Intervention did not think much of when his column no longer appeared and he was not in the news anywhere too. It should have struck that something was probably wrong. It didn’t because Chief Dan Agbese was capable of withdrawing from the maddening crowd once a while, most likely appearing with a book or such a project.
It wasn’t the case this time. this time it was death, meaning that all these while, he must have been sick.
When Prof Isawa Elaigwu and Chief Audu Ogbeh died within weeks of each other in July and August 2025, ‘we’ prayed that will be the end of passages of such precious souls for the rest of the year. With Chief Dan Agbese’s death, it could be said that our prayers have not been heard or heard in God’s own way.
It surely is the close of an era: the era of that set of journalists around the defunct? Benue Plateau Publishing Company (BPPC), publishers of The Nigeria Standard and its Sunday version. Among them were Senator David Attah, George Ohemu, Dan Agbese, Gideon Barde, Sylvanus Namang, Rufai Ibrahim and many more.
While Attah, a Zaria graduate in Economics, wrote a column “Thinking Aloud”, Ohemu, a History graduate of Zaria wrote compelling treatises. The now late Agbese, a product of UNILAG’s Mass Communication wrote a weekly column whose name eludes memory immediately but which was a compulsory stuff. The winning outing till today must still be “Come With Me to Agila” when he described the road to his area in Benue State, how the grasses close into a roof from both sides of the road, leaving the roadster no choice than meander his or her way underneath. It is, arguably, Agbese’s moment in journalism for some of us who were reading him at our secondary school’s Staff Room before ever meeting him and before he went places!
May his soul rest in peace!
