Dr. Frederick Fasehun was born in Ondo town on September 2, 1935. He earned his degree in medicine at Aberdeen University College of Medicine. He did his postgraduate studies at the Liverpool Postgraduate School that qualified him to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
I first heard of Dr. Fasehun during the early part of my career at Radio Nigeria in Lagos in the 70s, where I was a writer, presenter and producer of current affairs programmes. In the then current affairs unit of the radio station, the story filtered in about one Nigerian doctor who was propagating treatment of pains and some ailments with the Chinese acupuncture techniques. We were curious and on enquiry, we found that Dr. Fasehun was one of the doctors that decided to draw public attention to the availability of such pain reliever. We eventually got him to come down to our studios in Ikoyi for a thirty-minute interview programme: ‘Behind the Headlines’. He informed the radio audience that he had gone to China in 1976 to study acupuncture. That exposure to acupuncture treatment involving the insertion of Chinese designed needles around the location of a pain in the body brought him into limelight after he returned to Nigeria. He told us that the method of treatment had been found to be efficacious in subduing pain in different parts of the body. He pressed home his claim after he resigned in 1978 from the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH at Idi-Araba in Lagos to set up Besthope Hospital and Acupuncture Centre known as the first centre of practice of the Chinese medicine.
If we got all the public needed to know about acupuncture from Dr. Fasehun, we did not know that he would be a fire brand if an occasion demanded it. Fasehun suddenly burst into the political scene when Moshood Abiola’s electoral victory was annulled by President Ibrahim Babangida led military regime that was conducting a general election that was to usher in a civilian administration in 1993. The medical practitioner felt that his Yoruba ethnic group where Abiola came from had been cheated by the military and he won’t have none of it. So he formed the Oodua People’s Congress as a pressure group to fight for the actualization of Abiola’s electoral success.
His posture of confrontation with the military regime was strident, consistent and it was conducted in a fearless manner. He was not appeased by the installation of a Yoruba man, Ernest Adegunle Sonekan as head of an interim government when Babangida stepped aside as he could not manage the crisis that he initiated by the annulment of an election that was adjudged to be the freest and fairest in the country’s history. Sanni Abacha, another military officer abruptly sacked Sonekan’s interim government and seized power. It was Abacha that clamped Fasehun, who appeared to be ‘a pain in his neck’ into detention in December in 1996. He remained incarcerated until June 1998 when Abacha died in office. The Abdulsalam’s military administration that took over government freed Fasheun from what seemed as an indefinite detention without trial.
He came out of Nigeria’s military ‘gulag’ to resuscitate and invigorate his Oodua People’s Congress. However the time came when OPC was ‘sliced’ into two factions. The leader of the youth wing, Oodua Youth Movement, Gani Adams broke away from Fasehun’s camp and set up his own structure that he maintains till today. In fact, the Fasehun camp became less visible while Gani Adams calls the shots. Only in January this year Adams confirmed his supremacy when he took the sacred Yoruba chieftaincy title of Aare Ona Kakanfo, the Generalissimo of Yorubaland.
However Fasehun continued his exploits in politics when he revived Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN a party formed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a legendary Yoruba political figure of repute. At 83 years old, Fasehun could not go on with his ethnic and national political crusade. He succumbed to the prowling hands of death.
Undoubtedly, Dr. Frederick Fasehun will take his rightful place in Nigeria’s history. His Yoruba ethnic group will continue to remember him for the sacrifice that he made on their behalf.
