There are questions in national life that are asked not because there are no answers, but because the answers are visible and yet we refuse to submit to public reason. Questions like these hang uneasily between investigation and prosecution. They begin as demands for explanation and end as mirrors of power. In Nigeria, there is a unique category of such questions. Over time, questions lose their innocence and become hardened into rhetorical fossils. They are repeated not in the hope of resolution but as a ritual reminder of the nation’s moral inertia. Chief among them is the unforgettable refrain: “Who killed Dele Giwa?”
Thirty-four years after Dele Giwa, a movement journalist, founding editor of Newswatch, and one of the sharpest pens of Nigeria’s Fourth Estate, was murdered by a parcel bomb delivered to his home in Ikeja, no evidence more significant than the fact and grotesque sophistication of the murder has been established. This problem has outlived eras of government, outlived transitions, and outlived the deaths of many actors who once strode the Nigerian stage with dignity and impunity. This question remains unanswered not because it cannot be answered, but because answering it requires looking into the mirror that the Nigerian state has consistently tried to hide from.
Immediately after Giwa’s assassination, Newswatch editors led by Ray Ekpu channeled their grief into quiet but radical editorial practices. Each weekly edition had the question permanently fixed on its front page: Who killed Dele Giwa? It was journalism stripped of its moral core. No window dressing, no accusations, no speculation. Just a question. The indictment slowly gained weight because the simple questions remained unanswered. When the question was finally dropped, it was not because it had been answered, but because the very ritual of humiliating a nation that had perfected the art of not blushing had exhausted its power. But another aspect of the sudden end to the editorial blowback is that it alleges that there was a subtle threat from the authorities, which effectively drew the attention of Dele Giwa’s grieving colleagues to the wisdom of an Igbo proverb that points out the dangers of premature retaliation against those who killed their father. There is a saying: “Nuta etoghi eto jụwa ihe gburu nna ya.” “ihe ahụ gburu nna ya ewere isi ya.” (A child who rushes to avenge his father’s death risks suffering his father’s fate). Ezikeba’s proverb concludes everything with a decisive rhetorical question. Is it meaningful for a woman, in the process of mourning the death of her co-wife, to appeal to her own life force (qi) and take her own life? (Oonye ọ na-akwakọnụ nwunye ji ye sị chi ye chọta a?)
But Nigeria does not seem to have exhausted its capacity to create new puzzles. Some 35 years after Giwa, two disturbing questions have been added to its grim archive. “Who ordered the withdrawal of the troops overseeing security at the Government Girls Secondary School in Maga, Sokoto, just before terrorists attacked and kidnapped 24 schoolgirls?” and, more recently, “Who changed the tax reform bill that was passed by the National Assembly before it was approved by the President?” At first glance, these questions appear to be of different weight and genre. One is rooted in blood and fear, the other in bureaucratic legal politics. However, beneath their superficial differences lies a common pathology: a systematic avoidance of responsibility from the public sphere. In each case, the question is obvious and requires a simple answer. Commands are given by people. The banknotes are tampered with manually. A decision has a signature, a trail, and a beneficiary. But Nigeria has a strange habit of the obvious becoming elusive.
Here, the mystery questions stop being about facts and begin to reveal something more troubling about power structures.
Philosophers have long argued that political authority is maintained not through mere coercion but through intelligibility, the ability of citizens to understand who decides what, and on what basis. Hannah Arendt warned that the banality of evil often lies not in monstrous intentions but in the routinization of unaccountable power. Nigeria’s Mysterious Questions dramatizes this insight. They are symptoms of a system in which power is at play but refuses to speak. He makes a decision but refuses to explain. It can be killed, altered, and retracted, but it leaves no trace of its authorship. Let’s take the MAGA high school girl. In a country traumatized by Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara and countless other nameless tragedies, it was no coincidence that troops were stationed around vulnerable girls’ schools. It was recognized, albeit belatedly, that the state has a duty of care. Their sudden withdrawal just before the attack was therefore not just a tactical error. That is a moral failure. Asking who ordered the withdrawal is the same as asking who is responsible if protection is intentionally lifted. The silence that follows such a question is not neutral. That’s kind of the answer, the answer that accountability is negotiable and life is collateral.
The episode with the tax reform bill is no less revealing, though less bloody. In constitutional theory, the passage of a bill by the legislature and its assent by the executive represents a transparent demonstration of democratic authority. To suggest that what was agreed upon and formally gazetted was not what was passed is to open a rift under the very concept of representative government. Again, the question “Who changed the bill?” should have a commonplace answer that can be traced through the legislative process: clerks, drafts, versions, signatures. Its persistence as a mystery suggests something deeper. It is a state in which documents can change without an author and a power can rewrite the results without owning the action.
