The Pacesetter Frontier Magazine

Tag: NBA Conference

  • VDM Apologises to Security Agencies Over ‘Unknown Gunmen’ Remarks

    VDM Apologises to Security Agencies Over ‘Unknown Gunmen’ Remarks

    Social media activist Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, has apologised to soldiers, policemen, customs and immigration personnel over his controversial remarks at the Nigerian Bar Association’s 66th Annual General Conference.

    Otse, in a video shared on Friday, said he had reflected on his speech and realised that he was unfair to security personnel who were genuinely risking their lives to protect Nigerians.

    The activist had, while speaking at the conference in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, described the military, police, immigration and customs personnel as “unknown gunmen” in his discussion on insecurity.

    However, in Friday’s video, Otse said his remarks were not intended to accuse all security personnel of involvement in criminal activities.

    “I don’t think I was fair to a lot of people, particularly the speech where I said that the military are the unknown gunmen, the police are the unknown gunmen, you know, the immigration, the customs.

    “I know exactly what I was trying to say because, I mean, I have evidence to back up my claim, but I wasn’t fair to a lot of people in that speech,” he said.

    He said he was particularly concerned about soldiers fighting Boko Haram and other threats in the bushes.

    “That speech was not fair, especially to the soldiers that are in the bushes fighting Boko Haram to protect our lands, to protect our lives, and to protect our families.

    “I don’t think it’s fair to say they are also the unknown gunmen, to be very honest, because these people have laid down their lives,” he said.

    Otse said his intention was to draw attention to alleged corruption and sabotage by some personnel within the security agencies.

    “My speech was not to discourage you.

    “My speech was entirely to talk about the bad eggs in our security operative, our security forces, is to put attention on the bad eggs, so that the leaders in these security settings will look inward and to see that sometimes information are being leaked and their own people are sabotaging them,” he said.

    He, however, admitted that the way he presented his argument made it appear as though he was generalising.

    “But by passing that speech, like I said, it seems like I was generalising and it’s not fair to the fallen soldiers,” he said.

    Otse subsequently apologised to the Chief of Defence Staff and the leadership of the security agencies.

    “So I will go further to say to the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir, I really want to apologise for that speech, and I don’t want to discourage your boys.

    “Please extend my apologies to your boys, to the ones that are in the bush protecting our lands,” he said.

    He also apologised to the police, customs and immigration authorities, as well as the families of fallen security personnel.

    “To the families of these heroes that might have also felt offended by this speech, knowing fully well that their brother, their sister, their son, their husband fought and died for this country, I am really, really sorry,” he said.

    The activist maintained that there were still “a lot of good people” within the security agencies despite his allegations against some personnel.

    “Yes, a lot of bad eggs there, like I said, a lot of bad eggs, a lot of them are there.

    “A lot of corrupt generals, a lot of high-ranking police officers are corrupt, a lot of junior officers are corrupt, a lot of them are there. But there’s still a lot of more good people, a lot of more good people, and I know a lot of them,” he said.

    Otse said he feared his comments could discourage a soldier fighting in the bush who came across the video.

    “Imagine a soldier fighting in the bush and he watches VDM’s video, and he’s like, ‘Ah, VDM is one of us now, unknown gunman.’ That would discourage him, to be honest,” he said.

    The activist, who has previously spoken about alleged misconduct by security personnel, said his relationship with some policemen had also exposed him to the challenges facing the force.

    “Me and police, we work steady. I give, sometimes I share police information, tell them, ‘Oh, this is what is happening here, please, can you intercept,” he said.

    He urged security personnel who were genuinely protecting the country not to be discouraged by his comments.

    “And please don’t be discouraged, please, please, don’t be discouraged.

    “We’re there behind you now, and we’ll always support you. You know, and we are part of this thing, security is for all of us,” he said.

    Otse, however, maintained his warning to personnel allegedly involved in sabotage, arms supply and leaking information to terrorists.

    “But then again, to the bad eggs, your days are numbered.

    “To all of you in the military that are sabotaging and causing deaths to your officers, your days are numbered,” he said.

    The apology comes amid controversy over Otse’s appearance at the NBA conference, where his participation and comments generated criticism.

    Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, had rejected the defence of Otse’s role at the conference and called for experienced speakers to handle specialised discussions at the event.

    Otse subsequently responded to critics by defending his invitation to the conference and explaining why he was invited to speak.

    He later mocked the backlash by appearing in a lawyer’s wig and gown in a video.

