Obituary: Mohammed ‘Egin MO’ Fawehinmi – The formidable heir who kept the flame burning
Mohammed ‘Egin Mo’ Fawehinmi was a leading figure in Nigeria’s civil society and human rights movement. Though he spent 18 of his 23 years in legal practice on the wheelchair, he proved that he was a formidable heir whom any form of disability could not limit.
Before his death, on Wednesday, August 11, 2021, at 52, Egin Mo or Mannix, as he was fondly called, never allowed his activism and legal wings to be clipped; advocating, like his larger-than-life father, Gani Fawehinmi, for a better society.
Egin is used to describe the people of Ondo town in Ondo state, Southwest Nigeria, while Mannix is an American detective television series popular in the late 1960s to the 70s.
A family statement on Thursday, August 19, 2021, confirmed that Mo died of COVID-19.
“We are in a position to inform you that our dear brother died from Covid-19 related complications,” Saheed Fawehinmi, Mo’s younger brother, said in the statement.
Mo was handsome and with very good height, always neatly dressed, humble, courteous and well-groomed despite his aristocratic background. Until his death, many agree that he was energetic, courageous, eloquent and very intellectually alert.
In a tribute, Ebun Olu-Adegboruwa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said Mo “was very eloquent, perfectly combining his knowledge and study of English language with the practice of law. His was a case of whom the cap fits; let him wear it.”
Mo was assigned to Olu-Adegboruwa, whom he understudied when he joined the Gani Fawehinmi Chamber after he was called to the bar in 1998.
“Despite his mishap. He kept the flame of his father burning,” In his tribute, Festus Keyamo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and Minister of State for Labour, said we would sorely miss him.
Femi Falana (SAN) said, “as a chip off the old block, Mohammed was courageous, dedicated, knowledgeable and committed to the liberation of the Nigerian people from the shackles of injustice in all its ramifications.”
Born on February 21, 1969, to Alhaja Ganiyat Fawehinmi, his father was the late legal icon, Gani Fawehinmi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who earned the moniker Senior Advocate of the Masses over his advocacy for the rights of citizens and ordinary people. Gani was jailed multiple times for confronting Nigeria’s most draconian military regimes. He was also a Presidential aspirant.
The deceased attended Kotun Memorial Primary School, Surulere, Lagos and Federal Government College, Sokoto, where he became fond of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari for ‘saving his life’ when he was in secondary school.
In a 2017 interview with Raphael Adenaike of Media Career, Mo recalled how “the Maitatsine sect just like Boko Haram came to our school. He (Buhari) had information that they were ravaging schools. So, he sent soldiers, and they came to the periphery and sent in mobile policemen. They were able to catch some of them while trying to escape,” Fawehinmi said. “He saved my life when I was in the Federal Government College, Sokoto. He saved my younger brother’s life when he was in the Federal Government College, Maiduguri. So, I owe him a lot”.
More than 500 students have been kidnapped from Niger State, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and other parts of Northern Nigeria in the last six years of Buhari’s government.
He wanted a career in the Military.
As a teenager, a career in the Nigerian Army was his dream, but despite having three uncles in the army, his father did not approve.
“When I was 14, we were given forms in school for the Nigerian Defence Academy. I hurriedly filled mine and took it to my father to sign; I never knew I had courted trouble. Till he died, I don’t think he had ever been that angry,” “He said that I wanted to go and join the people that were throwing him in jail all the time. He said I wanted to join those who wanted to kill him. He said that it was better he killed me before I joined his enemies. It took four senior lawyers to hold him down that day. I had to run away from the scene as fast as I could and managed to jump the fence before tearing the form,” Mo recalled.
“I thought he had forgotten about everything, but I was surprised when he woke me up with the cane at about 2.30 am the next morning. He dealt with me thoroughly that day,” he narrated.
From that moment, he became aware that his life’s work would be advocating for the oppressed and fighting repressive regimes.
When Mo was born in 1969, his father “was held in an illegal custody in Kaduna under the State Security (Detention of Persons) Decree No 24 of 1967,” Falana said.
He grew up to choose his father’s path and became a formidable heir after Gani died of cancer in September 2009.
Before obtaining a law degree from the University of Buckingham, England, Mo had bagged a degree in Business Administration from the University of Lagos.
A 1997 graduate of the Nigerian Law School, he was one of the first set of lawyers to be called to the Nigerian bar in Abuja in 1998, following the relocation of the Law School to Nigeria’s capital in December 1997.
At the Law School in Victoria Island, Lagos, Malcolm Omirhobo, a human rights lawyer and Mo’s classmate, said Mo ‘‘had a magnetic personality. He was like honey to bees and sugar to ants. Anywhere or everywhere he went, people were always around him. He was the man of the people and was practically everybody’s friend ‘except my good self’.
“My refusal to befriend Mo throughout our one year course at the law school was not because I had any beef with him, but it was just that I did not want to be his friend because everybody was his friend, and I did not want to join the crowd of his fans,” he said. Three months after they were called to the bar, they became friends after running into each other at Marina Street, Lagos Island.
