By Israel Olawunmi Esq
An institution begins to decay long before it collapses. The first sign is often its inability to distinguish between what attracts attention and what deserves authority.
There was a time when the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) withdrew its invitation to Nasir El-Rufai to speak at its Annual General Conference. The decision followed objections concerning his record in Kaduna State, including allegations relating to human rights, intolerance of criticism and disregard for the rule of law.
One may agree or disagree with the above decision. It nevertheless affirmed an important principle: an institutional platform is never merely a stage. It is also a statement of judgement. A conference invitation is not invariably an endorsement. It nevertheless carries institutional meaning, particularly where the invitee is presented as a source of authority rather than as the subject of rigorous interrogation. Institutions sometimes speak not only through their communiqués but also through the company they keep and the standards they appear willing to relax.
It is therefore proper to ask what criteria informed the NBA’s decision to invite Mr Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan or VDM, to address its 2026 Annual General Conference on insecurity. The question need not be asked with contempt, or should it be answered with abuse? It is a legitimate inquiry into institutional judgement.
The answer cannot simply be that he is famous, outspoken, or knowledgeable about societal grievances. Fame is neither a qualification nor a substitute for moral authority. Virality is not a social impact. An audience establishes reach, but it does not, without more, establish expertise or judgement.
Mr Otse’s public record includes arrests and criminal proceedings arising from allegations of cyberstalking and online harassment. In March 2025, an Abuja magistrate issued a bench warrant after he failed to appear pursuant to an earlier summons in criminal defamation proceedings. In October 2024, a Lagos High Court directed him to remove specified publications concerning Femi Falana, SAN, and Folarin Falana, an order he subsequently sought leave to appeal.
Furthermore, in November 2025, Mr Otse and comedian Freedom Atsepoyi (Mr Jollof) exchanged blows aboard an aircraft, an incident that prompted their removal from the flight and public condemnation by aviation authorities. In May 2026, a court reportedly awarded substantial damages against him in a defamation action brought by Mr Jollof’s wife. Also, his methods and use of his platform have attracted sustained public criticism.
Objectively, none of these matters should be exaggerated. An arrest is not a conviction, and an allegation is not a judicial finding. A citizen does not forfeit his right to speak because he has been sued, charged, or criticised. However, institutional judgement requires more than the avoidance of outright disqualification. It requires consideration of temperament, record, relevance and the message conveyed by selection.
The concern is not whether Mr Otse is entitled to speak. He plainly is. The concern is whether the NBA, of all institutions, exercised sufficient discernment in choosing him as a conference voice on insecurity. Freedom of expression gives a person the right to enter the public square. It does not impose upon every institution a duty to provide him with a lectern.
To describe Mr Otse simply as a social justice crusader also misses the deeper point. He is not compelling proof that our institutions are working. He is, in significant part, a product of the vacuum created by their failure.
Chinua Achebe understood this pathology in ‘A Man of the People’. In the novel, Chief Nanga does not rise in spite of institutional decay. He rises through it. His power depends upon a society in which public memory has weakened, principle has lost its price, and performance has replaced character. He converts familiarity into legitimacy and applause into absolution.
Achebe’s warning extends beyond the corrupt politician. Once a society loses confidence in its institutions, it begins to search for personalities to perform the work of systems. The strongman replaces the state. The benefactor replaces social policy. The influencer replaces due process. Citizens cease to ask whether power is lawful and begin to ask only whether it produces an immediate result.
Wole Soyinka offers a related warning in ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’. Jero’s authority rests less upon substance than upon theatre. He understands the desires and frustrations of his audience and converts them into personal influence. The lesson is not merely about religious hypocrisy. It concerns every society in which performance acquires the appearance of legitimacy because the public is desperate to believe someone is finally listening.
Mr Otse’s emergence during the Jenny’s Glow controversy illustrates the point. After a customer complained about certain skincare products and became entangled in a confrontation with the business, Mr Otse amplified the allegations and questioned the regulatory status of the products. His intervention attracted public and regulatory attention. Yet the deeper lesson is not necessarily one of personal heroism. It concerns the dangerous wide distance between citizens and the institutions established for their protection. Where regulatory systems are visible, accessible, and responsive, no citizen should need an online enforcer before a complaint receives attention.
