Muyiwa Akintunde’s work on the rights lawyer and social justice crusader will be launched at a memorial event in Abuja attended by President Tinubu and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka
The Tunji Braithwaite Foundation is set to mark ten years since the death of one of Nigeria’s most consequential legal minds with the unveiling of a commemorative book that charts the life and convictions of a man who spent his career arguing, often at personal cost, that justice was not the exclusive province of the powerful.
The event takes place on Saturday at the Congress Hall of Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja, where guests including President Bola Tinubu — attending as Special Guest of Honour — and Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka will gather to reflect on the legacy of Dr Tunji Braithwaite, who died on 28 March 2016 at the age of 82.
The centrepiece of the occasion is the launch of a book written by journalist and public relations consultant Muyiwa Akintunde, publisher of Breezy News, an online publication committed to ethical journalism. Conceived by the foundation itself, the work examines Braithwaite’s decades-long crusade for human rights and social justice — a crusade waged, as the book makes clear, on behalf of those who could rarely afford to wage it themselves.
“Rights and privileges shouldn’t be the prerogative of only the nouveau riche, but must also be available to the plebeian,” the book quotes Braithwaite as asserting — a sentiment that, his admirers argue, defined not merely his rhetoric but every chamber brief he accepted and every cause he championed.
Akintunde describes a man of uncommon moral resolve. “His relentless fight on the side of what was just and true resonates in this book,” he writes. “Even in the face of the gun, he never buckled. For him, evil would never triumph with the will and determination to do the right things.”
Braithwaite practised law as an act of conscience. A lawyer, politician and social justice activist, he was regarded by contemporaries as one of the rare figures in Nigerian public life who remained consistent — professionally and personally — in holding authority to account and defending the marginalised, however unfashionable or dangerous that position might be.
The book will be reviewed at the event by Professor Anthony Kila, a director of the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies and a regular political and governance analyst on ARISE News, whose commentary spans constitutional affairs, economic policy and leadership theory.
The event, themed “Politics with Conscience: Leadership, Responsibility, and the Nigerian Social Contract”, carries a charge that feels deliberately contemporary in a country still navigating its own fraught relationship with those three ideas. Chief Bisi Akande, former governor of Osun State, will chair the proceedings, while Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu will serve as Chief Host.
That Soyinka — Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature and himself a lifelong witness to the moral failures of Nigerian governance — will be present as Guest of Honour lends the occasion an additional symbolic weight. His presence places Braithwaite’s story within a broader tradition of intellectual and civic resistance that has always existed in Nigeria, even when its practitioners have been overlooked or silenced.
The foundation’s decision to commission a literary memorial, rather than merely a ceremonial one, speaks to something in Braithwaite’s character: a belief, held to the last, that ideas argued clearly and honestly could change the terms on which power operated. Whether Nigeria has moved closer to the social contract he envisioned is a question the event’s theme invites, but does not presume to answer.
The event takes place on Saturday, 2 May 2026, at the Congress Hall, Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja.
