Vanguard News
Jimanze, quintessential polemicist takes a bow
On
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
I WAS excited when my phone rang on Sunday, September 13, 2020 at exactly 5.25 p.m, and it was Dr. Jimanze Ego-Alowes. We had not seen each other since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and we spoke last in March when he called over my mother’s kidnap. That was untypically long period because we spoke often on phone. So, in my excitement, I picked the call, shouted his name and was already poking him of being overwhelmed by the country’s intractable problems when his voice stopped me in my track.
Farewell, Jimanze Ego-Alowes, “Wiseman from the East”, (1958-2020), By Nduka Otiono 5 min read
…Do go gentle into that good night, Wiseman from the East, a.k.a. “Ahiazuwa,” a philosophical Igbo expression about the world as a marketplace with which he signed off his column in
The Sun newspaper. We will continue to treasure your bold and provocative works, which include the seven books you cited in the…email to me…
Jimanze Ego-Alowes died from liver cancer at 62, before we could hatch his next-level proposal. A prolific author, he described himself on his Twitter handle as a “journalist, poet and writer with a passion for new knowledge and human development.” He was the founding director of The Brace Institute, a Lagos-based think tank; founder of a fledgling civil society advocacy group, Minority Rights Defense Initiative (MRDI); and publisher of The Stone Press Ltd., with which he reissued his remarkable 2006 book,