Senior Advocate of the People

by Paul Chuks

Gani Fawehinmi Park, located in Ojota, Lago / CC-ReoMartins

In the course of Nigeria’s democracy and her historical pitfalls with its tragic actors, many activists have risen to steer Nigeria on the path of what they perceived to be true democracy. Gani Fawenhinmi was one of them. Driven mostly by his compassion for the masses, Gani, fondly called “senior advocate of the masses,” was rumored to have handled over a thousand cases, for free — what in legal terms is called pro-bono.

Fawehinmi without compassion is like a tiger without its tigritude — it commanded his existence and constituted his fundamentals as a lawyer and human. When he loved, he loved deeply — with the gravity of a poet whose poetry added to the theology of love. According to Lores, his first wife was from a Christian home. During the naming ceremony of his first son, the muslim clerics refused to continue the event until she was given a muslim name. In a brisk moment of epiphany, “Ganiyat” — the feminine equivalent of his name — sauntered into his mind and became her eternal nomenclature. The event continued and the child was named Mohammed.

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Gani was convinced that injustice and corruption are not simply the result of human fallibility but are symptomatic of a deep-seated psychological disease which needed to be cured. Paralleling humans’ proclivity for mistakes, Gani finds that the major problem with Nigeria’s democracy is dishonesty and a deficiency in virtue and principle. The leader has a magnified image of himself as one who is an outlier of the constitution, and so, he goes on to break the laws enshrined in it. He believes laws are not made for him but for his subjects. In a democracy, this would have a butterfly effect; it would engineer every other leader in their own (little or not) capacity into administering their leadership role this way, finding themselves crippling the law. Democracy is a system of government where the most popular behaviour is likely to be found throughout the vein of the country. If this behaviour entails uptight ethics, then that’ll be the pulse of the nation. Gani Fawehinmi understood this and launched a menacing attack on leaders who led with this notion.

Once, Gani Fawehinmi took on a case that involved a state secretary and an ordinary citizen who had alleged that the state secretary had slammed his genitals with his wife’s. Bala Abashe, the citizen, sued the state secretary for adultery. Gani rendered his services as Abashe’s legal representative for free, while the government backed their officials in and outside of the courtroom. They pressured Gani to drop the case, but he remained unyielding. Andrew Obeya, the state worker, was forced into resignation, and Fawehinmi, detained for nine months. He gave voice to the voiceless — to the citizens who were wronged by the state and wouldn’t have ever dreamt of having justice come their way. Gani framed democracy as people-centered. In effect, he clamoured for every government to administer leadership in the context of the constitution and rule of law, without the preclusion of the masses.

After General Buhari toppled Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s civilian regime in 1983, Gani appeared in court against the ruling of the NBA. His logic was since the military regime was determined to subject corrupt leaders to the fury of the law, nothing should stop them. He further went on saying that “experience has shown that corruption in public life in Nigeria cannot be obliterated by mere probes and commissions of enquiry or by the invocation of the criminal code under the ordinary legal system.” He continued, “the compelling need therefore arose to evolve and devise a system of justice swift enough, fair enough and serious enough to deal a lethal blow on corruption in public places.” His pursuit for the obliteration of corruption in public places was evident here, but the NBA had a different perspective. They threatened to put Gani in a newly opened Roll of dishonour. He challenged them in court and won. He won on the charge that the NBA had taken sides against him, instead of taking a neutral stance and watching things unfold. He beamed with glee at the pronouncement of the judge’s ruling and remarked in his address to the judge, “your ruling is a product of an exemplary courage, rare but deep sense of justice and unsurpassable exposition of titanic legal intellectualism.”

For Gani, injustice and corruption were the two cancerous diseases that sickened democracy — in Nigeria’s case, nearly to its demise. And the only way to avoid them is to mount a vicious attack on them, damning the consequences. Despite the savage attacks the Nigerian government launched at him everytime he challenged them, he continued — vehemently, in the struggle for a sane democracy. History has it that Gani was arrested over 35 times. The first time he was placed behind bars, he was happy that his client got the justice he needed. It was after Abashe had gotten his pound of flesh in the dismissal of Obeya, the state secretary.

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Can we inhabit a society with a philosophy that jettisons the pith of democracy and regards our rights as fictions, our anger at democratic absurdities as “righteous projections?’’ No, if Gani Fawehinmi were here to answer this question. One can in fact already glean from his 44 years of struggle with anti-democratic policies that his No will come with the vim of a man who is being petitioned to donate his last cash for something not worthy.

