Friday
September 11, 2009 |
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The 17th century English poet John
Donne immortalized the verse that ends with these memorable lines: “Each
man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind, therefore, send
not to know, for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
There are at least two senses in which Donne’s sentiments apply to the
late Gani Fawehinmi, a giant in several respects.
First, Mr. Fawehinmi’s crusading life was informed by an insistence that
injustice to any citizen was deeply personal, nothing less than
injustice to himself. Despite his privileged training – or actually
because of it – he believed it was his place to combat the
dehumanization of the least privileged among us. For him, the needless
and senseless degradation of Nigerian lives translated into a personal
diminution. When the poorest Nigerian was felled by the machinations of
brutal, unconscionable power, Gani went to war on behalf of the
voiceless, the powerless, and the dispossessed. The denigration of any
Nigerian was, as far as he was concerned, a direct affront.
Second, it is no surprise that a man like Fawehinmi, who exuded
extraordinary love, should attract fulsome affection in life and
effusive praise – even by his erstwhile detractors and bullies – in
death. Here was a man whose precepts and work buttressed a belief that
others’ privations were his business. Generous to the point of being
self-disregarding, this human luminary and brilliant legal mind was both
larger than life and familiar. He was so familiar, in fact, that even
total strangers would come to know him – to address him – simply as Gani.
His generous fellow feeling earned him the depth of public admiration we
have seen on display since his passing on August 5, 2009. The relay of
tributes testifies to one fact: that here’s a man whose death has
impoverished us.
Fawehinmi’s death has come up in my conversations with numerous friends
and acquaintances. There’s not a single person, even among those who
never met him in flesh and blood, who did not express a deep sense of
loss, indeed a personal testimonial of bereavement. Nigerians, it is
safe to suggest, are mourning the passage of a man whose magnificence
not even his most inveterate foes dare deny.
Consider, by contrast, the celebratory fever that gripped Nigeria when
news spread of the death of maximum ruler, Sani Abacha. The dictator had
funneled billions of dollars of public funds into his private foreign
accounts, or those of proxies. Yet, all that loot could not buy him a
moment’s reprieve when death came, nor could it procure the unspoken but
solemnly observed stricture against ravaging the memory of the deceased.
Abacha, like Ibrahim Babangida before him, had made a point of hounding
Gani, rewarding the searchlight he beamed on their perfidy by processing
him in and out of jail.
For the power-obsessed, in uniform or agbada, the likes of Gani are
nothing more than insufferable irritants to be contained – through
police beatings, detention, imprisonment, or defamation by the
machineries of state power. Thus, an outstanding patriot like Gani was
labeled a dissident, a disgruntled element, an idle rabble-rouser.
Yet, if any lesson is to be learned from the differing fates of Abacha
and Fawehinmi in death, it is that, in the final consideration, the
verdict of history cannot be rigged – whatever the size of the rigger’s
pocket.
Gani Fawehinmi gave himself wholly to Nigeria, which makes it all the
sadder that Nigeria betrayed him – as it betrayed Michael Imoudu,
Mokwugo Okoye, Aminu Kano and a multitude of other true and tested
patriots. It was Gani’s terrible luck to be born in a country whose
hospitals could not diagnose his cancer, until it was too late. It was
his bitter pill to live in a country where his advocacy of democracy,
transparency and accountability was treated as high crime.
It is now up to history to redress the manifold wrongs done to this
ethically agile and morally well-funded man. And history’s reparation is
underway, even now. It is evident in the somber mood that’s enveloped
Nigeria. In the end, it is Gani and citizens cast in his mold, not the
Abachas, Babangidas and Obasanjos with their airy rhetoric (“all hands
must be on deck,” “moving the nation forward,” “delivering the dividends
of democracy”) who will be festooned for gallantry.
Gani’s expansive place in the national imagination appears assured. One
trait of his greatness, remarked upon by many since his death, was his
allergy to pretentiousness and cant. He was an intrepid foe to the
enemies of the Nigerian people, and a dependable ally to those who
fought to achieve democratic ends. He was quick to detect, and detest,
wantonness and puniness in those who made the wrecking of Nigeria their
main preoccupation.
