Death be not proud: Publisher Dotun Oladipo and the tolling bell, By Max Amuchie

I have struggled with the inconceivability of writing about Dotun Oladipo in the past tense. Even now, the words do not sit comfortably with me. My mind keeps returning to the Dotun who was still here — sending his bulletin, sharing ideas, encouraging colleagues and going about the business of journalism.

At just 56, Dotun Oladipo has left us far too soon.

John Donne, the 17th-century English poet and cleric, wrote words more than four centuries ago that seem almost written for a moment such as this:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man/is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;/and if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe/is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as/well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine/own were; any man’s death diminishes me,/because I am involved in mankind./And therefore never send to know for whom/the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Those words have stayed with me since I first encountered them. I have returned to them at moments of profound loss, including the tragedy of the Bellview Airlines crash in October 2005. But I never imagined that I would one day find myself returning to them to make sense of the death of Dotun Oladipo.

For whom, indeed, does the bell toll?
It tolls for Dotun. But it also tolls for all of us.

It tolls for the journalists who worked with him, for the publishers he mentored, for the members of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) whom he served and strengthened, for the readers who encountered his journalism, and for the many people whose lives he touched in ways that perhaps became fully apparent only after his death.

It tolls for me too.

The first time I invoked the title of Donne’s famous meditation, ‘Death Be Not Proud’, was in October 2005, in a reflective article on the 22 October, 2005 Bellview Airlines Boeing 737-200 crash.

On Sunday, 23 October, my family was about driving out to go to church when a call came from Eniola Bello, then Editor of ThisDay. Bellview Airlines had crashed the previous day, Saturday, and I was needed immediately in the office to lead the reportorial team to the crash site in a remote village in Ogun State.

I was Features Editor at the time and, as is typical of journalism, like military service, one must obey the editor’s order.

I got to the ThisDay office in Apapa, Lagos that morning and the Chairman, Nduka Obaigbena, had made his personal car available for the trip. We drove to the forest in Lisa village in Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State, where the crashed aircraft had been buried deep in the earth.

There was hardly any visible trace of the aircraft. No recognisable piece of it could be seen, except for the little smoke rising from the earth and the tree branches that had been cut or shattered by the impact.

All 111 passengers and six crew members perished.

There were many responders — the Red Cross and the Ogun State Government team led by the then Commissioner for Health, Dr Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, among them. The atmosphere was sombre. Everyone could feel the enormity of the calamity, the scale of the human tragedy.

Journalists are trained to be emotionally detached from the stories they cover.

I managed to apply that principle, but I also had to write a reflective piece on a tragedy whose scale was almost unimaginable.

In writing that article, I reached for John Donne’s ‘Meditation XVII’, from his 1624 “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” the meditation that inspired the title of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I had first written about Donne’s famous meditation some five years earlier, following the Kenya Airways Flight 431 crash of 30 January, 2000, which I was assigned to cover at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, where relations of the crash victims had besieged the airline, desperately seeking information about their loved ones.

The plane, carrying almost exclusively Nigerian passengers, had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after take-off from the Félix Houphouët-Boigny International Airport, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

Dr Francis Enemuo, a highly respected political scientist and senior lecturer at the University of Lagos, and Reverend Father Edmund Ikenga-Metuh, an eminent Catholic priest and renowned professor of African Traditional Religion, were among the casualties of the Kenya Airways crash.

And now, more than two decades later, I am confronting that same bell again.

Penultimate Tuesday, I found myself in a reverie, ruminating over the immortal words of that 17th-century writer. It was evening, and I had casually picked up my phone, which was being charged, to check if there were fresh messages. Suddenly, I saw a pop-up on the GOCOP WhatsApp platform. It was from Danlami Nmodu, mni, our president.

I saw the name Dotun Oladipo on the pop-up and decided to open the message.

What I saw did not make sense to me.

I had actually just woken up from sleep, so I cleared my eyes to be sure that I had read the message correctly. Our own Dotun Oladipo had died?

I checked my WhatsApp messages.

Dotun had sent his news bulletin to me at 2:50 p.m. that same day.

Is this a joke?

It was incomprehensible.

I called Danlami. When I could not reach him immediately, I called Olumide Iyanda, our vice president. He confirmed it.

Then Danlami returned my call and confirmed it.

By then, Gabriel Akinadewo was already at Dotun’s house that night. I called him. He said he was spending the night there.

Very understandable.

Tragedy had just befallen GOCOP.

The Weight of His Example

I began to play in my mind my personal journey with Dotun.

But everyone who had the privilege of encountering Dotun had a personal journey with him. He left something of himself in the lives of the people he met.

As I read the testimonies of our members on the GOCOP platform, I started crying.

Journalists are trained to manage emotion. For an editor, the more tragic, bizarre or extraordinary a story is, the more compelling it becomes as news. We learn to stand at a certain distance from the events we cover, however devastating they may be.

But this was different.

Reading the comments, tributes and testimonies on our platform melted that professional distance. I became misty-eyed and could not help myself.

How can anyone who knew Dotun closely not testify to the rarity of his candour, the strength of his character and the depth of his selflessness?

There was something unusual about him. His frankness was not the convenient sort that says only what is safe to say.

His selflessness was not performed for applause. It was simply the way he lived.

And perhaps that is why the grief has been so profound.

We mourn people when they die. But sometimes, the death of a person forces us to confront the value of a life we had perhaps taken for granted while that person was still with us.

