Nairobi — In Nigeria, the life of Abdul Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi (popularly as Gani) has poked fun at those who insist that the country's over 250 ethnic communities don't make a nation but leave the country as a "mere geographical expression."

Most Nigerian common folk may not have heard of the man who turned 70 in April but millions of the urban literate have.

Gani has become the embodiment and the symbol of the war against corruption which Nigeria is yet to win.

According to Mohammed Haruna, a veteran in print media propaganda, Gani became famous on February 1, 1969.

On that day, a government-owned newspaper associated with ruling classes in Northern Nigeria reported that Mr Andrew Obeya, a senior government official in Benue-Plateau State had been caught in a compromised position in a car with the wife of a factory worker.

Mr Obeya then hired a seven-foot tall lawyer who, over the years, would grow so physically massive as to only fit in a custom-made car.

His name was Chief Rotimi Williams, QC.

Chief Williams sued the New Nigerian newspaper, which carried the news report) for "sedition" on the novel grounds that at a time when Nigeria was embroiled in the Biafran civil war, it was a crime to "scandalise a public official at a time when all minds should concentrate on winning the war".

There are reasons to suspect that the entry of Chief Williams into this legal drama was sufficient inducement to urge Gani to jump into the fray with great enthusiasm when the New Nigerian, hired him to defend its editors against being enjoined in the sedition charge.

Gani had, on an earlier occasion, insisted that when Chief Rotimi was a legal officer in the regional government of Western Nigeria, a British colonial official had disciplined him for theft of public funds.

When Chief Williams subsequently went to court to plead for a redress because someone had allegedly brought his name to "public disrepute and odium", Gani had submitted, as defence lawyer, that Chief Williams "had no reputation to be defamed" since it was already on official record that he had previously been publicly found guilty of theft of public funds and been accordingly punished.

Chief Williams' invocation of the national interest following the exposure of his client's sexual escapades was just the kind of window of opportunity to "speak truth to power" that Gani could not resist seizing with utmost enthusiasm.

Gani apparently dug up so much evidence, witnesses and "exhibits" and won the case for his lowly client.

Mr Obeya's friends in officialdom were so enraged that the offending defence lawyer, Gani, was detained for the crime of winning that legal battle.

And it came to pass that from that detention up to 2008, the only governments that did not throw Gani into detention (before he reached 70) for "speaking the truth to power" have been the near-democratic ones between 1999 and 2008.

It was Gani who held a press conference to denounce former President Olusegun Obasanjo for a documented total of over 370 full days that he was out of Nigeria after he took office on May 29, 1999.

President Obasanjo was, at the time, engaged in shuttle diplomacy to argue in various G8 capitals for the cancellation of Nigeria's debts, for among other things, being fraudulently accumulated and calculated with the collusion of G8 officials and bankers, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Obasanjo was also determined to force these governments to stop the racist practice by immigration officials to frisk Nigerians for cocaine.

Gani had also locked horns with the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida. He went to the Supreme Court to demand for judgment on the illegal diversion of over $12 billion (Sh732 billion) by the presidency.

A commission of inquiry led by a distinguished Nigerian economist, Pius Okigbo, had reported this "theft" in an official investigative report. That case is still in court.

Gani also filed a case against Brigadier Aliyu Akilu and another top intelligence official in General Babangida's government for the gruesome death, on December 19, 1986, of Dele Giwa, a brilliant columnist and one of the founding editors of the Newswatch magazine.

Mr Giwa was in his office when he answered a phone call which sought to confirm whether he was there.

Soon after the call, a vehicle arrived out of which came a person who handed over a parcel to Mr Giwa. On opening the parcel a bomb exploded, killing him instantly.

That shocking attack would later be used to silence critics of the regime and its implementation of the World Bank/IMFs Structural Adjustment Programs which Nigerian economist, Adebayo Adedeji characterised as a "socio-economic war against peoples of Africa". Gani's case against Babangida's intelligence officials is also still in court.

Gani has filed a total of 248 cases on the issue of "a person's legal right to sue (or locus standi).

In that long and trying legal trek, he has defended students punished (including being gunned down by the police) for protesting against various "anti-poor people" government policies.

He has also defended trade unionists.

Adams Oshiomole, a former president of the Nigerian Labour Congress (and probably the most caustic and courageous leader of strikes against escalating pump prices of petrol), has stated publicly that Gani offered them free legal guidance that kept them out of traps and mistakes that would have enabled the government to detain or imprison them.

In the 1998/1999 electoral campaigns, Gani formed the Nigerian Conscience Party. The party's name is an electoral expression of his principle of "speaking truth to power".

Television reports of his campaign rallies in some neighbourhoods in urban Lagos showed that the party had not aroused mass enthusiastic support.

Reason? Lawyers fight with words that common folk do not use in their daily lives.

While Gani shoots lethal arrows in courts of law, newspapers and television detached from urban and rural poverty.

Without being a member or part of movements like trade unions and student revolts, he was a weak force in electoral politics. But his popularity hasn't waned.

On his return from London on May 10, 2008, Nigerians burst into spontaneous mass

jubilation on sighting Gani coming down from the aircraft at the Airport in Lagos.

