“You have never let me or any of us down.” Chief Femi Fani-Kayode wrote that line to Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who turned 64.
Fani-Kayode, a former Minister of Aviation and Nigeria’s Ambassador-designate to South Africa, posted the tribute on X. He called Gbajabiamila a friend and brother, and said they had been “closer than brothers for at least 50 years.”
The friendship began in Lagos and London in the 1970s and 1980s. Fani-Kayode grew up alongside Folabie Caxton Martins and Wole Atunrase, who lived round the corner from Gbajabiamila in Surulere, and Deremie Ajidahun, among others.
Memories, one by one
Most of the post is a run of recollections. Fani-Kayode recalled Gbajabiamila’s sharp criticism of the late Chief Bola Ige in 1990, when the two men first went into politics, after Ige dismissed the “newbreed politicians” idea promoted by the government of the day.
He remembered the day in 2004 when Gbajabiamila came home from America with his wife, Saa, after years abroad. They went to see President Olusegun Obasanjo at the Villa to say they were back and would live in Abuja. A few years later the couple opened a restaurant and bar there, “where all those that mattered used to gather and make merry.”
Fani-Kayode also described Gbajabiamila’s loyalty to Tinubu from 1993, through the NADECO years and Tinubu’s time as Lagos governor, until he was elected President. He wrote of Gbajabiamila’s love for his mother and his wife, and of a soft, kind heart behind a “sometimes stern and officious look.”
Two speeches stood out. In 2007, at Fani-Kayode’s 47th birthday dinner in Lagos, Gbajabiamila spoke warmly of him and in the same speech criticized the president and government Fani-Kayode was serving as Minister of Aviation. In 2011, at Gbajabiamila’s birthday dinner in Abuja, Fani-Kayode answered with a fiery speech of his own, just after Aminu Tambuwal was elected Speaker. He said then that Gbajabiamila’s time would come to be Speaker. “My words proved to be prophetic,” he wrote.
The two men now live as neighbours in Maitama, Abuja. “Whoever thought that this would be?” Fani-Kayode asked. He ended with a prayer for his friend’s health, peace and prosperity.
