A man for the ages
It was a gathering of memory but also for memory because it was a time to toast an icon. Who better to do that than the people who fought with
It was a gathering of memory but also for memory because it was a time to toast an icon. Who better to do that than the people who fought with him, hoped with him, hid fears and cradled courage. Men who looked gun in the eye and underwrote death.
It was in honour of Gani Fawehinmi. His daughter, Basirat Fawehinmi-Biobaku, was presenting a book, Gani Fawehinmi and The Nigerian Press, to mark his birthday. And in attendance, of course, were the members of the two divisions of his soldiery: the media and civil rights. Media fighters from the Tell magazine and The News were like ghosts in the Abacha era. They unleashed salvos but were not seen. So unseen were they that the goons besieged the American embassy in Lagos to confiscate copies of the magazines. They were matadors in the shadows. The goons thought they printed the subversive literature in the entrails of a foreign house. Their unfledged intelligence did not know, as Femi Falana mocked, that they might have unveiled them in the dingy lair of Mushin. In the hall were Kunle Ajibade, Nosa Igiebor, Dare Babarinsa, Onome Osifo-Whiskey. Femi Falana, Shehu Sani and a few others clocked in for civil rights. There was a lone politician and former governor in Iroko, that is Olusegun Mimiko. But the cynosure of all eyes was from the civil rights but also a member of the Fawehinmi family. He is the Kaduna State Governor, the ebullient Uba Sani. He told three stories that few knew. One, that he lived with the lawyer. “My room was next to that of Mama,” he says. Basirat also recalls her father often asking if Sani had eaten and if he was feeling at home. “He only allowed two people to live in his house. Myself and Femi Aborisade,” he recalled.
The other story was Gani’s scholarship scheme. He was one of the selection judges for the scheme to fund indigent students through the university. Yours Truly was once a judge under Itse Sagay as chairman. Governor Sani said over three hundred youths benefited. “Gani asked me what I thought about the exercise. I told him I was not happy,” he replied. The reason was that only about 20 of the recipients were from northern Nigeria. Fawehinmi then commissioned him to set up a panel to interview potential candidates. He went to Zaria, and Gani flew over with two hundred cheques. There were over four hundred students eligible for the scholarships, and Comrade Sani persuaded him that all should benefit, and Fawehinmi obliged.
This story underlined the humanity of the man beyond his public image as a pugilist for justice and the law.
Sani also told the story of his role in opening the political space for a truly multi-party democracy. In 1998, after the death of Sani Abacha, the Abdulsalam Abubakar transition regime decided to register only three political parties, the PDP, APP and AD. Fawehinmi had tried to persuade them to register others, including his Nigerian Conscience Party. Sani asked him if they should organise protest. Gani said no. We were now in a democracy, and he would entrust the matter to the outraged majesty of the courts. The matter was a three-year slog in the court. But he prevailed in 2002. That is why we have so many parties today in the country. Fawehinmi saw, as in the words of the Prophet Isaiah, that the children came to the birth but there was no strength to deliver them. Gani pulled it off with the law. He demonstrated, as Governor Sani stressed, that the court have saved justice for democracy and democracy for justice.
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Governor Sani wanted the world to know that he is one of the sons of the civil rights man of war, who turned the law into a document of justice. He gave plaudits to those who soldiered for democratic justice, including some of the Tell and The News stars. He witnessed the Bagauda Kaltho’s hour of expiry who perished in a bomb. He and Shehu Sani might have walked into smithereens that hour. They were a few metres away from Kaltho’s martyr’s flesh. Governor Sani himself was in Abacha’s Gulag the day the tyrant died. A few night’s earlier, he was whisked from his bed, in his underwear, into a truck. No friend or relative was on notice as he entered the dark, shadowy arms of the night. They might have despatched him without accounting to anyone. Hence Sani warned that those who are calling for the return of the soldier do not know the raw agony of tyranny, the desperate fears and the anonymous deaths, the betrayals and evaporated ideas.
Governor Mimiko made a point about democracy’s value in line with dividends, especially these days that governors have more money than anytime in our history. He said it is against the background of some of the achievements so far of the Kaduna State Governor in making governance close to the poor in security, welfare programmes, investment, and a society impartial in faith. He said others should emulate the Kaduna State governor who has not let the civil society down.
Falana stressed the child rights law, and how it is still reigning in the breach in most states.
During the event that took place in his library, I could not but ponder on the glorious contradiction of the man, although in my short speech I mentioned two of them. He was perhaps the most popular Nigerian in his day, but he could not win an election. He was a wealthy man who identified with the poor. He told me if he had a case between the rich man and the poor man, he would find the law for the poor man. He fought for democracy but some of his idols were autocrats from Kemal Ataturk to Stalin. Once I told him that Stalin lived for 20 million people to die. He was unfazed as he said I should imagine what the Russian ruler achieved with his mechanisation policy. He had a martial spirit but he did not like soldiers. He loved the technicalities of the law but he bent it for justice as an avenging angel. He was a loner who bubbled with a gregarious spirit and loved his asun and pounded yam.
I also recalled the poem O Ship of State by Henry Longfellow where he says, “Humanity with all its fears/with all the hopes of future years/ is hanging breathless on thy fate.” If it was hanging on Gani, when he departed it was hanging worthily on those at that gathering.
He was one for the ages.
One party opposition
The opposition parties gathered in Ibadan and committed a self-indicting irony. They said they were coming together to present one presidential candidate. This essayist has two things to say to them. One, what kind of moral universe do they inhabit? They have been accusing the President and the APC of one-man rule and one-party state. Yet, they are also closing the space for variety in the opposition. They want one voice, one candidate, one result, one muzzle over muscles. They were accusing the ruling party of what scholars define as competitive authoritarianism. They don’t know that term of course, or one of their men, including the great Professor Pat Utomi, might have gone to town with it. Yet, they know the ruling APC does not fulfil that definition. It entails choking free speech and the press, occluding freedom of movement and association and stifling the opposition. The Ibadan meeting shows they enjoy all those freedoms that President Franklyn Roosevelt enunciated during the quicksand years of the Second World War. The men are calling for one-party, one-man opposition. What a mockery of democracy. Two, they will not have a candidate. It is wishful thinking. Even now, the Obi-Kwankwaso unit is already crying that they would not accept any other outcome. Atiku blasted Kwankwaso and Tambuwal, and claims the north as his inheritance. An inheritance of loss. Of course, he expected, rightly, the Obi-Kwankwaso ticket that is called an OK ticket to be KO’d. That is, knocked out. While the OK ticket awaits a technical knockout, we are still waiting for the courts to tell us whether those angry men at Ibadan will have a shelter when the rain falls.
