There are questions within the lifetime of a nation which can be requested not as a result of solutions are unavailable, however as a result of the solutions, although seen, refuse to submit themselves to public purpose. Such questions hover uneasily between inquiry and indictment. They start as requests for clarification and finish as mirrors held as much as energy. In Nigeria, a peculiar class of such questions exists—questions that over time shed their interrogative innocence and harden into rhetorical fossils. They’re repeated not in expectation of decision, however as ritual reminders of a state’s ethical inertia. Foremost amongst them is the haunting chorus: Who killed Dele Giwa?
Thirty-four years after Dele Giwa—crusading journalist, founding editor of Newswatch, and one of many sharpest pens of Nigeria’s Fourth Property—was killed by a parcel bomb delivered to his Ikeja house, nothing of consequence has been established past the actual fact and the grotesque ingenuity of the homicide. The query has outlived governments, outlasted transitions, and survived the mortality of lots of the actors who as soon as strode the Nigerian stage with swagger and impunity. It stays unanswered not as a result of it’s unanswerable, however as a result of answering it might require the Nigerian state to look right into a mirror it has persistently chosen to avert its gaze from.
Within the fast aftermath of Giwa’s assassination, the editors of Newswatch, led by Ray Ekpu, transformed grief right into a quiet however radical editorial follow: each weekly version carried, pinned completely on its entrance web page, the query—Who killed Dele Giwa? It was journalism stripped to its ethical core. No embellishment, no accusation, no hypothesis. Only a query. A easy interrogative that slowly acquired the burden of an indictment exactly as a result of it remained unanswered. When the query was finally pulled down, it was not as a result of a solution had emerged, however as a result of the ritual itself had exhausted its energy to disgrace a state that had perfected the artwork of not blushing. But, one other dimension to the abrupt finish to the editorial riposte alleged delicate threats from the authorities, which successfully drew the eye of Dele Giwa’s grieving colleagues to the knowledge of the Igbo proverb, one which factors to the hazard of untimely retaliation in opposition to the killers of 1’s father. “Nwata etoghi eto jụwa ihe gburu nna ya,” because the saying goes, “ihe ahụ gburu nna ya ewere isi ya.” (A baby in a rush to avenge its father’s dying dangers struggling father’s destiny). An Ezikeọba proverb caps all of it with a clincher rhetorical query: Does it make any sense for a girl to attraction to her life-force (chi) to take her life all within the technique of mourning the dying of a co-wife? (Oonye ọ na-akwakọnụ nwunye ji ye sị chi ye chọta a?)
But Nigeria, it appears, has not exhausted its capability for producing new thriller questions. Some three and a half a long time after Giwa, two unsettling questions have joined that grim archive. “Who gave the order to withdraw the troops overseeing the safety of Authorities Ladies’ Secondary College, Maga, in Sokoto, shortly earlier than terrorists attacked and kidnapped 24 ladies?” And, extra just lately, “who altered the Tax Reform Payments handed by the Nationwide Meeting earlier than presidential assent?” At first look, these questions seem totally different in gravity and style—one rooted in blood and terror, the opposite in bureaucratic legerdemain. However beneath their floor dissimilarities lies a standard pathology: the systematic evacuation of duty from the general public realm. In every case, the query appears apparent sufficient to demand an easy reply. Orders are given by individuals. Payments are altered by palms. Selections have signatures, trails, and beneficiaries. But, in Nigeria, the plain has an odd behavior of turning into elusive.
That is the place thriller questions stop to be about information and start to disclose one thing extra troubling in regards to the structure of energy.
Philosophers have lengthy argued that political authority is sustained not merely by coercion however by intelligibility—the flexibility of residents to know, who decides what, and on what grounds. Hannah Arendt warned that the banality of evil usually lies not in monstrous intent however within the routinisation of unaccountable energy. Nigeria’s thriller questions dramatise this perception. They’re signs of a system through which energy acts, however refuses to talk; decides, however declines to elucidate; kills, alters, withdraws, but leaves no authorial hint. Take the Maga schoolgirls. In a rustic traumatised by Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara and numerous unnamed tragedies, the presence of troops round a susceptible ladies’ college was not unintentional. It was a recognition—nevertheless belated—that the state bore an obligation of care. Their sudden withdrawal, shortly earlier than an assault, is subsequently not merely a tactical error; it’s a ethical rupture. To ask who ordered that withdrawal is to ask the place duty resides when safety is knowingly eliminated. The silence that follows such a query will not be impartial. It’s a solution of types—a solution that claims accountability is negotiable, and lives are collateral.
The Tax Reform Payments episode, although cold, isn’t any much less revealing. In constitutional idea, the passage of a invoice by the legislature and its assent by the chief is supposed to be a clear choreography of democratic authority. To counsel that what was assented to and formally gazetted was not what was handed is to open a chasm beneath the very thought of consultant governance. Right here once more, the query—who altered the payments?—ought to have a secular reply, traceable by means of legislative proceedings – clerks, drafts, variations, and signatures. Its persistence as a thriller alerts one thing deeper: a state through which paperwork can mutate with out authors, and energy can rewrite outcomes with out proudly owning the act.
