While many persons have penned tributes in memory of Chief Gani Fawehinmi, a few things still remain distinct for me. The first was his love for books, that many do not say much about. If he heard of any new book, of whatever subject, he would pick it up.
For a man enamoured of politics, I was amazed to see books on poetry, drama and novels in his treasured cove. His library was massive. I recall when the chief conducted Femi Ojudu and I through shelf after shelf, a cornucopia of big minds aflare on his walls.
So enthused were both of us that Ojudu promised to bury his next leave as a staff of Concord Press in between his book covers. I bought my copy of In a Free State by Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul because it plopped into my eyes from the shelf.
One day, I ambled into his office with a book I bought from “bend down bookstore,” previously owned by Olu Akaraogun. Immediately he saw it, he grinned in his boyish way and quipped, “That must be about the French Revolution.” He was right. It was a book about Reflections on the French Revolution by Edmund Burke.
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The other thing was his fascination with dictators. He loved Kemal Ataturk, Joseph Stalin, et al. I challenged him once that Stalin lived for 20 million people to die. His riposte was an aplomb face, and then he said the Soviet leader needed such ruthlessness to build his massive mechanization project. Yet when the Soviet Union fell, he told me its parallel was coming for the IBB regime.
He somehow managed to remain a closet authoritarian in public. He might not want an Ataturk for Nigeria, I think he might have favoured what political philosophers now call competitive authoritarianism that we now see in places like Turkey and Poland.
He was IBB’s nemesis, and each January he would say, with sanguine mischief, “this government is going to fall this year. There is no doubt about that at all.”
I recall his intimacy with Olu Onagoruwa, and how they met for banter and cackles in his house over fried goat meat called asun, and how they travelled together on weekends out of Lagos, Gani going farther to Ondo, while Onagoruwa held the brakes at Ijebu. Up till today, I muse over how the quest for a public good made a mincemeat to a storied friendship.
But pray, how did a Gani go for a swim in a public place like the Sheraton Hotel? How can we say it was not where he ingested what eventually took his life with SSS always trailing him?
