If there is any difficult task I hate to undertake, this is one of them – writing a tribute to someone extremely close to me for more than four decades. I was busy clattering away on my laptop when a colleague sauntered into my office last Monday. I barely looked up when I sensed his presence, thinking he had come to say hello to me as usual. After fidgeting for some seconds, he dropped the bombshell: Your friend, Dan Agbese, has passed away. My fingers froze, eyes popped out of their sockets.
I sat back on my chair, and then leaned forward as my heart gathered speed. I was not prepared for what netizens refer to as “Breaking News”. My lower jaw gave way but no words came out of the cave. The shock was too profound to handle. About 48 hours earlier, the Blueprint family had woken up to the sad news of the passage of our Assistant General Manager, Printing and Logistics, Alhaji Yahaya Adamu.
I was surfing through the internet when my eyes fell on Yahaya’s picture. He was no stranger to social media. I thought he had posted something of interest until I discovered that it was Malam Ibrahim Sheme announcing his passing a few hours earlier. Malam Sheme, as if you don’t know him, is a media icon and pioneer editor of this newspaper. Sheme and Yahaya were what is known in football as 5 and 6. The duo were inseparable until the ultimate terminator sneaked into red-card Yahaya on the morning of Saturday, November 15, 2025.
Permit me to still digress a little. I will backpedal to Dan’s tribute later.
Yahaya was an asset to the Blueprint, loved by everyone. He was committed to the cause of the paper almost to a fault. Here was a Hercules who would labour to accomplish any tasks assigned to him without giving any excuses. His boss, Malam Salisu Umar, does not even brood excuses once he gives you a task. His philosophy is “Make an effort, not an excuse.”
Although Hahaya had been nursing some health challenges lately, he had refused to be totally knocked down. So, no one saw his passing on the horizon that soon. He attended the management meeting 72 hours before his passing and had requested that the air conditioner in the boardroom be turned off because it was affecting his breathing, which was punctuated by occasional wheezing. Nevertheless, he still made his usual contribution at the meeting, beginning every sentence with his familiar adverbial word… “Actually”. Despite his condition, he still insisted on travelling to Kano with a colleague for an official assignment the following week.
Yahaya will be sorely missed by the entire Blueprint family. The MD and I were fond of harassing him to exercise for weight shedding. He is free from that now, and also free from me calling him “Tumbi Giwa”, which means elephant tummy in Hausa.
May his soul find peace with His maker. And also grant his family, colleagues, and friends the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss.
Now, back to Oga Dan.
Our paths first crossed when I joined the New Nigerian Newspapers (NNN) in the early 70s as a greenhorn. Oga Dan had already established himself as a staff writer with the paper. I found Dan’s writing style irresistible. I discovered we had a lot in common in spite of the huge gap between us because I came from a storytelling background. I could start by telling a gripping story, the end of which I would not even know from the beginning, and it would just flow to the denouement. We became closer after reading some of my sports stories and features from my Zaria base. Consumed by curiosity, he asked not where I trained, but where I had practised before joining the paper.
A few years after working with New Nigerian, Oga Dan took off to the prestigious University of Lagos (Unilag) to read B.Sc. Mass Communication.
When The Nigeria Standard Newspaper was established (as a weekly) by the Joseph Gomwalk regime, some of my New Nigerian colleagues who crossed over to Jos seduced me to decamp from my Zaria base to set up the sports desk. Two years later, I was sent to the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Lagos, for a sub-editing course. Shortly after returning to the Tin City, Oga Dan also landed in Jos. He had completed his Mass Communication programme as well as the mandatory Youth Service in Ibadan.
He was made the chief sub-editor, and I had to work with him on the sub-desk. Having undergone a course in sub-editing at the Nigerian institute of Journalism (NIJ), Lagos, I was saddled with other responsibilities outside my sports specialty. As the paper turned daily, Oga Dan suggested to the management that I should be divested of other functions so that, in his words, “By doing so, he will concentrate on sports and keep a sports column like Clement Isaiah”. Mr. Isaiah, the father of the late Sam Nda Isaiah, founder of the LEADERSHIP Group of Newspapers, was my immediate boss in the New Nigerian. He ran a very vibrant weekly sports column every Saturday. And it was a must-read.
The management reluctantly agreed with Oga Dan, and that was how I escaped being used as one stone to kill many birds. One morning, he called me aside and asked to know when I would introduce my sports column. We both put our heads together and came up with “Saturday Commentary” as a platform. Three months after the birth of the column, I bagged a board appointment with the state’s Sports Council. Oga Dan could not hide his excitement at my being the first sportswriter to land a board appointment in the country. He insisted I must “wash” the appointment. I did, over “isiewu”, a delicacy made from goat head, which was his favourite.