Nigeria’s thriller questions thus perform as what the thinker Paul Ricoeur may name wounded narratives—tales interrupted on the level the place that means ought to crystallise. They refuse closure, and in doing so, they maintain reopening the moral wound of the polity. Every unanswered query accumulates symbolic weight, instructing residents, subtly however firmly, that reality is non-obligatory and duty fungible.
Over time, these questions cease being requested in hope. They’re requested in irony. Who killed Dele Giwa? has lengthy ceased to be a request for info; it’s now a shorthand for the state’s enduring allergy to self-incrimination. It’s a method of claiming: we all know that you already know, and you already know that we all know; but, all of us proceed as if every part is regular and ignorance have been a shared comfort. That is essentially the most corrosive impact of thriller questions. They normalise cynicism. When a society internalises the expectation that nobody will ever be held to account for the gravest acts, public morality withers. Regulation turns into procedural moderately than principled. Establishments persist, however legitimacy evaporates. The state continues to talk, however its phrases sound more and more hole, stripped of the authority that solely reality can confer.
And but, thriller questions endure exactly as a result of they nonetheless carry a residual ethical cost. They’re requested as a result of one thing within the collective conscience refuses to be absolutely anesthetised. They’re Nigeria’s method of remembering, of refusing full amnesia. On this sense, each repetition of Who killed Dele Giwa? is an act of quiet resistance—a reminder that unresolved injustice doesn’t expire with time.
Maybe, because of this new thriller questions maintain rising. A society that has not resolved its foundational riddles is condemned to breed them in new varieties. The unanswered previous leaks into the current, reshaping it in its personal picture. The bomb that killed Giwa and the pen(s) that altered a invoice belong to totally different worlds, however they’re animated by the identical logic: energy with out confession. The true tragedy, then, will not be that these questions stay unanswered, however that the Nigerian state seems to have made peace with their permanence. A nation that learns to dwell with such questions dangers mistaking endurance for stability and silence for order.
But questions, by their very nature, are stressed issues. They don’t die when ignored; they solely retreat. They wait. They age. They collect ethical sediment. And generally, lengthy after the actors have exited the stage, lengthy after the applause and the denials have pale, they return with an insistence that may not be deferred. Historical past, not like energy, is affected person. It has a cussed behavior of reopening information that authority thought it had buried underneath layers of silence, concern, and official forgetfulness. That is exactly why who killed Dele Giwa refuses to run out.
Writing underneath the evocative caption, Once more, Who Killed Dele Giwa?, Olatunji Dare had noticed in The Nation newspaper (27 February 2024) that the query has resurfaced with renewed pressure, not as mere nostalgia or journalistic ritual, however as a dwell constitutional and ethical problem. The Integrated Trustees of Media Rights Agenda, performing as institutional reminiscence for a rustic vulnerable to amnesia, breathed contemporary life into the query by means of a petition earlier than the Federal Excessive Courtroom in Abuja. In a uncommon second when the legislation itself appeared to clear its throat, the presiding choose, Justice Inyang Ekwo, reportedly directed the Legal professional Normal of the Federation to deliver Dele Giwa’s killers to justice, holding that the assassination violated the fitting to life as assured underneath the Nigerian Structure and the African Constitution on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
For the primary time in a protracted whereas, the query didn’t merely echo in newsrooms and personal conversations; it discovered its method into the austere language of judicial obligation. Dare, in his characteristically restrained however piercing method, ended with a query that now hangs closely within the air: Is that this lastly the momentum the attentive public has been craving for? It’s a query layered upon a query, a meta-interrogation that exposes Nigeria’s peculiar tragedy. For many years, the nation has not lacked information, suspects, insinuations, and even whispered certainties. What it has lacked is the braveness to permit reality to finish its journey from data to acknowledgment, from suspicion to accountability. And so Who killed Dele Giwa? turned much less a question than an ethical barometer, measuring how far the state was keen to go in defending itself from its personal reflection. However Nigeria, being Nigeria, has at all times understood the language of parable maybe higher than the language of coverage.
Gentleman Mike Ejeagha, the unassuming philosopher-minstrel of Igbo folklore, as soon as sang that the stub of a plantain thrown into the ocean doesn’t merely dissolve into oblivion. In some way, in opposition to expectation, in opposition to logic, it takes root in deep waters. In time, it rises, towers, and blossoms into luxuriant foliage.
The track will not be about botany. It’s about reality; about how what’s discarded, submerged, or intentionally forgotten retains a cussed capability for resurrection. Reality, Ejeagha reminds us, doesn’t rely upon beneficial circumstances to outlive; it merely waits for time to ripen. So it has been with Nigeria’s thriller questions. Jim Nwobodo, former governor of previous Anambra State underneath the Nigerian Peoples Social gathering (NPP), stumbled into philosophy underneath the cruel tutelage of political injustice. Allegedly rigged out of the 1983 elections, he distilled his frustration right into a sentence that has since migrated into proverbial lore throughout Igbo land: E mecha, eziokwu ga-apụta ihe—in the end, the reality shall absolutely prevail. It was not a menace. It was not a prediction anchored in optimism. It was a press release of religion in time itself as the final word adjudicator.
To be continued…
Agbedo, a professor of Linguistics, College of Nigeria Nsukka, Fellow of Netherlands Institute for Superior Examine, is a public affairs analyst.
