Leadership Notes Gani Fawehinmi Bequeathed to Governor Uba Sani

Jamiu Salifu

Some political legacies are preserved in monuments, some in books, and some in the institutions that outlive their makers. But the most durable legacies are often carried quietly in the character of those who were taught by men and women of uncommon conviction. They survive not because history remembers a name, but because a principle takes root in another generation and is translated into public conduct.

That is the deeper significance of the book, Gani Fawehinmi and Uba Sani: A Tale of Mentor and Mentee, authored by Basirat Fawehinmi-Biobaku, Esq., daughter of the late Chief Abdul-Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, SAN, GCON. Publicly presented in Kaduna on Saturday, 5 September 2026, at the Abba Kyari Banquet Hall, Sir Kashim Ibrahim House, the book is ostensibly about a remarkable relationship between a legendary Nigerian and a much younger activist. In reality, it is about something larger: how political courage is transmitted, how democratic values are inherited, and how private mentorship can eventually acquire public consequence.

The most compelling evidence is contained in the book’s Foreword. It is not an elaborate essay but a simple admonition that Chief Fawehinmi gave Uba Sani more than three decades ago:

“Uba, if you ever have the opportunity to serve our country Nigeria in any capacity, make sure you do not ever forget the masses of our people, of course you know I mean the less privileged, and the unemployed youths which constitute the larger part of our population.”

It is difficult to imagine a more concise philosophy of public service.

The instruction was not to remember power, party or political advantage. It was to remember people. Specifically, it was to remember those most easily forgotten when political authority becomes insulated from the realities of ordinary life.

That sentence is the moral centre of the book. It is also the most illuminating lens through which to understand the evolution of Uba Sani from a young pro-democracy activist into the Governor of Kaduna State.

Their story began in the combustible political atmosphere of 1993. The annulment of the June 12 presidential election had plunged Nigeria deeper into political uncertainty, while the military establishment sought to contain the democratic agitation that followed. It was in those circumstances that the 22-year-old Uba Sani encountered Fawehinmi.

According to Basirat Fawehinmi-Biobaku, ten young activists came to see her father. When Fawehinmi asked why they were there, Uba Sani answered that they had come “because we want to fight for the heart of Nigeria.”

The older man understood immediately that rhetoric would not suffice. He asked the young activists whether they understood the consequences of the struggle. Then he ordered his detention bag to be brought out. It was always packed. The symbolism was unmistakable. In Fawehinmi’s Nigeria, democratic activism was not a comfortable vocation. It could mean arrest, detention, professional isolation and personal sacrifice.

Uba Sani’s response was equally unequivocal: “Sir, I’m ready to face the consequences.”

That exchange was more than an introduction. It was the beginning of an apprenticeship in courage.

Fawehinmi subsequently invited the young activist to live in his Lagos home. Uba Sani spent four years there, sharing a household with the man who would become his mentor. He ate with him, travelled to work with him and lived alongside Femi Aborisade, one of Fawehinmi’s closest confidantes. In the intimacy of ordinary domestic life, the young activist encountered the person behind the public icon.

This distinction matters. Political education does not occur only at rallies, in courtrooms or through manifestos. It also happens through observation: watching how a person behaves when no audience is present, how he treats the vulnerable, how he responds to intimidation and whether his private conduct is consistent with his public convictions.

Fawehinmi’s life provided an unusually rigorous curriculum. He was uncompromising in his opposition to military authoritarianism, fearless in the defence of human rights and relentless in his deployment of the law against arbitrary power. He understood that democracy could not survive where citizens were denied justice, where institutions were subordinated to personal authority and where the law became an instrument for protecting privilege rather than defending liberty.

His influence on Uba Sani therefore went beyond activism. It established a conception of public responsibility.

This becomes especially evident in the scholarship initiative that brought the two men together in another dimension. In 2000, Uba Sani served as Northern Coordinator of the Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Foundation. More than 1,000 brilliant but indigent students across Northern Nigeria ultimately benefited from the programme.

The significance of that intervention lies in its philosophy. Fawehinmi did not merely protest deprivation; he invested in human capacity. He understood that democracy without education could remain formal rather than transformative. A citizen may possess the right to vote, but without knowledge, opportunity and economic dignity, the practical value of that right can remain severely constrained.

