The Legacy Of Chief Gani Fawehinmi: The Dogged Senior Advocate Of The Masses

In the midst of the bad and the ugly surrounding the personality of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the governor of Lagos State in 1999, Gani Fawehinmi alone had the singular courage to stand firm and call a spade a spade. But he met a brick-wall in the police and the courts of law that should have saved the country from the mess we see ourselves today. By allowing Tinubu to get away with all of his alleged crimes the police and the courts created a god, a political behemoth and a monster without a conscience out of him and thereby gave him the power to devour Nigeria and all of us. In 1999, the police and the courts sold their soul to Tinubu. They mortgaged their conscience to Tinubu. By doing so, they inflicted a cataclysmic damage on Nigeria and to all of us, particularly to our younger generation that are made to believe that crime pays as long a person has stolen enough money from the public coffer to bribe the police and the courts to protect him.
After ruling Lagos State as the governor in spite of his alleged crimes, Tinuhu became so emboldened that at the approach of the 2023 elections he told Nigerians that it was his turn to rule Nigeria – *Emilokan.* Out of more than the 225 million persons in Nigeria today, who and who sat together and decided that it was the turn of Bola Ahmed Tinubu to become the president? Where was the venue of such a decision? What criterion was employed to arrive at such a decision? These three questions are summed up by Tinubu’s order to his political thugs: “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. They don’t serve it a la carte. At all cost, fight for it, grab it and run with it.” Mr. *Emilokan* fought for and grabbed the presidential throne which he did not win but he does not know how to run with it. Now it is scalding his palms and roasting Nigerians alive.
Since the Lagos State House of Assembly and the Nigeria police made no effort to find out if the allegations against Tinubu were true or not and so told him to continue as the governor of Lagos State and since the courts employed the immunity clause in 2023 to dismiss the allegations, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar took it upon himself to get to the root of the matter. After Tinubu had set aside the electoral laws and the constitutional provisions and got Mahmood Yakubu, the chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, INEC, to tell the world that he won the presidential election which he did not win, Atiku went to the United States of America and discovered that everything Gani Fawehinmi said about Tinubu’s alleged crimes are true.
When Atiku returned with his full weight of evidence to prove that Tinubu has no business being the president of Nigeria the next thing we heard was that Tinubu threatened the judiciary that if he was removed from the throne there would be chaos and anarchy in the country. The unabashed sacred cow had his way. Had Peter Obi whose mandate he grabbed, said something like that he would have been in the same place with Nnamdi Kanu to this day. As the world waited with bathed breath to hear that Tinubu had been told to vacate the presidential seat which he had occupied by foul means, all that we saw and heard was that through the evil concoction called legal technicalities, the five judges of the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who presided over the case told the world that Tinubu had no case to answer and should continue as Nigeria’s president. That was the day that Nigeria collapsed. That judgement gave birth to the lamentations that have so badly soaked the land. I have no doubt in my mind that history will find a way to deal with those rotten judges.
Finally, in the words of Chinua Achebe, any honest Nigerian can today rightly trace where the rain that is currently soaking Nigeria started beating us. It started when the Nigeria police and the courts decided to pay deaf ears to the persistent, loud and patriotic alarms raised by Gani Fawehinmi that Bola Ahmed Tinubu should be made to be under the law of the land and not above the law. Today, Tinubu is not just above the law. He is the Law. And every Dick, Tom and Harry in Nigeria is feeling his scorching heat. As a result of his love for his fatherland, Gani Fawehinmi must be uncomfortable in his grave. This is a conventional way of calling attention to the predicaments of Nigerians under Ahmed Bola Tinubu. In reality, wherever he is now what is happening in Nigeria is no longer Gani’s business. He has played his gallant and splendid role and gone to receive his reward from his Creator.
From the look of things it is not an overstatement to say that if Nigerians do not put aside undue ethnic and religious loyalty, if not bigotry, and with one voice or at least with a majority of voices, demand that Tinubu should take into consideration the fact that Nigeria is not, and cannot be, his personal property and that he is ruling unwilling human beings and not dogs, he will destroy the tenuous pendulum that has managed to keep the country together and pave the way for the disintegration of the Nigeria.
In the Holy Bible, Jesus Christ tells us: “Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life and only a few find it.” (Mt.7:13-14). In his book, *The Merchant of Venice,* William Shakespeare through Antonio, one of the main characters in the book, compared the world to a stage where each person has to play a specific part. Antonio said: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine is a said one.” In the course of the years, Gani Fawehinmi is one of the billions of men and women who have played their part on this stage and gone. Fortunately, unlike Antonio, the part he played is not a sad but a glorious one. It therefore follows that if we must survive the numerous afflictions imposed on us by evil political leaders, we certainly need more of Gani Fawehinmi’s type.
