He was probably the last of the Mohicans. Every now and then, the sheer turmoil and contradictions of Nigeria throws up a figure of arresting vitality to remind us of unfinished business. Olatunji Braithwaite, the distinguished Lagos lawyer who died last weekend aged eighty two, was such a person. For a man of immense personal bravery and punishing physical exertions, it was so appropriate that the legal gladiator should die in his gym and literally on the tread mill.
There was always something of a high-born Roman nobleman about the Lagosian lawyer. His upper class credentials were impeccable. Well-born, well-bred and well-connected, he carried himself with aristocratic flair,panache and a hint of sartorial eccentricity which sat very well on a sprightly well-honed physique.
If his public school diction betrayed his elitist and privileged background, his fiery rhetoric and the magnetic aura of his personality endeared him to the political mob and other denizens of the barricades. He belonged to a body of men— rebel aristocrats and gentleman gladiators all—- who viewed law principally as a weapon for the emancipation of the people rather than a social and political racket for protecting injustice and inequality.
It is a long line of legal avatars stretching from Braithwaite through the youthful and much mourned BamideleAturu, GaniFawehinmi, AlaoAka-Basorun, thetempestuous KanmiIsola-Osobu to the founding patriarch himself, Sapara-Williams. It should be noted that bar one of them all these people were children of considerable privileges and scions of the emergent merchant elite in the hinterland or on the coast. Yet they did not flinch when it came to defending the rights of the underprivileged.
For these men, the law is a noble instrument for advancing the cause of the ordinary citizen and for championing political and social justice. In any society, it is when the practice of law and its adjudication fall into the hands of the ignoble that the sanctity of the profession is breached and its sacred ethos desecrated.
All of these men in their separate and individual manner, and within the limits and limitations of their god’s given talents, fought titanic battles against tyrants of all hue and turned the law courts into one vast coliseum of colliding gladiators. For them, everywhere there is injustice is a legal battlefield. They drew blood and blood was drawn from them. They bore the scars of their confrontations till they fell in battle. In at least one of them, there was more than enough hints and evidence of circuitous state execution.
What could have drawn a young man from a privileged and pampered background like Tunji Braithwaite to this holy band of iconic legal warriors is a matter for historical conjecture. The late lawyer could have been a born rebel who was bound to revolt against the grosser absurdities of his class in any case. Or it may well be that as he grew up and was confronted by the inequities of Nigeria, he concluded that his life’s mission was to see to the amelioration of the dreadful condition of the Nigerian underclass.
Whatever the source of the summons, the great man never wavered thereafter and despite the odd and occasional tactical adjustment, he would never be found speaking from both sides of the mouth where injustice and tyranny are concerned. The scandalously rich he viewed with courteous disapproval, the arriviste or new rich with bemused contempt and a whiff of condescension and the vulgarly opulent he ticked off a withering stare of revulsion.
In human societies, ideological battles among and within the classes are always fought under a great occlusion in which all sides are beset by one illusion or the other about their real motives and the actual causus belli which lead them to fight under one ensign or the other. Some may think they are furthering the cause of their class when they are actually threatening its long term viability. Others may think they are deliberately undermining their class interests when they are actually and unconsciously cementing the long term viability of the same class.
The same week that Braithwaite departed, more than three dozen of his silk-donning professional colleagues filed up in court to defend the rights to fair hearing of a celebrated political rustler and to forestall any attempts by the state to undermine the rule of law as it appears to them. To them, this may well be a selfless and patriotic duty.
Braithwaite would never have been caught dead in such a company. Unknown to our SANs, by defending the indefensible, they are the ones actually undermining the rule of law and setting up their class for a violent confrontation with the seething mob lying in wait just outside the courts. When law fails, everything is lawful.
Many of our top lawyersbeing parvenus and newly empowered upstarts from the lowest rungs of the society, it should be obvious that securing the longer term interests and conditions of reproductions of their new class may well be beyond their ken.This is how the cunning of history plays itself out often leading to the destruction and mutual ruination of the contending classes and their various factions.
Like all well-heeled and entrenched scions of the old propertied class, Braithwaite had no time or patience with the neo-rich rabble and the arrivistes. For him nobility must fulfil its obligation and if it cannot it must give way in order not to endanger the survival of the society as a whole and the greatest Black nation as an entity.
It is this capacity to see farther than and much beyond circumscribed class interests which allows a man like Braithwaite to place emphasis on the survival of a nation as a whole rather than the perpetuation of narrow and unsustainable class interests. It is a noble tradition that harks back to the old burgher classes of Europe and the founding fathers of America.
That he was able to grasp the critical connectionbetween the rule of law and social justice shows that Braithwaite was principally a man of ideas, an intellectual who also happened to have been a lawyer rather than a mere middleman of legal mumbo-jumbo. This critical shortage of intellectual acuity is the Achilles heel of many of our lawyers no matter how technically proficient and forensically brilliant they may be.
African post-colonial ruling classes in general and the Nigerian political elite in particular have failed to grasp the concept of integrated prosperity and shared wealth for the entire society, a prerequisite for securing the security architecture of the nation. But rather than ameliorate the living condition of the people, they resort to stealing on an outlandish scale aided by all kinds of schemes and scams .This is what has turned the typical African nation into a permanent war camp; a hotbed of acrimonies andinsecurities.
Tunji Braithwaite fought such governments to a standstill no matter their hue, whether it is military despotism or civilian autocracy.But towards the end of his life, he seemed to have given up on the nation as it is currently configured, dismissing it as a structural monstrosity that is going nowhere. This need to restructure the country might have led the great legal activist to some strangeand questionable political association at the twilight.
But his ardour for public agitation was never diminished. It was not surprising that his very last gesture of public defiance came as a result of a principled opposition to the fuel subsidy scam. In January 2012, Braithwaite joined other patriots and elder statesmen led by Professor Ben Nwabueze to register their dismay about the subsidy hoax and the savage suppression of popular protests.
This writer got his summons to the barricades via a text from the grand old man that came in around four in the morning even as one was preparing for another meeting at the Lagos State Secretariat later that morning. By 8: 15 am, one had established contact with the crowd of protesters at the park opposite the House of Assembly.
Nwabueze, Braithwaite and others gave soul-stirring speeches as a detachment of fierce-looking policemen materialized asking the crowd to peacefully disband or be forcibly dispersed. A tense face off which seemed to have lasted for hours ensued as the singing and dancing crowd of merry protesters inched their way towards the Freedom Park. In the event, the police made good their threat by tear-gassing and manhandling everybody in sight including the octogenarian Nwabueze.
This was Braithwaite’s finest hour in defence of political and civil liberties. It was as if the great man was saying goodbye to his beloved compatriots amidst the chaos of emptied canisters, streaming tears, crumpled old men and fallen women. The veteran of several brushes with authorities, survivor of cruel incarcerations, brutal detentions, civilian ambush and military ambuscade might have had enough. Four years later, he has joined his ancestors. May his noble soul rest in peace.
NATION
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