The resulting influencer becomes, in the public imagination, investigator, prosecutor, regulator, judge, and enforcement officer. Yet he does this without the discipline, safeguards, or accountability required of any of them. The influencer carries none of the corresponding duties: no settled rules of evidence, no obligation of impartiality, no institutional right of appeal, and no dependable remedy when reputations are wrongly destroyed. This reveals the dangerous breadth of the institutional vacuum.
Mr Otse’s supporters argue that Nigerians take their grievances to him because he obtains results more quickly than lawyers, courts, or law-enforcement agencies. Even if one accepts this premise, it is an indictment of the justice system, not a complete answer to questions concerning the invitation. A crowd may compel a refund; public embarrassment can produce an apology; fear of reputational damage may force a settlement. None of these necessarily amounts to justice. Justice is not merely the production of a desired result. It is a result reached through a process which hears both sides, tests evidence, restrains prejudice, and remains answerable to law. A mob may occasionally punish the guilty. What makes it a mob is its inability to protect the innocent.
Personal exposure to insecurity is not equivalent to expertise in security policy. Mr Otse’s encounters with communities affected by violence may be sincere, moving, and relevant. Such experience can enrich a discussion, but it cannot supplant demonstrated competence in policing, intelligence, or conflict resolution. A witness may describe the fire with terrible accuracy. It does not follow that he understands its engineering, its causes, or how a city should prevent the next one.
The more serious defence is that Mr Otse was invited not as a security expert but as a witness to the fears and frustrations of ordinary Nigerians, and that engaging him allowed lawyers to test his claims publicly. There is some merit in this argument. Institutions should not speak only to people whose methods they approve. A controversial figure may properly be invited to recount experience or submit his claims to informed scrutiny. Yet the distinction between witness and authority must remain clear, and the prestige of the platform must be matched by the rigour of the interrogation. An institution does not answer populism merely by sitting it on a panel. It answers populism by testing its assertions, correcting its excesses, and demonstrating why disciplined process remains superior to personal power.
The NBA has previously invited non-lawyers, as it should. A lawyers’ conference need not become an echo chamber in wigs and gowns. Journalists, economists, artists, business leaders, victims, and activists can illuminate legal questions in ways lawyers cannot. The objection is not to the presence of a non-lawyer. It concerns the relationship between the speaker’s record, the subject assigned to him, and the judgement of the institution extending the invitation. The relevant question is not, “Is he a lawyer?” It is, “Why him, for this subject, before this institution?”
Some of his supporters have also made arguments that the objection to his invitation is rooted in classism. Respectfully, this is unpersuasive. Certainly, the legal profession is capable of elitism. Lawyers should not mistake accent for intelligence, polish for integrity, or formal education for wisdom. But standards are not inherently classist. Indeed, the classism argument patronises the public it claims to defend by assuming that ordinary Nigerians cannot distinguish courage from recklessness, advocacy from humiliation, or accountability from spectacle.
Mr Otse undeniably commands a substantial audience. A cross-section of Nigerians finds value in his interventions. Yet an audience is not conclusive evidence of social worth or value. Sometimes, it is evidence of collective frustration. The loudest voice in the public square is not always the voice of reform. Sometimes, it is the echo created when the courthouse has grown distant, the police station distrusted, and the regulator invisible.
Every country produces provocateurs, populists, and digital vigilantes. Functional societies are not distinguished by their absence. They are distinguished by institutions strong enough to hear public anger without surrendering their standards to it. This is why the NBA’s choice here matters. The association is more than a professional society. It is expected to defend the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and the disciplined administration of justice. When such an institution borrows relevance from a personality who flourishes partly because lawful processes are distrusted, it risks consecrating the very disorder it ought to correct.
The NBA’s choice is not the icing on an already tasteless cake. It is the frost that reveals how cold our standards have become. A profession charged with defending due process should hesitate before appearing to canonise trial by publicity. To borrow the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s celebrated essay, albeit in an entirely different context, it is obscene. It represents a troubling nadir in the Bar’s exercise of institutional judgement.
Mr Otse is not the principal defendant in this argument; our institutions are. He did not create the vacuum; he merely found the microphone inside it. When justice retreats, spectacle does not merely fill the silence; it inherits the republic. When an institution can no longer distinguish the noise outside its gates from the authority it is meant to preserve, the gravest loss is not decorum but judgement. To borrow the restrained line from a popular American rapper, Kanye West’s hit song, ‘I am so appalled’.
Israel Olawunmi is a legal practitioner. He can be reached at Olawunmiisrael10@gmail.com
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