Joseph N. C. Egemonye

Joseph N. C. Egemonye (1933 - 2011) was a Nigerian Journalist and Writer. He was the Editor-in-Chief and founder of The Nigeria Monitor newspaper, the first weekly newspaper in Nnewi, south-east Nigeria and Co-founder of The Winston-Salem Chronicle newspaper in Winston-Salem, United States. He is a great-uncle of the Nigerian professional basketball player Benson Egemonye.

Background

Joseph N. C. Egemonye was born on 6 December 1933 to Anglican Missionaries from Nnewi. He is a member of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria and a grandson of a powerful landowner and chief.

Education

He attended Manchester college of Commerce, England in 1962 and St. John College also in Manchester, where he was the vice president of the student union.

In 1968, he obtained a Bsc degree in Management Science from The University of Manchester where he also won the 1966/67 Manchester Debating Union freshers' debating competition. He also obtained a Master of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Career

He began his career as a teacher, writer and journalist in Nnewi. He wrote two short stories, Disaster in the Realms of Love and Broken Engagement which are both featured in the Onitsha Market Literature and can be found in the Library of Congress. As a journalist, he was the Igbo editor of the Eastern Nigerian Observer Newspaper in 1960 before founding an Anglican Youth Fellowship magazine called The Voice of the Youth. He was a lecturer at North Carolina Central University, Durham and head of the Journalism Department at Shaw University.

In September 1974, he co-founded Winston-Salem Chronicle in Winston-Salem (a weekly newspaper that focuses on the African-American community) and in 1986 he founded the first Weekly newspaper in Nnewi called The Nigeria Monitor which raised local readers awareness on local politics and community affairs and earned him the nickname Monitor, however in the 90's, the Military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha suppressed Press freedom.

As a businessman, he introduced the Micro wheel balancing Machine into the Nigerian automobile industry to provide young people with employment. As a politician, he was nominated as the Nnewi North local government Chairmanship (Mayor) candidate by the National Republican Convention Party (NRC) in 1993.