    His latest apology also comes after a separate controversy over his claims that some police officers at checkpoints allegedly pass information about wealthy travellers to kidnappers.

    The police had challenged him to provide evidence for the allegation, while Otse responded by daring the authorities to charge him to court, saying he would present his evidence.

    In Friday’s video, however, Otse stressed that his criticism of alleged misconduct should not be interpreted as hostility towards the security agencies as a whole.

    “I actually know more than the people I was trying to communicate with, so it was not really communicated properly,” he said.

    He concluded by urging Nigerians to support security personnel genuinely fighting to protect the country.

    “And to the patriots, to the heroes, to our fallen heroes that have died to protect this country… I am really, really sorry.

    “Keep on fighting for our beloved country, God bless all of you. We Nigerians are with you,” he said. Punch

  • When the Bar Lowers the Intellectual Bar

    When the Bar Lowers the Intellectual Bar

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Last week, I read a few Facebook posts about the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference which took place in Port Harcourt. The Uyo-based lawyer and scholar, Solomon Ekokoi’s post on the shoddy arrangements captured the mood better than most. There was, clearly, much to complain about in the organisation of this year’s conference. But the concern of this column lies elsewhere and is, for all practical purposes, a more fundamental one: between the 2025 Enugu AGC, where Julius Malema was the keynote speaker, and the 2026 Port Harcourt AGC, where George Weah delivered the keynote address, one cannot help but ask what these choices say about the direction of the Nigerian Bar Association. Perhaps someone needs to explain what happened to the intellectual imagination of the Nigerian Bar Association.

    The NBA is not another jack-in-the-box professional association gathering people together for an annual jamboree. The legal profession occupies a peculiar place in any serious country because lawyers are expected to engage with the questions that govern the exercise of power, the meaning of liberty, the character of the State and the obligations of citizens. A Bar conference should therefore be one of those rare occasions when the profession moves away from routine litigations and confronts the larger questions that confront a country and its citizens. Who is invited to address such a gathering is therefore not a trivial matter. A keynote speaker is not simply an entertainer who happens to possess a recognisable name. The choice is itself a statement about what the association considers intellectually important.

    And this is where I find the recent choices deeply troubling.

    Julius Malema is a formidable political personality. He is a controversial figure, an accomplished political mobiliser and an arresting public speaker, but he lacks the intellectual nous, analytical depth and conceptual rigour that would ordinarily qualify a political personality to deliver a keynote address to a profession whose central preoccupation is the disciplined interrogation of law, power and society. George Weah is a global sporting icon who became President of Liberia. His journey from football to the presidency is remarkable and worthy of discussion. But neither achievement, celebrity nor political visibility automatically translates into intellectual authority appropriate for a keynote address to a professional body whose membership includes some of Africa’s finest legal minds. The question is not whether Weah is an accomplished man. Of course, he is. The question, therefore, is not simply whether a keynote speaker is famous or accomplished in some other field, but whether the record he brings to the podium is compatible with the intellectual and ethical demands of the occasion. In the case of George Weah, his stature as an international football icon and former president of Liberia could not, by itself, erase the troubling human-rights record of his presidency, including the failure to advance accountability for grave violations committed during Liberia’s civil wars and his government’s retreat from the question of a war-crimes court.  To invite such a figure to deliver a keynote to a profession whose foundational claim is a commitment to the rule of law and human rights was, at the very least, a profoundly questionable exercise of judgment. Celebrity cannot be permitted to launder a record that ought itself to invite scrutiny.

    When the Nigerian Bar Association convenes its annual conference, the intellectual standard ought to be considerably higher. The question should not be how famous a prospective keynote speaker is, how many followers he commands or how much publicity his presence might generate, but what new question he will compel the profession to confront, what body of thought he will bring to the table and what difficult conversation his address will provoke. These are not unreasonable demands; they are the minimum questions any intellectually serious professional association ought to ask of the person entrusted with its keynote. The NBA seems increasingly comfortable with personalities when what it ought to be searching for are ideas. It celebrates visibility more readily than scholarship, confuses popularity with influence and public recognition with intellectual depth. Did the immediate past President not himself suggest that Martins Otse was invited to a roundtable at the conference partly because he had more followers on social media than the NBA? At some point, the NBA’s appetite for celebrity begins to look less like an attempt to engage the public and more like an abdication of intellectual judgment. The absurdity is that, in a profession whose very business is the disciplined engagement of ideas, the harder work of thought appears increasingly to be giving way to the easier currency of visibility.