During an interview with the *Megastar* magazine of August 1988, Gani recounted his ordeal under Nigeria’s tyrannical leaders and his readiness and joy to suffer for a just cause for the sake of the people. He said: “My life these past five years have been turbulent but it is the way God has designed it to be. I am happy that I have to play these roles. The role of someone who is to put his life on the line to pursue a cause; the role of someone who has to be a victim of several arrests and detentions to propagate a standpoint; the role of someone who has to be persecuted by the authorities in pursuit of truth. If it is in the course of that I have suffered that is the role designed for me by God and I enjoy it.” In the midst of severe harassment from people who made themselves cruel demigods in the name of leadership, Gani intensified his war, particularly the legal battle, against injustice and bad leadership. By April 1998, he had filed not less than 200 law suits challenging the illegal activities of different Nigerian governments against the poor and the less privileged because, as he put it: “I am at home with those who are persecuted, oppressed; above all, I am at home with those who are poor and disadvantaged.”
In the course of all of these sufferings I believe what must have pained his tormentors most was his unwavering conviction and readiness to accept his ordeals. In his interview with the Newswatch magazine of May 4, 1998, he made this clear when he said: “Contrary to the intentions of the military, every persecution through police cell or through criminal charges advances the cause in me. Anytime I am arrested and taken to the police cell or to the prisons, I am not sad, I don’t feel inconvenienced simply because I am not there because of myself, or fighting for my own cause. I have never in my life fought my personal cause. All the causes I have fought, I have fought on behalf of others: the poor, the cheated, the disadvantaged and the oppressed and so on and so forth.” To crown it all, he added: “I take all these acts of oppression and repression as a mark of triumph because if my opposition to the regimes has not been effective, they would have left me alone all these years.”
It is precisely on account of this, his readiness to suffer, his readiness to surrender everything, including his life, in order to ensure the freedom of so many people being crushed under the wheel of oppression, that Gani Fawehinmi is acclaimed as a hero and a great man of his time. He was neither a selfish opportunist nor a pragmatic adventurer. Rather, like great men before him, he was always prepared to stand for what is right without counting the cost. He believed that he had no good reason to rejoice, even if the whole world was put on his palms, as long as even a single innocent soul suffered for no just cause.
We need men who have courage; men who will understand that the survival of Nigeria means their survival and not vice versa; men who will love Nigeria and Nigerians more than they love ethnic and religious bigotry; men who will be prepared to give their lives for a just cause irrespective of whether their brothers and sisters are the victims of injustice or not; men whose conscience can neither be bought with money nor will rest until justice is done to all and sundry; men who, by word and action, will clearly demonstrate to people of goodwill that they have no ulterior motive for their struggle for justice; men who will prefer to lose all they have that Nigeria, our dear country, may retain all the material and spiritual blessings God has bestowed on her; men who, like Jesus Christ who confronted both the religious and political authorities of his time, will be *diplomatic* enough to call a spade a spade without fear or favour; men who will have the courage to reject government bribe in form of political appointments in favour of truth, justice and fairness; men who, even when they are being led to the gallows, will be prepared to say No to the organized and systematic destruction of our fatherland by the few who think they are gods. Those who have constituted might into right and their ubiquitous sycophants who are ever-ready to trade their future and the future of generations yet to be born on a mess of superfluous material opulence will not save this country. It is this crop of men, the rebels with a cause, no matter how few they may be, that will save the country from the scourge of misrule, oppression and resultant regression. Portage.
Gani Fawehinmi, the scourge of Nigeria’s many and habitual evil leaders, the irrepressible human rights crusader, the voice of the voiceless millions of Nigerians, the defender of the defenceless, the strength of the weak, the Senior Advocate of the Masses, the friend of the poor and the conscience of our bruised, benumbed and rudderless nation, has departed this apparently God-forsaken nation to give account of his good works on earth to his Creator. For defending the rights of the poor, the less privileged and the defenceless, the powers that be brutalized him and shortened his span of life. But unlike those who brutalized him, he bequeathed to us a legacy of selfless sacrifice before his departure.
The famed American writer and humorist, Samuel Langhome Clemens (1835-1910), who is known more by his pen name, Mark Twain, once said: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Gani Fawehinmi lived fully by being prepared to die at any time that justice might prevail. How many of us, Nigerians, are prepared to take up the gauntlet and continue the battle for the liberation of the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the oppressed and the cheated; for the enthronement of democracy, justice and equity and for the establishment of the rule of law from where Gani stopped? This is the challenge facing us today. As we continue to remember Gani, he does not need our tears. He needs those who are upright, selfless, patriotic and gallant enough to continue the battle for a better Nigeria from where he stopped. I believe, wherever he is now, that is the greatest tribute he may need from us.
I love Chief Gani Fawehinmi. I will cherish him till my time on earth is up. When my time on earth is up, if it is possible to meet him yonder, I will love him to eternity because he lived and died for others.
– By Rev. Fr. John Odey