Before he was called to the bar in 1998, Mo had had a wealth of experience in law practice. And “the next working day after our call to bar Mo appeared at the Supreme Court of Nigeria as counsel and did that every other day,” Omirhobo said.
Olu-Adegboruwa confirmed that Mo was a regular guest at his father’s law firm in Ikeja as a law student. After being called to the bar, he was assigned to Adegboruwa, who mentored him in the early days of his legal career.
“When Gani was picked by security agents shortly after he defied the Abacha junta to launch the National Conscience Party (NCP) in 1994, you (Mo) grabbed a car and pursued his abductors who struggled to shake you off,” Lanre Arogundade of the International Press Center (IPC) recalled in his tribute. “When you returned in the evening, you were full of triumphal excitement that you gave the security agents a good chase in your bid to know where your father was being taken.”
The accident that slowed Mo
On the evening of September 23, 2003, while driving home in his Mercedes Benz E320, Mo had a near-fatal accident that confined him to a wheelchair.
“I was coming from the chambers at night on the evening of September 23, 2003. The accident happened around 9:48 pm. I used to stay at Ajao Estate (along the International Airport road Lagos) then, and I usually took the airport route to connect Ikeja. It was a Mercedes E320. By the time I got to the toll gate, I had bought a call card and prayed, something I had never done before because when I was at that place, I didn’t usually stop,” Mo said in an interview. “As I approached a popular fuel station on the axis, my car skidded off the road and leapt into the place. As the car landed, I tried to apply the brakes, but it wasn’t responding. Eventually, the outlet where they used to check for petrol gauge stopped the vehicle. The airbag from the front came out and pinned me to the seat, while the one from the side shifted me and broke my neck. After about one-and-a-half minutes of struggling to burst the airbag, my entire body went numb. It was a naval officer who stopped to rescue me from the car; otherwise, I could have been burnt alive in it because petrol was already spilling from it.”
He was flown to the UK after two days at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi. In the UK, doctors told him he could have been walking the following week after the accident if he was handled correctly at the Nigerian hospital.
“He said the particular spot where the injury occurred should have been frozen with a special spray after the accident, rather than being handled anyhow. That spray cost about N8,000 when converted to our local currency. It is so common abroad, but up till now, many hospitals don’t even have it in Nigeria,” Mo said.That accident changed his life forever. The accident also disrupted his love life, and he had to let go of the lady he was planning to spend the rest of his life with. He never married.
“I just felt that I shouldn’t bother any woman with my condition. I didn’t want anybody to marry me out of pity. Even though I always have females around me, it is not every woman that can stay with a person with a disability of my kind.” Mo told Raphael Adenaike in a 2017 interview that he still feels a lot of pain from his injuries and was considering herbal concoctions to relieve the pain.
“But I regularly observe my medications. Sometimes, I use sleeping pills so that I wouldn’t disturb the people around me when the pain starts. There is no country I haven’t been to for treatment – England, Germany, Israel, name it,” he said.
Despite his physical challenges, Mo remained passionate about activism and law, taking on cases and actively participating in rallies and protests.
Along with his mother, he was at the frontline of the Occupy Nigeria protest against the removal of fuel subsidy in 2012.
Olu-Adegboruwa said the admirable part of Mo’s life was “the way he handled the accident with personal determination and zeal not to be deterred or discouraged.”
After his father died in 2009, he shut the Gani Fawehinmi Chambers in line with his father’s instructions and started the Mohammed Fawehinmi’s Chambers, which he headed until his death. He was also Director, Nigerian Law Publications Ltd; Director, Books Industries Nigeria Ltd, and Director, Gani Fawehinmi Library and Gallery Ltd, at Alausa, Ikeja.
He passionately advocated for free education, free and better health care, an end to the abuse of human rights and more.
When the former Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomole, lost his wife, Clara, to cancer in December 2010, Mo wrote on his Facebook page: “cancer killed my father also, we must ask for legislation to start research centres all over the country to find a cure for cancer, diabetes, spinal cord injury and hypertension.”
In another Facebook post from 2010, he advocated for free healthcare for children and mothers.
Arogundade said the iron-willed radical activism in him meant that confinement to the wheelchair was not a barrier to speaking truth to power and participating in pro-people protests for justice and end to brutal exploitation.
Omirhobo, his classmate at Law School, said he was ‘an affable companionable person and a continuity master.’
“Mo was a man who was very alert and conscious of his environment. He also had a very good retentive memory and was an extrovert extraordinary. He made other people’s business his business. Once he gets to know your name, it sticks. Once you let him into your life, he becomes part of your life. If Mo met you for the first time today and he gets to know your name, and you happen to share some information with him, if you meet him eight months later, Mo will not only call you by your name, he will continue his discussion with you from where you stopped. He was a continuity master.”
“In all aspects of his life, Mo was a chip off the old block, in his strides, his character, his demeanour and even his passion. He didn’t so much believe in cutting corners, as he opted to go through the mills in the Chambers.” Olu-Adegboruwa, his early career mentor wrote.
Mo’s 72-year-old mother and siblings survived him. On Friday, August 27, 2021, he will be buried at the Gani Fawehinmi family compound in Ondo Town, Ondo State. His father was also buried in the family compound in 2009.
