REMEMBRANCE: Today We Remember Chief Gani Fawehimi SAN, It’s Exactly Twelve Years Today Which He Left This World!

REMEMBRANCE: Today We Remember Chief Gani Fawehimi SAN, It’s Exactly Twelve Years Today Which He Left This World!

On this day but not the same date, twelve years ago, in the early hour on Wednesday, we lost Comrade Gani Fawehinmi an activist and a legend to the cold hands of death.

Gani spent the better part of his life crusading for the greatest good of the greatest majority of Nigerians, for which he paid dearly with his personal liberty and ultimately his life as the circumstances of the illness that took his life could not be divorced from the criminal nature of the Nigerian State, that employs physical and chemical elimination of its opponents as just weapons of repression.

With his boundless energy he tenaciously and uncompromisingly pursued and crusaded his beliefs, principles and ideals for the untrammelled rule of law, undiluted democracy, all embracing and expansive social justice, protection of fundamental human rights and respect for the hopes and aspirations of the masses who are victims of misgovernment of the affairs of the Nation.

In 2008 Mr Gani Fawehinmi rejected one of the highest national honours that can be bestowed on a citizen by the Nigerian government — Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) —in protest of the many years of misrule since Nigeria’s independence. Gani, as he was fondly called, died in the early hours of 5 September 2009 after a prolonged battle with lung cancer. 

He was 71 years old. Later he was buried on September 15, 2009 in his hometown of Ondo, Nigeria.

Gani Fawehinmi died as a disappointed man, because of the state of Nigeria at the time of his death, he refused the highest honour accorded him by the fedral republic of Nigeria on his sick bed.