    This should worry every lawyer, particularly when set against the depth of the African intellectual tradition available to us. Issa Shivji, a towering African legal thinker, has spent decades interrogating law, constitutionalism, class and political economy in Africa; Makau Mutua has profoundly shaped contemporary debates on human rights and international law; while Nigeria itself has produced contemporary legal scholars of the stature of Wahab Egbewole and Oyelowo Oyewo. Their scholarship does more than furnish answers to familiar legal questions; it unsettles assumptions that have too easily become settled and demands a more searching engagement with the problems confronting nation-states. Africa or the disaporan black race has never suffered from an absence of ideas. Our problem has often been the unwillingness of institutions to take ideas seriously.

    The irony is particularly painful in the legal profession. Lawyers make their living from words and ideas. They argue over constitutional meaning, interrogate precedent, distinguish one principle from another, challenge assumptions, and persuade judges to see familiar facts differently. The intellectual life of the lawyer should therefore be inseparable from the practice of law. A profession that ceases to think deeply eventually ceases to practise law deeply. This is not an argument for elitism, nor is it an argument that only university professors can deliver meaningful keynote addresses. A lawyer, politician, entrepreneur, artist or athlete may possess extraordinary insights. But relevance must be demonstrated, not assumed. A conference of lawyers should not lower its intellectual threshold simply because a prospective speaker possesses an identifiable celebrity status.

    Nigeria desperately needs institutions capable of producing serious public thoughts. Our political class has not provided enough of it. Our universities struggle under enormous constraints. The media is increasingly dominated by immediacy. The Bar, with its intellectual resources and constitutional role, ought to be filling some of this vacuum. When the Bar lowers its intellectual expectations, our country loses one more place where difficult questions might have been asked without fear. The organisers of NBA conferences should in future rethink what a keynote address is supposed to accomplish. The objective should not be to generate photographs, headlines or fleeting social-media excitement. A keynote should provoke thought worthy of the institution hosting it, challenge the profession to interrogate its assumptions, confront the defining questions of its time and leave its audience with ideas that endure beyond the conference hall. There is no suggestion here that every keynote speaker must be an Issa Shivji. That would be absurd.

    What is required is something much simpler: intellectual seriousness.

    The new President of the NBA should therefore look beyond the predictable culture of performative visibility, in which celebrity, social-media following and public recognition have become increasingly attractive substitutes for intellectual consequence. The Association should resist the temptation to measure relevance by the size of a person’s audience and instead recover a more demanding conception of intellectual authority that’s grounded in ideas, scholarship, originality and the capacity to unsettle received wisdom. The NBA needs fewer celebrities at its podiums and more minds capable of making the profession think. Why not invite Issa Shivji to speak to Nigerian lawyers about law, power, political economy and the enduring struggle over the meaning of justice? Why not bring Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, to Nigeria to speak about climate change, climate justice and the grotesque inequalities embedded in the global response to the climate emergency? Mottley is not another head of government who happens to speak eloquently about climate change; through the Bridgetown Initiative, she has placed the relationship between climate change, global finance, debt and development at the centre of the international conversation. And if the NBA chooses to extend that conversation to Africa and the oceans that connect us, it can invite Wavel Ramkalawan, the former President of Seychelles, whose country embodies the existential threats posed by rising seas to small island states. Seychelles has itself described climate change as an existential threat, while Ramkalawan has argued that the ocean must be treated as a central pillar of the climate agenda rather than an afterthought.

    These are the sorts of people a keynote committee should be thinking about. Not because they are celebrities whose presence would fill a conference hall, but precisely because they would force Nigerian lawyers to think beyond the narrow confines of legal practice. What does our law owe communities in Igbokoda and Okitipupa in Ondo State that are facing ecological collapse, with some disappearing into the sea? What does environmental justice mean in a country where oil extraction, pollution, land degradation and the destruction of livelihoods are everyday realities? What obligations do lawyers, courts, governments and corporations have to generations that have not yet been born? These are legal, political and moral questions, and a profession that prides itself on being the guardian of justice should be willing to engage them seriously. In the Age of Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, the NBA cannot afford to be playing pussy-fussy with its intellectual life. The annual conference should not become another stage for photographs with famous people whose principal qualification is that they are famous. The keynote should be an intellectual intervention, an invitation to think more deeply about the world in which the law operates and the kind of society the profession is helping to construct. If the new President wants to leave a mark, one place to begin is by restoring intellectual seriousness to the NBA conference keynote.

