ONE of Africa’s most remarkable journalists and informed commentary writer, Mr. Alade Odunewu, has died at the age of 85.
Family sources say Mr. Odunewu, who for many years wrote the blistering ‘Allah Dey’ column at the defunct Daily Times stable, passed on after an undisclosed form of sickness at the St. Nicholas Hospital in Lagos.
Witty and brilliant, Alhaji Odunewu resuscitated his ‘Allah Dey’ column again with The Comet (now The Nation) newspaper in 1999 and kept it as a regular feature until 2001 when he accepted to serve as the chairman of Nigerian Press Council.
He also served the government as a Commissioner for Tourism in Lagos State in 1973 and also as a member of the now-defunct Federal Elections Commission.
Odunewu attended St John’s School, Aroloya; St Cyprian, Port Harcourt; New Bethel College, Onitsha, and the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, UK.
A co-founder of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, Mr. Odunewu rose to the position of the Managing Director of the Nigerian Tribune in 1956.
In 1964, he returned to Daily Times where he became the Group Publications Controller, then the editor, before rising to become Editor-in-Chief of the Times Publications.
The late Odunewu was an advocate of fairness and ethics in reporting. He served as the president of the Nigerian Media Merit Award, a project that is designed to reward excellence in journalism.
Canonised as the dean of Nigerian satirical writing by the late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, satire was the stuff of his work. As Dr. Tunji Dare described him, he was “Master of the well-placed innuendo, and of what the British call damnation by feint praise.”