accuracy. No shadow boxing. No gerrymandering. He was our in-house Chike Obi. Seriously! The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. He seemed to be telling us. He could easily fathom the ‘X’ factor in any editorial equation. With him you have no business dribbling the reader like Maradona on the field of play. Express, not impress with circumlocution, he would advise and ‘tutor’ us and me in particular, his young protege. Some of us jokingly referred to him as “editorial terrorist”. Far from it.
“The rice grain suffers under the blows of the pestle”, wrote the late Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Mihn, on the prison wall while incarcerated in a North Vietnamese prison, “but (it) admires its beauty once the ordeal is over…”. Being under Dan’s tutelage was no “ordeal”. The Idoma Prince was only putting us in the editorial furnace to polish us into 18 karat gems in the writing profession. Today we are the better for it.
He meant well.
No doubt he was a great teacher and goal getter, per se. Like my other colleagues in Newswatch I learnt a lot from him. Yes, he suffered no fools gladly but he knew how to “unfrown” (defreeze) your frowning (frozen) face and clean out your blood shot, angry eyes with swaps of humour.
A particular occasion warranted Dan, one day, at the weekly editorial Conference, to display the humour merchant in him when he almost brought the roof of the newsroom down.
And how did that come about?
It was when he, a Benue oga, “yabbed” another Benue oga (Yak) over a somewhat innocuous editorial snafu, “Ya Ku bu”! , he bellowed, “you don drink burukutu bah’?! . (Oga Yak is a devout Muslim who would naturally not have a sip of burukutu). “Ah!”, exclaimed Oga Yak with his typical smile. The resultant “laugh-proar” was a seismic vibration that almost tore through the eardrums!
That’s Dan for you. And that’s just a tip off his paraphernalia of spontaneous, hilarious jokes sandwiched with wits and wisecracks laced with local flavor and intellectual panache. Damn too witty. Dan, the boss! He will be sorely missed.
Eternal rest grant him, O Lord.
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