    Over to you, Mr President, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN!

  • At NBA Conference, Tinubu speaks on justice reforms, investment promotion, Elumelu on poverty eradication, security

    At NBA Conference, Tinubu speaks on justice reforms, investment promotion, Elumelu on poverty eradication, security

    President Bola Tinubu has said that poverty eradication and investment promotion for wealth creation depend on justice reform.

    The president said this on Sunday in Abuja while declaring open the 63rd Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) with the theme: ‘Getting it Right: Charting the Course for Nigeria’s Nation Building.’

    According to Mr Tinubu, world-class remuneration for legal professionals would also sanitise the judiciary for a prosperous Nigeria.

    He also said that a new Nigeria was possible with his renewed hope but it would require making bold decisions that would be painful at first but beneficial in the end.

    He said that the bold steps his administration was taking to find lasting solutions to the challenges confronting the country would succeed only with the cooperation and collaboration of all, especially the private sector.

    “I am not cynical, I am factual, The critical and bold initiatives embarked upon will yield the desired results only with collaboration and cooperation of the private sector.

    “We are so blessed and we are still lacking. A change of mindset is what we need.

    “We accused our previous leaders, we complain too much about the past, it is not the solution, we must look forward, God has given us creative minds and will,” he said.

    The president said that the country could not continue to service external debt with about 90 per cent of its revenue, hence the hard decision his administration was making in that regard.

    He commended the NBA for the theme which he said was timely and implored the association to give his administration maximum support to succeed.

    “I want to learn. Remind me of what I’m doing right, and I will continue, whatever I am doing wrong, tell me, and I will change,’’ the president said.

    Poverty eradication and security

    In a keynote address, the Founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, Tony Elumelu, said eradication of poverty in the country was the ultimate solution to insecurity and extremism.

    According to Mr Elumelu, poverty anywhere is a threat to all of us everywhere, the ultimate panacea for insecurity and extremism is prosperity.

    “This is why all of us must think of legacy and play our role and part now that we can, to urgently support our young ones to become economically engaged, else we are doomed.

    “We must give them hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. Let us not underestimate the power of hope.

    “Hope is what fuels the dreams of our youth, what ignites the determination of our entrepreneurs, and what unites us in our pursuit of a better future.

    “Nations that prioritise their young go far. It is no coincidence that an American that created Harvard and Stanford, also produced Amazon, Microsoft and Google. We need the same focus on our young, their futures and ambitions,’’ Mr Elumelu said.

    He said it was important for the country to invest in security because banditry, kidnapping, oil theft and pipeline vandalisation created uncertainties, fears, deprivation, poverty, and untold hardship.

    “Let us invest in brand Nigeria. We know the frustrations, we know that joblessness of our youth is a betrayal of a generation; and the plundering of our commonwealth is inhumane and cruel, but we have no other motherland than Nigeria,’’ he said.

    He also noted the need to invest in women saying that women were the threads that hold families and societies together.

    “Let us invest in our women. When a woman succeeds, families and communities are lifted out of poverty. It is no surprise that in my businesses, women lead and flourish.

    “Let us invest in our power sector. Let us create regulatory structures that reward success, that deliver to our people, our schools, our hospitals and our industries, the sustainable, robust power supply that our country so urgently needs.

    “Is it not ironic that a country with abundant gas resources cannot optimally operate its power plants due to lack of gas?’

    “We have idle gas fields and there is so much private capital to make the needed investments for gas production. Yet, we cannot produce gas to power our economy and 21st-century industrialisation,’’ he said.

    The entrepreneur implored all Nigerians to approach the task of nation-building with unwavering determination, guided by the principles of unity, inclusivity, and progress.

    “Let our pursuit of nation-building be characterised by unwavering determination, empathy, and the commitment to create a legacy of progress, unity, and hope for generations to come.

    AGF speaks

    For his part, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), tasked the legal practitioners with upholding the rule of law and promoting human rights.

    He pledged that under him, the Ministry of Justice would work hard to promote people-centred justice and that they would be guided by relevant provisions of the Constitution.

    The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the 63rd AGC of the NBA, according to its president, Mr Yakubu Maikyau, a SAN, is the largest gathering of professionals anywhere in the world with over 16,000 registered conferees.

    NAN also reports that the conference was also attended by the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiami, and the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike.

    Others are the Minister of Sports, John Enoh; former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, past NBA presidents and other top government officials.

    NAN