The Nigerian media world has lost one of its legends, Mr Dan Agbese, who was a co- founder of Newswatch, and now Newswatch Plus.
He died this morning, 17 November 2027 at the age of 81, according to family sources.
The Man, Dan Agbese
Mohammed Haruna, another veteran journalist, gave a biographical information Dan Agbese when he turned 70 and it was published in The Nation. ‘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 proportionately fewer still of the millions of readers he must have gathered in his long and illustrious – 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 Masters 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 assistance – 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 life-time career and forget about being a librarian. However, as the man himself said in an interview with the newsmagazine Verbatim (October 21, 2013) which looks like an offshoot of the defunct (?) Newswatch he co-founded in 1985 with the late Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed – all three of them among the country’s best and brightest journalists and columnists – he developed second thoughts about remaining a journalist after graduation 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.’
Source: The News