Other Nigerians are famous for the wring reasons. A towering figure on Nigeria's convulsive political landscape is the former Minister for Abuja, Nigeria's federal capital territory.

Quantity surveyor, Nassiru El-Rufai was an abrasive, brilliant, single-minded reformist and a member of President Obasanjo's reform-pushing "Dream Team".

In a drive to dam the surge to turn Abuja into a giant slum, El- Rufai may well have demolished houses and revoked title deeds in 30,000 cases but his officials flouted 76 court injunctions.

For a regime that loudly claimed to run on the due process in awarding contracts, an official under El-Rufai reportedly handed over 7 billion Naira to contractors under a procedure he called "direct labour" that, in effect, broke up projects into small tasks that were awarded without following contract procedures.

Hotel shares sold for a song

El-Rufai also sold the government's 48 per cent holding in Sheraton Hotel (valued at $200 million) for $45 million. Garki Hospital, a government-owned facility, was allegedly sold at a very low price because, in El-Rufai's words, "I wanted to assist my friend."

The former National Secretary of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, Ahmadu Ali, recently took journalists to the ruins where his demolished house once stood, to confirm that El-Rufai had lied when he claimed that the house had been built on an urban water pipeline grid.

In the angry cacophony of his accusers, El-Rufai made the revealing statement that his mates in Obasanjo's government were acting within the framework of an "ideological" guide.

That statement may well be a vital lead to a historical terrain worth exploring.

That terrain goes back to 1960 when Nigeria was a political tripod in which Ahmadu Bello led a political force in the Hausa-Fulani dominated Northern Nigeria while Obafemi Awolowo led in Yoruba-dominated Western Nigeria and Nnamdi Azikiwe in the Igbo-dominated Eastern Nigeria.

The three political giants led political parties that ran governments in each region.

Fuelled by compulsive desires to ensure that their individual regions and peoples were not eclipsed by the other two, the departing British colonial political engineers had unwittingly, left behind a most dynamic Nigeria.

The country was a socio-economic and political cauldron which, if left to run a healthy course, would turn Nigeria into an economic giant that would unstoppably dominate West Africa and become a powerful force against Apartheid South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

An increasingly developed Muslim Northern Nigeria would, also, be a powerful future ally of Egypt and the Arab world in wars against Israel.

It was a horizon whose possibilities aroused cold sweat in Pretoria, Tel Aviv, Paris, London and Washington. It could, however, be reduced to dust.

Coups blamed for stagnation

After the 1966 military coup in Nigeria, the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post noted that Israeli intelligence officers had made contact with Aguiyi Ironsi, the man who became Nigeria's first military ruler from that coup, while he served in the Nigerian contingent serving under the flag of the United Nations during the 1960-1961 civil war in Congo.

Ironsi was not the only Nigerian military officer who served in that contingent.

Early last week, retired general Yakubu Gowon publicly blamed the military for the over thirty years of subsequent military rule for derailing Nigeria's economic and socio-political development.

It was not a new message. Most Nigerians above 16 would probably now hear it with loud yawns laced with bitterness, a sense of betrayal and collective humiliation.

What was new since 1999, however, is that Obasanjo's "Dream Team" had set out on a "new start" for Nigeria.

Obasanjo himself never got tired of repeating the institutions and agencies his military government had, between 1976 and 1979, set in motion to rebuild Nigeria but which, by 1999, lay in ruins -- wrecked by official theft, ethnic chauvinism and poor management.

Nigeria's new "ideology" of being "born again" under this new sun consisted of open emulations of success stories from Malaysia, Singapore and possibly Japan, India and China.

The problem of that ideological road is that it requires the use of rough, long and sustained incumbency by "born again" disciples devoted to good governance.

Mao Zedung ruled communist China from 1949 to 1976.

India's Congress Party lost Mahatma Gandhi but the iron hands of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s saw the party carry into nuclear technology his vision of self-reliance through a policy of Indians wearing made-in-India cloth and eating salt shoved out by Indian hands out of waters around India's shorelines.

In Malaysia and Singapore, the "born again" ideology held for decades. Obasanjo's eight years in power would be seen by these Third World apostles of "born again" national growth as a bad joke.

The question to be asked now is whether the political convulsions being witnessed in Nigeria are a replay of the counter-convulsions that snuffed out fires of regional development-focused regional competition in 1966.

The here is loudly aggressive. The current Attorney General has labeled Obasanjo's regime as "lawless" and a condition of "anarchy".

Recently, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) backed off at the last minute from saying that its rally in front of parliament on May 8, 2008 to denounce corruption was primarily meant to call for Obasanjo's imprisonment for corruption.

Killing the Nigerian dream

The NLC sounded as if its own members were not the officials that processed administrative procedures that dug out and paid out stolen funds from public vaults.

It is not clear if the new anti-corruption drive is both selective and part of an agenda to jam the wheels of a "born again" Nigeria.

It is a question that must arouse active concern and intervention from every African capital if Nigeria's role in the African renaissance relay race will not be to drop the baton, yet again.

Okello Oculi is the executive director of Africa Vision 525 Initiative.