Human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, has faulted the Nigerian Bar Association over its decision to invite social media activist Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, to speak at its annual conference.
Falana spoke on Thursday during an interview with Channels Television, following the controversy surrounding VDM’s appearance at the NBA’s 66th Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt, where he addressed issues surrounding insecurity in Nigeria.
The senior lawyer argued that speakers at professional gatherings of lawyers should possess appropriate expertise or practical experience in the subjects they are invited to discuss.
According to Falana, NBA conferences should prioritise intellectual discourse and knowledge-sharing rather than entertainment.
He said, “In those days, the NBA brought individuals who had paid their dues, who were coming to engage lawyers intellectually.
We wanted to learn from them, and so the NBA was not… none of our conferences was a side show in the past.”
Falana maintained that the choice of speakers should be determined by the theme or subject under discussion, particularly where specialised areas such as national security are concerned.
“So, if you are bringing an expert to discuss the security of the country, either from the private or public sector, such an individual must have contributed to the security architecture of the country,” he said.
He warned that using speakers without direct knowledge or experience of a specialised subject could defeat the purpose of the conference.
“But when you bring people who have nothing to do with the security of the country, there are problems. It’s like talking about media freedom, press freedom—you are going to bring practitioners in that field, whether in the academics or in the newsroom.
But to just go and bring somebody from nowhere to come and entertain you, there are problems with that,” Falana said.
His remarks came after the interviewer cited the position of some lawyers, including Professor Chidi Odinkalu, who supported VDM’s invitation on the grounds that lawyers could benefit from hearing directly from members of the public who engage with the justice system.
Falana, however, said that argument was applicable to public engagement generally and did not necessarily support inviting an individual without specialised experience to speak on a subject such as national security.
“With profound respect to my very good friend Chidi Odinkalu, he was talking in the general sense. We’re talking of this particular case,” Falana said.
He acknowledged the value of interaction between the legal profession and the public but maintained that specialised security discussions should feature individuals with firsthand knowledge of the subject.
“If we are talking about justice delivery in the country, we now want to hear from members of the public, that will have been okay.
But if you are talking about the security of the country, it does require that you bring people who are involved in maintaining the security of the country, or who are victims of abductions and the rest of them,” he said.
Falana urged the NBA to revive what he described as the intellectual character of its conferences, recalling how presentations by respected legal scholars and jurists in previous years continued to generate debates long after the events.
“In those days—in those days, the submissions of some of our lecturers, like the late Dr. Akinola Aguda when he addressed us in 1985, or the late Justice Oputa when he addressed our conference in 1987—for several days and weeks, their submissions became matters of public discourse,” he said.
“Editorial comments were written on them, lawyers debated them even after the conference, and we learned from them. And I think lawyers, as I said, we should go back to that era.”
The SAN also called for greater scrutiny of the credentials and records of political leaders invited to speak to lawyers on democracy and the rule of law.
He said, “So if you’re going to have a former head of state to address lawyers to talk about democracy or rule of law, then you must bring someone who can say, ‘When I was in power, there was not a single court order that I disobeyed, I didn’t lock up people illegally, I didn’t harass the media,’ and so on and so forth.”
The controversy surrounding VDM’s participation at the NBA conference has continued to attract reactions, particularly after he made allegations about the conduct of security personnel in connection with kidnapping and insecurity in the country.