His warning that educational backwardness could become “a monster”  especially in the states in northern Nigeria, remains painfully relevant.

This is why Governor Sani’s later formulation of democracy is particularly instructive. As Governor, he has argued that “democracy is not the destination; it is the framework within which a society must pursue human dignity and shared prosperity.” That is a significant departure from the narrow conception of democracy as periodic elections. It places governance under a more demanding obligation: to make political freedom meaningful in people’s everyday lives.

The implication is profound. The ballot box is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A democratic government must educate children, expand economic opportunity, provide healthcare, protect the vulnerable, develop rural communities and create conditions in which young people can imagine a future beyond poverty and exclusion.

The same principle informed Fawehinmi’s later political battles. Following the return to civilian rule, he and his associates, including Uba Sani, challenged restrictions on political participation and the denial of registration to parties outside the initial political arrangement. The legal battle eventually reached the Supreme Court and helped widen Nigeria’s political space.

That history deserves remembrance because political freedom has a tendency to become invisible once it becomes familiar. Many Nigerians who participate in today’s multiparty system may have little knowledge of the struggles that made such participation possible.

As Senator Shehu Sani observed at the Kaduna presentation, “Democracy has a history,” and that history includes sacrifice.

It is this historical consciousness that makes the book timely. Nigeria’s present political class is often accused, with justification, of possessing little institutional memory. Political actors inherit freedoms without remembering their custodians; they occupy democratic institutions without appreciating the battles that secured them; they speak of public office as privilege when it should be understood as responsibility.

The Fawehinmi-Sani story offers a corrective. The most important inheritance from the elder to the younger man was not political machinery. It was an ethic of service. The note was simple: never forget the masses.

The real test, therefore, is whether that instruction survives in governance.

Uba Sani’s stated priorities in Kaduna: education, infrastructure, security, healthcare, agriculture, vocational training, social protection and access to justice, can be understood within that broader philosophy. His administration’s allocation of 25 per cent of the 2026 budget to education, alongside substantial commitments to infrastructure, health and agriculture, reflects an understanding that public expenditure is ultimately a moral document. Budgets reveal what a government considers important.

Likewise, the expansion of vocational education and the graduation of thousands of young people with practical skills speak to a proposition that Fawehinmi understood deeply: empowerment is more enduring than dependency.

The same logic applies to Governor Sani’s administration’s intervention in the criminal-justice system. The release of hundreds of convicts and persons awaiting trial, together with the payment of fines and compensation for beneficiaries, rests on the idea that justice must retain a human face. As Uba Sani put it: “Justice must never be reduced to punishment. It must contain humanity, rehabilitation and the possibility of a second chance.

That is precisely where the mentor’s old counsel meets the responsibilities of contemporary office

Yet the significance of this relationship should not be reduced to the record of one administration. Its larger importance lies in the question it poses to every Nigerian entrusted with authority: whom do you remember when you acquire power? Fawehinmi’s answer was clear. Remember those without power.

Remember the poor. Remember unemployed youths. Remember citizens whose voices are easily drowned by the machinery of the state. Remember that public office derives its legitimacy from service.

The finest tribute to Gani Fawehinmi, therefore, cannot be a ceremony, a memorial or even a book, valuable as all three may be. His true memorial would be a Nigeria in which the law protects the weak as confidently as it restrains the powerful; in which education is treated as national security; in which democratic freedom is matched by social justice; and in which political authority remains answerable to the people. That is the enduring lesson of the relationship between Gani Fawehinmi and Uba Sani

A mentor’s greatest achievement is not to reproduce himself, but to prepare another person to carry a principle beyond his own lifetime. Fawehinmi did precisely that. He planted in a young activist a conception of service that has travelled from the streets of the pro-democracy struggle to the corridors of democratic government.

The note he left was brief. Its implications are not. “Do not ever forget the masses of our people.”

In a country perpetually tempted to confuse power with purpose, those words remain a formidable standard. They remind every occupant of public office that history will judge not merely the battles he fought, the positions he occupied or the honours he accumulated, but the extent to which ordinary citizens found their dignity enlarged by his stewardship

That is the leadership note Gani Fawehinmi bequeathed to Uba Sani. It is also a note Nigeria should never stop reading.

Dr. Salifu, a university teacher, resides in Samaru, Zaria.