PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNAThe Essential Fawehinmi At 70
The year was 1969 and the New Nigerian was barely three years old. Still, for courage, accuracy, authority and literacy, it was the newspaper to beat. Early that year, precisely on February 1, it put its already formidable reputation for courage and accuracy to possibly its severest test at the time. In the end it passed the test in flying colours, thanks in large measure to a somewhat obscure Lagos based lawyer who would eventually become famous several decades later as arguably Nigeria’s most litigious. He was Mr. Abdul Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi who celebrated his 70th birthday penultimate Tuesday, April 22.
On that fateful first day of February 1969 the New Nigerian published a small but exclusive story on the back page with the salacious headline, “Sex in a car.” The story was that of one Mr. Bala Abacha, a 500 British Pounds Sterling per annum Jos factory worker, who claimed he caught the Secretary of the then Benue/Plateau State, Mr. Andrew Obeya, having sex with his wife in his convertible sports car in a bush along Jos/Zaria road.
Mr. Obeya felt defamed by the New Nigerian and headed for the courts; he sued the newspaper for criminal libel for a then princely sum of #250,000. Before then Obeya’s lawyer, the formidable Chief Rotimi Williams, QC, represented by Mr. Gally Brown-Peterside, had wanted the reporter who filed the story, Mr. Stephen Bamigbele and its editor, Malam Adamu Ciroma, arraigned for sedition on the somewhat shaky ground that the country was then fighting a civil war and to scandalize a public official at a time when all minds should concentrate on winning the war was tantamount to sedition.
No surprisingly the courts did not buy that specious argument. Hence Obeya’s decision to resort to the charge of criminal libel.
While Obeya was busy suing the New Nigerian for libel the aggrieved Abashe decided to sue Obeya for adultery and for assault. He demanded #70,000 for the first count and #50,000 for the second. Abashe’s lawyer then was the little known Fawehinmi.
However, for all practical purposes he also doubled as New Nigerian’s unpaid lawyer. The one the newspaper employed was Mr. Owen Fiebai and, going through the balanced and objective account of the court’s proceedings on the case by the newspaper itself, it was apparent that he did a good job defending his clients. Behind the scene, however, Fawehinmi helped the newspaper with witnesses and exhibits that eventually nailed Obeya; on November 10, exactly seven months ten days after it all started on February 1, 1969, Obeya’s resident laywer, Mr Brown-Perterside withdrew his clients case. He also decided to settle Abashe’s suit out of court.
Eventually, Obeya himself was forced to resign from his job. For all his troubles, especially in making an unassailable case for his own poor client, Fawehinmi suffered what probably became his first extra-judicial detention by the authorities. As could be expected in a case like this, especially against the background of the civil war being fought at the time, Benue/Plateau State became politically tense. For some strange reason, the authorities chose to blame Fawehinmi and had him detained for a while. Indeed during the course of the litigation some faceless people attempted to kidnap him from the Hilltop Hotel Jos where he used to stay. Thirty nine years on it seems this famous case was the defining moment of the substance, if not the style, of Fawehinmi’s long and successful legal career of standing up for the poor and underprivileged and for what is right - and suffering detentions for all his pains.
In his tribute to Fawehinmi on his 70th birthday, former Attorney General of Lagos State, Professor Yomi Osibajo (SAN), said the legal activist has appeared in court 248 times on the issue of locus standi, which is the legal jargon for a person’s legal right to sue. As far as I am aware he has lost most of those legal battles, mainly, I suspect, because his style was more populist than rigorous. Yet he remained undeterred. That he did so was clearly a testimony to the man’s great courage and conviction.
That his style stood out more for its populism than for its rigor couldn’t have been more apparent than in arguably the most famous case he has pursued, namely the cold-blooded murder through a parcel bomb of Mr. Dele Giwa, one of Newswatch’s founding editors and celebrated columnist, on October 19, 1986.
The novelty of that murder outraged and frightened not only members of the journalism community but all Nigerians. Fawehinmi led the battle to unravel the murder. He accused two principal military intelligence officers of the military president, General Ibrahim Gabangida, then Brigadier-General Haliru Akilu and Colonel Togun of responsibility for the murder and sued them accordingly. He also fought long and hard in the courts to be allowed to privately prosecute Babangida himself for the murder. He lost the first battle but eventually won the latter when the Supreme Court granted him leave to prosecute Babangida. For some inexplicable reason, Fawehinmi never exercised that right.