Misery is not inevitable but is a choice we make or refuse to make. It all depends on our volatility. The facts of our situation have no meaning until we decide what meaning to give them. What is needed is a fervent spirit that will let us face this dismal picture and triumph over it. This notion carried Gani Fawehinmi throughout his years of activism — the acknowledgement of the mutuality of misery and activism and inaction. Misery being the result of both activism and inaction. The better misery though, for him, was action. His temperament, an antithesis to what Nigeria practiced as democracy. He vaunted his jail terms as the sale of his own freedom to tyranny, in exchange for the common good — the common good being social justice and the continuance of the struggle against corruption.

While addressing the court once, Gani crooned about “a system of justice swift enough, fair enough and serious enough to deal a lethal blow on corruption in public places.” Two things happened here: one, the admission of Nigeria’s public space as a hellscape of corruption — hence, the need to be courageous. Two, the need for the evolution of the means of annihilating corruption. These were the therapy needed to sustain Nigeria’s dying democracy. For Gani, the hope of preserving our society, was in our resistance, so that leaders will no longer rest on the illusion that they are above the law, and administer leadership as if we were in a medieval period dictatorship.

In 1971, Gani wanted to “give meaning” to Nigeria’s situation. He took up the case of the students of UNIBADAN who were rusticated from school due to a peaceful demonstration they anchored against the problematic rulership of the university’s administration. The armed forces were deployed to disperse the demonstration and a certain Kunle Adepeju died in the process. Gani Fawehinmi volunteered to represent the students in court for free. General Yakubu Gowon nominated a panel to investigate the case and when the result came out, more than half of the students’ demands were met.

On another occasion, in 1976, the students of the University of Benin contacted Gani Fawehinmi when the school rusticated and expelled some, over the crisis they allegedly stoked in the institution. He responded by filing a series of action suits at the Benin High Court. At the end of the legal tussle, all the actions initially taken by the institution against the students were rebuked and they soon resumed classes.

Similarly in 1983, the students of Unijos contacted Gani after they were rusticated for protesting against the highhandedness of the administration. He dragged the case to the supreme court and the institution was strong-armed into reinstating the students.

This was the crux of Gani’s career — the fight for the voiceless and helpless. The struggle with and for the hopeless, the unblurring of path for those whose seemed fogged by injustice and or corruption. Bad democracy is the bane of the people’s existence. And the people are the meat of democracy. If they were deprived of justice and the rights bestowed on them by virtue of humanity, and their endowment by the constitution, the masses would live in despair or society would plummet into anarchy.

Because all we have are the array of human experiences, Gani calls for the awakenness of our conscience. Democracy should not be thought of as an avenue to denigrate the people, cheat and oppress them; instead, it should be treated as an invitation for the advancement of the state.

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It follows from Gani’s application of the constitution that if all is done with the preclusion of the rule of law, then we must abandon all hopes of a rational government that lies in the democratic world. Even if it were meaningful to talk about democracy, it would not be relevant to the human situation.

The rule of law grows out of human virtue and principle — the need for certainty of equality before the law and something outside of us that we can lean on. Appropriately, Gani refers to himself as a “crusader of justice.” In the pre-democratic era, the masses were perceived as subjects to be ruled over and leaders, metaphysically lucky to be bestowed with the mantle of leadership. However, we can no longer see society through this prism. The values that give life meaning will vaporize into thin air. The world has become more intelligible, the days are counting fast and humanity is left in this cosmic space to make sense of her existence.

After her independence in 1960, Nigeria has suffered several coups that replaced civilian rules with military regimes. And the military rule is the opposite of democracy due to its hibernation of the rule of law, rights of citizens and highhandedness in administering its leadership role. It was the most bizzare time of Nigeria’s political history where public funds were looted and human rights violated gruesomely. Gani Fawehinmi did not fret.

In 1991, he filed an action suit that forced Babangida’s regime into rendering accounts of the crude oil during the Gulf War in 1991. After Babangida stepped aside, Ernest Shonekan’s regime took over as the interim government for several months. Gani Fawehinmi fought him throughout his regime, singing harshly, the unconstitutionality of his government until he was overthrown in a palace coup by Abacha in November 1993.

In 1994, he filed another action suit forcing the late general Sanni Abacha and all the public servants who served under his regime to publicly showcase their assets for the Nigerian public to be privy to the extent of the regime’s corruption in public places. In 1998, Fawehinmi went to court to challenge the decision of General Abdul Salami Abubakar, the then head of state who had taken the price of fuel from #11 to #25 per liter. He said that the increment would cause an unprecedented economic hardship on the people and would tilt the Nigerian to the opposite side of their morals.

The undergird of Gani’s democratic system of government consists of the notion that there is no democracy without the existence of rule of law. This is because the rule of law is the section that emphasizes the most on the principles of equality. Hence it is the lingering afterimage of this understanding that produces the persisting need for upholding the rule of law and the struggle for social justice, and in a stroke of imperfection, he backed General Muhammad Buhari for presidency.