Sumonu Oladele "Baines" Giwa hailed from Ugbekpe Ekperi, Etsako East local government area of Edo state.
[1] Dele Giwa travelled to the USA for his higher education, earning a BA in English from Brooklyn College in 1977 and enrolled for a Graduate program at Fordham University.
[2] Dele Giwa and fellow journalists Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed founded Newswatch[3] in 1984, and the first edition was distributed on 28 January 1985.
[10] Dele Giwa was killed by a parcel bomb in his home at Ikeja, Lagos, while in his study with Kayode Soyinka, on Sunday 19 October 1986.
Togun also accused Giwa plotting with the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, and students to carry out a socialist revolution.
Ogugbuaja also said that he suspected that his phone might have been bugged because Giwa and Ray Ekpu in one of their telephone conversations with him had indeed promised to employ him in Newswatch if the police dismissed him.
On Saturday 18 October, Giwa also spoke to Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, the Chief of General Staff who said he was familiar with the matter and also promised to look into it.
This same person from the DMI later called back to say he couldn't reach Giwa at the office and then put Col Akilu on the line.
According to Ekpu, this didn't come as a surprise because Giwa had received advance copies of some of the President's speeches in the past through Akilu.
Ekpu says Giwa replied Akilu that it wasn't over and that he had already informed his lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi to follow up on the matter.
[19] Aikhomu then went on to ask Ismaila Gwarzo, the Director of the SSS and Haliru Akilu to render their accounts of what had transpired between Dele Giwa and their agencies in the recent past.
Ekpu claimed that he remembered Gwarzo saying that the killing was "quite embarrassing" and also that Tony Momoh had described it as "a clear case of assassination"; later he was quoted saying, "a special probe would serve no useful purpose".
[19][21] In a newspaper interview years later in retirement, Chris Omeben who at the time was the Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in charge of the Federal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau (FIIB) at Alagbon, on his part recalled that he was the second officer to have handled the case file after he had taken it over from his predecessor at the FIIB, Victor Pam.
Omeben described the force of the explosion to have been strong enough to blow out the steel bars over the toilet window (burglary protection), which in his own assessment made Soyinka's story less convincing.
[23] However, Soyinka has come out to reply Omeben and accused him of spreading deliberate falsehood with his comments on him on his involvement with the parcel bomb incident.
In an interview he granted The Nation newspaper of Lagos of Saturday, 19 January 2013, Soyinka denied that he ran to the toilet when the bomb exploded.
Omeben alleges that the then Inspector General of Police Gambo Jimeta has asked him to leave the case with the Tsav team out of anger at how messy the whole situation was getting.
Tsav claimed that he was not granted permission to question key actors involved, including Tunde Togun, Ismaila Gwarzo and Haliru Akilu.
Tsav averred that in his final report, he had concluded that there was enough circumstantial evidence to accuse the duo of Togun and Akilu of conspiracy to murder but still the government did not make these two officers available for interrogation or a voice identification as he had requested.
This blackmail theory might not be unconnected with the off-the-record interview that Lt Col A.K Togun gave to airport correspondents of the Guardian on 27 October 1986.
In a Newswatch interview marking the 25th anniversary of the magazine, one of the founding partners of the organisation Yakubu Mohammed explained the Giwa-Newswatch-Gloria Okon link.
The Ibrahim Babangida drug running angle was also called into question by revelations made by the embittered former head of the National Security Organization (NSO), Alhaji Mohammed Lawal Rafindadi.
In 1985, following a request by the Supreme Military Council, the NSO under Rafindadi investigated Babangida and found him complicit of forgery and activities inimical to national security.
This issue arose as a result of Babangida and his in-law, Mr Sunny Okogwu's interest in an arms manufacturing venture in Kaduna called Black Gold.
[31] Soyinka is also alleged to have given conflicting accounts of the events to the Police and media outlets, he is also accused of fleeing the country while investigations were ongoing.
The air hostesses took them from us, played with them, and they were asking me if I was feeling better – knowing the trauma one must have been through in the past weeks, and took us straight and right inside the aircraft, even before checking in other passengers.
An excerpt of the Judgement by the then Lagos State Chief Judge, Justice Candido Johnson reads thus "...Even if one considers the reasonableness of time, I would say that the incident that gave birth to the death of the late Dele Giwa is not only unique in its form but also complex and would require sufficient time to conduct detailed and balanced investigation, a report on which the appropriate authority would reasonably act.
On 23 February 1988, Justice Longe ruled that the two security officers, Lt. Col Tunde Togun and Col. Haliru Akilu could not be tried for the murder of Dele Giwa.
In his ruling Justice Longe averred among other things that,"...the Attorney general did not oppose the objection raised by counsel to the 'accused' persons, Chief Rotimi Williams, on the ground that the information was filed by private prosecutor (Chief Gani Fawehinmi) when the information had not been completed and especially when the 'INFORMATION IMPLICATED ONE OF THE PROSECUTION WITNESSES'(Kayode Soyinka)...the proof of evidence before the Court was mere HEARSAY….
[34][35] In 2008, the Government of Nigeria named a street in the New Federal Capital Abuja after Dele Giwa, as they did with other activists such as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Ken Saro Wiwa[36]