Encomium
For the past 30 years, Dimgba Igwe ace journalist, publisher, author, biographer and pastor was a role model to many practicing and aspiring journalists. Along with his long time journalist friend and business partner, Mike Awoyinfa, he mid-wifed some hugely successful newspapers, including the rested Weekend Concord, The Sun and lately Entertainment Express and Sunday Express respectively.
After the pioneering roles they played at the rested Weekend Concord newspaper and The Sun newspapers in 2011, Igwe and Awoyinfa set about recording another landmark in the Nigerian media with the establishment of a newspaper entirely devoted to the entertainment industry, Entertainment Express.
The newspaper hit the newsstand in June 2011. The duo was still engrossed in taking the new project to Olympian height when death came calling on Saturday, September 6, 2014.
Dimgba met his co-traveller, Awoyinfa at the Sunday Concord newspaper, and ever since they have been long standing friends.
According to Igwe, “We discovered we are ‘kindred spirits.’”
Speaking about the late publisher recently, Awoyinfa said, “Dimgba complemented my weaknesses, he added to my strength. Only God knows why we came the way we are, even twins are not that close. We leaned on each other and celebrated, mourned our woes together. We did everything together and I learnt everyday from him because he had his own areas where he was stronger than myself. Intellectually and spiritually, he was above me in certain respects. Sometimes, we disagreed to agree again. We knew how to tolerate ourselves and we were not the greedy type,” Awoyinfa described his late friend.
The late Igwe was a hard worker to many staffers at the outfits he managed. He was something close to a slave driver. He loved to work and had actually planned to keep working for as long as his legs could carry him. To him, the idea of retirement was strange.
Aside journalism, Igwe, alongside Awoyinfa established the mastery of another form of writing. Together, the duo were unarguably the most renowned biographers in the country. While they were still in various paid employment and after they decided to be on their own, the duo wrote the biographies of more Nigerians than anybody else.
They wrote 50 Nigeria’s Corporate Strategists. It was printed three times and they all sold out. The book profiles 50 corporate leaders, trying to distill their management experiences and trying to work out case studies of how businesses are managed in our very peculiar terrain.
A consummate journalist till he breathed his last, the erudite media manager was never tired of propagating the many powers of the average journalist.
With his death, the media industry has lost another firebrand professional type that is not easy to replace. The death of media icon, Dimgba Igwe has left a big vacuum in the media industry, in his family and in the life of his literary twin brother, Mike Awoyinfa.
When ENCOMIUM Weekly visited his Dele Orishabiyi, Okota, Lagos residence on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, it was as quiet as the graveyard. The signs were written all over the place that a great man had passed on. Sympathizers and family members wore sorrowful looks, no words could describe the passing away of their loved one.
His wife and children were hardly seen downstairs in their duplex except a very important guest came to extend condolences.
ENCOMIUM Weekly spoke with some family members about the life and times of their son, brother and in-law.