Less than two years after joining the Standard, Dan took off to the US for his Master’s programme at the University of Columbia. He came back a year later armed not only with his second degree but also with a potbelly, considered by many as a hallmark of a big man. I told him he was sick. Signing out a set of tracksuits from the Standard FC stores, I chaperoned him to the Jos Race Course along Bauchi Road with a view to panel beating the protruding belly. After about three weeks of intensive jogging with me, the big tummy vanished. He confessed to me that he felt lighter and healthier. My reward was a bowl of peppered bushmeat, my own favourite.
In 1978 or thereabouts, Dan caught a virus that manifested in a column he named “In Lighter Mood”. Laden with satire and humour, the column was an instant hit, and it also boosted the circulation of the daily paper. There was this experience he shared with his numerous readers in a piece he entitled “Welcome to Orokam, where palm wine is cheaper than water.” Orokam is the headquarters of the Otukpa local government area of Benue state. It was a masterpiece. Before then, little or nothing was known about the community, which was bedeviled by perennial water scarcity.
Dan later became the editor of the daily paper. By then, partisan politics, driven by the Second Republic, had returned to the country, and the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) was in charge of Plateau state. But the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) as the opposition party was very strong. Its state secretary, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, was a case study of how an opposition party can keep a sitting government on its toes. Adamu singlehandedly gave Governor Solomon Lar some sleepless nights and everyone dreaded his mordant tongue. The government of the day, in taking any decisions, must factor in what Abduallahi Adamu would say. However, Oga Dan had the misfortune of being a friend of Abdullahi Adamu in a manner reminiscent of the Biblical David and Jonathan.
The NPP government became uncomfortable with an Adamu-Agbese unholy alliance even though Oga Dan was able to draw a line between being Adamu’s friend and editor of a paper funded by the NPP government. Some powerful elements in the party wanted him out of the system by all means. A sack letter was prepared and taken to Governor Lar for his signature. It was a difficult task for the executive governor to execute because he personally adored Oga Dan for his professional finesse; he was a vintage columnist… a wordsmith par excellence.
However, Mr. Aper Aku, who was the governor of the NPN-controlled Benue state got wind of Lar’s dilemma. The siege on Oga Dan ended when Aper Aku appointed him as the general manager of Radio Benue. I personally felt a sense of loss after his departure. But he left the virus behind. There was a huge vacuum and because we both have the same writing style, though he was satirical I was witty, the virus located me. And that was how I came up with a column named “The Man From PPC”. PPC stands for Plateau Publishing Company, publishers of the Standard Newspapers. “The Man From PPC” effectively filled the vacuum and ran on a weekly basis for almost a decade parri passu with “Saturday Commentary” until I bowed out.
In the early 80s, I visited him in Kaduna after his return to the New Nigerian, this time as its editor. I wanted him to write a foreword to the compilation of “The Man From PPC. His secretary went into his office to announce my presence. To the surprise of everyone, Oga Dan personally came out to usher me into his office, addressing me as “The Man From PPC” instead of Clem. When he saw me off, he told me not to forget “Saturday Commentary”. I promised him I would not. Surprisingly, it is the manuscript of “The Man From PPC” that is tucked away in my library along with the foreword. “Saturday Commentary” was published and released during the 2003 COJA. It was republished three years ago with the title, “Global Sports and Other Commentaries”.
When Oga Dan left the New Nigerian to co-found the Newswatch Magazine with Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed in the mid-eighties, I was tempted to join him. He would have loved the idea. But because I dreaded the Lagos environment, I perished the thought. The city is too chaotic for my liking. The three months I spent at the NIJ in the early 70s was like hell on earth.
What I have penned down here is not up to 25 per cent of my professional peregrinations with Oga Dan. He will get adequate mention when I write my memoir to add to my oeuvre and complete my imitation of him. He had six books to his credit, while I have 10, though seven that are works of fiction.
I join my colleagues and his numerous admirers at home and abroad in mourning this painful loss. May God grant his lively soul external rest, and his family, especially his spouse Lady Rose Agbese, the fortitude to cope with the huge loss. I still remember how resplendent she looked in her wedding gown at the St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, Jos, in the late 70s.
When Oga Dan arrives at the Pearly Gates, having translated to immortality and clutching his work tools, the angels should let him pass, more so that journalists would be required to report events in the Primordial Kingdom.