In this way, Nigeria’s enigmatic question functions as what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls a wounded story, a story interrupted at the point when meaning should have crystallized. They refuse to shut down and in doing so continue to reopen the moral wounds of the polity. Each unanswered question gains symbolic weight, subtly but firmly teaching the nation that truth is arbitrary and responsibility is fungible.
Over time, these questions become less hopeful to ask. they are asked sarcastically. Who killed Dele Giwa? It has long since ceased to be a request for information. It has now become shorthand for an allergy to the nation’s persistent self-incrimination. It’s a way of saying, “We know what you know, and you know what we know.” Nevertheless, we all proceed as if everything is normal and ignorance is a common convenience. This is the most pernicious effect of riddle questions. They normalize cynicism. Public morality declines when society becomes imbued with the expectation that no one will be held accountable for the most serious acts. The law becomes procedural rather than principle based. Institutions survive, but legitimacy evaporates. The nation continues to speak, but its words sound increasingly hollow, stripped of the authority that only truth can provide.
Nevertheless, the enigmatic question persists precisely because it remains a morally charged question. They are asked because something in the collective conscience refuses complete anesthesia. They are a Nigerian way of remembering, a way of refusing total amnesia. In this sense, “Who Killed Dele Giwa? ” is a silent act of resistance, a reminder that unresolved injustices will not disappear over time.
Perhaps this is why new and mysterious questions keep arising. Societies that have not solved fundamental mysteries are condemned to reproduce them in new forms. The unanswered past leaks into the present and reshapes it in its own image. The bomb that killed Giwa and the pen that tampered with the banknotes belong to different worlds, but they are driven by the same logic: unconfessed power. The real tragedy, therefore, is not that these questions remain unanswered, but that the Nigerian state appears to have come to terms with its permanence. People who have learned to live with such questions run the risk of mistaking patience for stability and silence for order.
But questions, by their very nature, are restless. You won’t die if you are ignored. They just retreat. they are waiting. they get older. They collect moral lees. And sometimes, long after the actors have left the stage, long after the applause and the voices of disapproval have faded, they return with a case that can no longer be held out. History, unlike power, is patient. It has a stubborn habit of reopening files that authorities think they have hidden beneath layers of silence, fear and official oblivion. This is exactly why Who Killed Dele Giwa refuses to expire.
Olatunji Dare, writing under the provocative caption “Again, Who Killed Dele Giwa?”, said in The Nation (February 27, 2024) that the issue is re-emerging with new vigor, not as mere nostalgia or journalistic ritual, but as a living constitutional and moral challenge. The Media Rights Agenda Corporate Board, acting as the institutional memory of a country prone to amnesia, breathed new life into the issue through a petition to the Federal High Court in Abuja. In a rare moment when the law itself appears to have cleared its throat, the presiding judge, Justice Inyang Ekwo, reportedly directed the Federal Attorney-General to bring Dele Giwa’s killers to justice on the grounds that the assassination violated the right to life guaranteed in the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter of Human Rights.
For the first time in a while, this question didn’t just echo in newsrooms and private conversations. It was incorporated into the strict language of judicial obligation. Mr. Dare, in his characteristically restrained yet sharp manner, concluded with the question that now hangs heavy. “Is this finally the momentum that an attentive nation has been waiting for?” It is a question upon question, a meta-interrogation that exposes a uniquely Nigerian tragedy. For decades, this country has not lacked facts, suspects, innuendos, or even whispered convictions. What is missing is the courage to allow truth to complete its journey from knowledge to recognition, from suspicion to accountability. So who killed Dele Giwa? Rather than a question, it became a moral barometer, a measure of how far a nation is willing to go to protect itself from self-reflection. But Nigeria is Nigeria and has always understood the language of parables perhaps more than the language of policy.
Gentleman Mike Ejega, the unassuming philosopher and bard of Igbo folklore, once sang that a plantain stump thrown into the sea is not simply forgotten. Somehow, contrary to expectations, contrary to logic, it takes root in the deep sea. Eventually, it will rise, tower, and flower into lush foliage.
This song is not about botany. It’s about truth. About how things that have been discarded, sunk, or deliberately forgotten retain a stubborn ability to rise again. Truth, Eyaga reminds us, does not depend on favorable conditions for survival. It’s just a matter of waiting for the time to ripen. The same goes for Nigeria’s mysterious question. Mr. Jim Nwobodo, a former governor of the defunct Anambra State under the umbrella of the Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP), has stumbled on philosophy under the harsh tutelage of political malpractice. After the 1983 elections were allegedly rigged, he distilled his grievances into a sentence that has since permeated Igbo soil as proverbial lore. It wasn’t a threat. It was not an optimistic prediction. It was an expression of faith in time itself as the final judge.
to be continued…
Mr. Agbedo is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a public affairs analyst.
