It was President Buhari’s wife who asked the question: “Are there no longer men in Nigeria?”
She was wailing about the shadowy characters that had, allegedly, hijacked her husband’s regime.
We need one particular man to come back from death to fight for us: Chief AbdulGaniyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, simply known and addressed as Gani.
History teaches us of Alexander the Great, but there is now an urgent need to add another great to the esteemed list of the “Greats”: Gani the Great.
The great man died of lung cancer on September 5, 2009, but the vacuum he left is threatening to swallow the entire country.
Unlike Alexander the Great who needed armies and sundry weapons to defeat his opponents, the man fondly known as Gani only used ideas to overwhelm the world.
Gani was courage writ large for he could put his own bare head deep inside the enemy’s territory where entire brigades and army generals would never dare enter even with tanks!
Given the way Gani lived life to the full, daring all dangers, nobody could have predicted that he would make the Biblical “two score and ten” years.
Even with all the greatness that he achieved in life Gani was at bottom a simple man who loved his bushmeat!
The story of Gani is remarkable to me for the simple things he did matter-of-factly. I was once launching a fictional book at the national theatre back in 1996.
It was deemed by me as a somewhat private affair with some of my friends, and I cannot remember ever sending an invitation to Gani Fawehinmi or his chambers, but come that day, it was the representatives of the chambers who were first to arrive at the venue well before publisher Adewale Maja-Pearce and reviewer Dr Reuben Abati.
When I explained to the two men sent by Gani that the book was a literary novel and not a legal or political stuff that may be of interest to the great man, I was promptly told that Gani put down specific instructions before travelling abroad that they must get two copies of whatever book it was for his library!
One of the big television stations in England was once doing a documentary on great black lives, anchored by Onyekachi Wambu, editor of the epochal Black British book Empire Windrush, and I was hired to help out with the Nigerian angle.
Onyekachi and I got to Gani’s Ikeja Lagos GRA home only to find out that Gani had travelled abroad. Even so, we were treated like family by his adorable wife and daughter who revealed to us that they were Born-Again Christians as opposed to their husband and father who was a Muslim! Gani led by example in allowing freedom of worship in his very home.
Gani always advised that an activist should always have toothpaste and toothbrush in the bag in view of ambush arrest!
The pity though is that Gani would have still been alive if we had a modicum of real medical care in this country. He was misdiagnosed which led to the lung cancer festering to the point of its becoming terminal.
For a man who never smoked, he ought not to have had the disease in the first place but for his incarceration in uninhabitable gulags such as the abominable Gashua Prison where he may have inhaled poisonous gases.
According to Gani’s second daughter, Dr (Mrs.) Hafsat Oni, “What happened to my father should have been diagnosed a long time ago. It all started when he began to get short of breath and they did a chest x-ray that was not readable. They blindly diagnosed him with heart failure which was wrong. My father being someone that is so committed to this country decided to stay here just for the love of this nation. He could afford to go to the hospital I work for in Ohio, United States. But he refused because he had so much faith in this nation. But eight months went by and he wasn’t getting better. Finally, he listened and came abroad. Within two weeks of his arrival, the ailment was diagnosed as Stage Three B Lung Cancer. If he had come earlier when it was Stage One, it would have been easily handled. It’s really a sad incident for someone who fought so much for this nation to go this way for something that substantially could have been prevented. But for lack of diagnostic facilities, not lack of knowledge, such a great man, even as I am not God, would have had more years.”
Hafsat’s classmate in secondary school, the celebrated novelist Chika Unigwe revealed how she wrote a “treatise” that filled up an exercise book on her love then for Gani which she sent to the great man through his daughter Hafsat.
Gani not only read what the young Chika had written but equally wrote a reply and made markings on the margins of the pages!
Novelist Unigwe also revealed that back then Gani used to book his children into different flights while they travelled abroad for summer holidays because he did not want to lose all the kids in one air crash!
Gani the Great must come back to fight for us now!