However, whatever any one may say of his style, no one can dispute the fact he is arguably the most consistent lawyer in the country for the courage and conviction with which he has championed his causes. Two famous but somewhat contradictory cases, namely, Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari’s execution of three cocaine pushers in 1985 under Decree 20 and former Lagos State Governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s certificate scandal in 1999, bear testimony to this fact.
For someone who had become justly famous as an anti-Establishment lawyer, Fawehinmi shocked his fellow Nigerian lawyers and laymen alike when he virtually stood alone in defense of General Buhari’s decree. The outcries of the anti-executionists, he said in the New Nigerian of April 17, 1985, were the “crocodile tears, oozing out of the ivory towers and the pious pulpits of our society.” The executed cocaine pushers, he insisted, only got their just deserts.
Throughout the heated controversy over the execution, Fawehinmi stood his ground. Even when the Nigerian Bar Association suspended him for defying their decision to temporarily boycott the nation’s courts in protest over the executions, he refused to bulge. Such was his strong-headedness which many, certainly most of his fellow lawyers, must have regarded as foolishness.
If in the case of Buhari, Fawehinmi uncharacteristically stood up for power, in the case of Governor Tinubu he reverted true to type and stood up to power.
The Tinubu certificate scandal in which questions were raised about his secondary school and university certificates occurred against the background of a similar case involving the first Speaker of the House Representatives, Alhaji Ibrahim Salisu Buhari. Buhari was discovered to have lied about his age and academic qualification when he ran for the House in 1999. The media and social critics went to town over the news. This eventually forced Buhari to resign as speaker.
Not long after that a similar discovery was made about Tinubu’s claim to have acquired a degree from Chicago University, USA. The contrast between the handling of the scandal by the media and social critics and their handling of Buhari’s case couldn’t have been sharper; in contrast to the very loud wise the media and social critics made about Buhari’s case their silence on Tinubu’s case was even more deafening.
One person alone, apart from Newswatch, stood out of the crowd of critics that had suddenly lost their eyes, their ears and their tongues. That person was Fawehinmi. He insisted that what was good for Buhari must also be good for Tinubu. Against the background of the battles they had fought together over June 12 and during General Sani Abacha’s dictatorship, Fawehinmi's stand required uncommon courage and convicting, something he apparently possessed in abundance.
Nigeria has produced politicians, professionals and academicians, etc, who have tried always to speak truth to power.Such people like Malam Aminu Kano, like Alhaji Babarabe Musa, like the late Ayodele Awojobi, the professor of mechanical engineering famous for his forays into legal practice without any formal legal training, like Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and like the late Dr. Bala Usman, Ahmadu Bello University’s most radical historian.
None of these, however, have demonstrated the kind of faith Fawehinmi has shown in law as a formidable weapon for effectively speaking truth to power. I believe it is this faith in law that must have inspired him to found the Nigerian Weekly Law Reports in 1985 for the compilation of court rulings, especially those of the Supreme Court. This has since become the indispensable companion of lawyers and judges all over Nigeria. For this alone, Chief AbdulGaniyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, a.k.a Gani, deserves more than the traditional three hearty birthday cheers as he celebrates 70 years of a life spent mostly fighting for the causes of the poor and underprivileged.
Well done Kaduna State It seems the Kaduna State Government has at long last responded positively to the petitions of the children of Mr Ogbadu, a minister in the Northern regional government whose name for a street in Malali, in the state capital, was replaced by that of the late Architect Umaru Balarabe Kabau, a commissioner in former governor Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi’s government. Driving along Rabah Road the other day I noticed that the street in question, which forms a t-junction with Rabah Road, has a shiny plate bearing the old Ogbadu name.
The state government deserves commendation for respecting history and for doing what is right and proper.
However, I noticed also that whereas it righted one wrong, it committed another in the same neighborhood; it has changed Kam Salem Road to Ibrahim Kano Road. This is wrong. Kam Salem was Nigeria’s second Inspector General of Police and one of the longest serving and most respected. It is inconceivable how anyone could have thought of replacing his name with any other.
Hopefully the state would right this wrong just as it did in Ogbadu’s case.
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