Dotun was one of those people.

I recall that around 2019, when Dotun was President of GOCOP, I had decided to help raise funds for one of our members, the late Ben Bright-Mkpuma, who was suffering from kidney failure.

Dotun saw how intentional I was about the effort. He could have simply commended it, as many people would. Instead, he decided that whatever I raised, GOCOP would match it, so that we could make it ₦1 million donation to the Bright-Mkpuma family.

At the time, there was no constitutional provision that obliged GOCOP to do this. Dotun was under no obligation to deploy the weight of the organisation behind my personal initiative. Yet he did.

From my own effort, I raised about ₦600,000. True to his word, GOCOP matched it. ₦1 million was eventually sent to the Bright-Mkpuma family.

And when Bright-Mkpuma eventually passed on, Dotun ensured that GOCOP was officially represented at his burial.

That was Dotun.

He did not merely speak about solidarity; he practised it. He understood that an organisation is not just a structure of offices, titles and meetings. It is, above all, a community of people who must stand by one another when life becomes difficult.

I experienced that same generosity personally in 2025, when my parents died and were to be buried.
Dotun rose to the occasion.

He did not wait for me to ask. He galvanised our friends to contribute and kick-started the process himself by making a personal donation.

That gesture has remained with me.

There are people who offer sympathy when tragedy comes. There are others who show up.

Dotun showed up.

And sometimes, that is the most profound definition of friendship.

The Eagle Online

Dotun was among the professional journalists who saw the potential of online publishing after a glorious career in the traditional media.

The Eagle Online, which he set up, became one of the most successful online news platforms in Nigeria, making Dotun a role model and mentor to not a few online publishers.

But what distinguished him was that he did not see his success as something to be guarded jealously. He was always willing to share what he knew.

As President of GOCOP, he mobilised members and worked to ensure that they benefited from programmes and opportunities that could make their businesses more sustainable. At GOCOP conferences, he regularly shared ideas about what The Eagle Online had done to make a difference in Nigeria’s online media space. More importantly, he encouraged other publishers to come forward and share their own ideas for the collective benefit of members.

I remember that as we were preparing for the annual conference in Lokoja, Kogi State, in 2024, I had casually spoken about exploring opportunities for the low-hanging fruits in sustaining online news businesses. Dotun immediately suggested that I prepare a paper on the subject for presentation and discussion at the conference.

That was another side of Dotun: he recognised possibilities in other people and gave them room to develop those possibilities.

When ‘The Sunday Stew’ column was launched and I announced that it would be syndicated, Dotun was among the first to indicate his interest in joining the syndication loop.

Up until the time of his death, The Eagle Online never missed an edition of the column.

I think about that now.

Every Sunday, my words travelled to the readers of The Eagle Online. And behind that simple act of syndication was a man who had, once again, opened a door for another journalist.

That was Dotun.

He built his own platform, but he also helped others build theirs. He understood that the success of one publisher did not diminish the prospects of another. If anything, he believed that the online media ecosystem became stronger when publishers shared knowledge, opportunities and audiences.

In an industry where competition can sometimes make people protective of information and opportunities, Dotun chose generosity.

And that, too, was his legacy.

A Different Kind of The Sunday Stew

This is the most difficult edition of ‘The Sunday Stew’ I have had to write since the column debuted in March.

I have struggled with the inconceivability of writing about Dotun Oladipo in the past tense. Even now, the words do not sit comfortably with me. My mind keeps returning to the Dotun who was still here — sending his bulletin, sharing ideas, encouraging colleagues and going about the business of journalism.

Even the story of his passing and the reactions from individuals and organisations was difficult for the Sundiata Post to publish. There are stories journalists report because they must, even when every instinct in them wishes the story were not true.

This has been one of those stories.

So this is a different kind of ‘The Sunday Stew’.

There is no cleverness here, no attempt to manufacture a profound ending. There is only the painful duty of remembering a man who mattered.

I began this piece with John Donne because his words have accompanied me through other moments of loss: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The bell has tolled for Dotun.

And yet, as I write this, I still cannot quite bring myself to say goodbye.

Perhaps because Dotun’s final bulletin arrived on my phone at 2:50 p.m. that day, Tuesday, 25 August, before the news came that he was gone.

Perhaps because, in journalism, we are accustomed to deadlines, editions and bulletins — but there is no edition that prepares you for the final bulletin.

And perhaps because some people do not leave us entirely when they die. They remain in the things they built, the people they helped, the doors they opened, the ideas they shared and the memories they left behind.
Dotun left much behind.

His burial begins with a service of songs on Thursday, 10 September at Daystar Christian Centre Headquarters, Oregun, Ikeja, Lagos. And he will be laid to rest on Friday, 11 September, from 10:00 am to 11:00 am at the same venue.

But I will not say goodbye.

I will simply say: Thank you, Dotun for giving us the shelter of your example to dwell in.

You thought of no other name for your news platform but The Eagle Online. Perhaps that was because you appreciated the strength of the eagle and the power of its wings. With those wings, you have left us an imperishable legacy and flown to a higher, more glorious realm.

May the angels of heaven grant you Godspeed in that realm, as you rest in His bosom.

Fare thee well, Dotun Samson Oladipo.

Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.

Max Nwabueze Amuchie, a member of GOCOP, is CEO & Theorist-In-Chief, Sundiata Post and Lead Researcher, Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU), Abuja.