By Emmanuel Umohinyang Esq
The controversy surrounding the invitation of VeryDarkMan (VDM) to the Nigerian Bar Association’s 2026 Annual General Conference should not be reduced to the rather superficial question of whether a non-lawyer ought to be permitted to speak at a gathering of lawyers. That formulation is too narrow. The Nigerian Bar Association is not an association whose intellectual life is confined to lawyers speaking to lawyers about black-letter law. Its Annual General Conference can accommodate discussions on governance, security, human rights, politics, technology, economics, public policy, and other matters that bear upon the legal profession and the administration of justice. Non-lawyers may therefore have legitimate and valuable contributions to make.
However, the NBA’s Annual General Conference is not simply another public gathering. It is the Association’s principal annual forum for continuing professional development, for intellectual engagement with legal and justice-sector issues, and for the consideration of matters affecting the profession and the administration of justice. It also enables interaction with relevant public and private stakeholders and advances the NBA’s wider professional and public-interest objectives. Its programme may therefore properly extend beyond conventional legal education. But the wider the range of voices admitted to the platform, the greater the need for a coherent principle governing their selection. Recall the biblical parable of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22): the king welcomed guests freely, yet still expelled the guest who was improperly dressed, on account of the decorum owed to the occasion. Openness of invitation and fitness of conduct are distinct standards, and an institution may hold both at once.
This distinction becomes particularly clear when VDM’s appearance is considered alongside the earlier controversy surrounding Portable, a street dancer. The fact that neither men was invited to teach law does not, without more, justify either invitation. Portable tested the NBA’s judgment about entertainment; VDM tested its judgment about substantive discourse. The first question asks what sort of entertainment a professional institution may legitimately sponsor or accommodate. The second asks what kind of messenger may legitimately be entrusted with a place in the intellectual programme of the profession. Both, however, return to the same underlying question. What standard does the NBA apply when it decides who, or what, should appear on its platform?
VDM himself reportedly acknowledged that he was not present to teach law but to share his experience. Notwithstanding that disclaimer, he went further, making assertions, drawing conclusions, and offering inferences for which he supplied no supporting evidence and no factual premises.
This is where the institutional character of the NBA becomes important. If the Association invites an unconventional speaker to challenge established narratives, that can be intellectually valuable. But it should not, in the process, abandon the standards of critical inquiry that distinguish a professional conference from a popular rally or a social-media exchange.
The substance of what VDM said is not the only question his invitation raises. His appearance drew comment as well, including his ear and nose piercings, and that criticism deserves to be addressed on its own terms. It would be intellectually indefensible to suggest that body piercings make a person unintelligent, dishonest, or incapable of making a valuable contribution, but such an odious outlook should not become an acceptable norm at a conference of this kind. The point can be illustrated by a simple analogy. If one is offered a chilled drink in a dirty cup, the fact that the drink may be refreshing does not necessarily compel one to take it. Nor does the condition of the cup establish-evidence that the drink is contaminated. The cup and the drink are separate questions. One may acknowledge the quality of the drink while reasonably questioning the condition of the vessel in which it is served. A chilled drink may be perfectly good, but the host cannot entirely escape responsibility for the cup in which it is served. And where the host is the Nigerian Bar Association, the question is not merely whether the drink is drinkable. It is whether the vessel, the presentation and the occasion are consistent with the dignity and decency of the house.
The difficulty is that a professional institution does not communicate only through the substantive content of its conferences. It also communicates through the standards of decorum it sets, the people it places on its platform, and the manner in which those people are presented. For an institution such as the Nigerian Bar Association, decorum is not merely a matter of personal taste; it forms part of the Association’s dignity, identity, and professional image. Professional freedom does not remove the responsibility to observe decorum within a professional setting. Invitations are, in that sense, institutional statements. A keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, or entertainer may occupy different roles, but each reflects a degree of institutional endorsement. The NBA may broaden its platform and welcome diverse voices, but openness should not become an abandonment of decorum. The message matters, but so does the manner in which the institution presents the messenger. A Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Dr. Monday Onyekachi Ubani, observed, popularity and social-media visibility should not be allowed to take precedence over “intellectual pedigree, professional accomplishment and scholarship.” His further caution that “entertainment has its place, but it must never replace intellectual substance” goes to the heart of the controversy.
VDM’s subsequent comments make his selection even more difficult to justify. His concerns about unemployment, underemployment, and weaknesses within the profession may deserve attention, but his dismissal of law as no longer a noble profession went beyond constructive criticism. It sufficiently amounted to a broad denigration of the profession. The NBA should have anticipated this risk when it selected him, and by inviting him, it gave his voice institutional visibility. This, in itself, further reinforces the argument that VDM was an inappropriate choice of speaker. The NBA should have considered whether the particular person chosen possessed the restraint, respect, decency and institutional sensitivity that the platform required. The fault, therefore, lies not with the messenger ; it lies squarely with the institution that chose him.
This same question of platform coherence is illustrated, in a different register, by the earlier controversy surrounding Portable’s appearance at the 2023 “Unbarred” event. That episode raised a legitimate institutional question about the kind of entertainment appropriate to the NBA’s flagship professional gathering. Whether a performer associated with a deliberately provocative public persona was an appropriate entertainment choice for an event carrying the name, prestige, and institutional identity of the NBA. In that sense, the controversy was fundamentally one of decorum and institutional branding. It is significant because it was not an accidental encounter between Portable and lawyers but a programmed appearance at an NBA-associated event, and responsibility for that choice cannot be displaced entirely onto the performer, the audience, or the conference sponsor. Afam Osigwe, SAN, who was then Chairman of the 2023 NBA Conference Planning Committee, reportedly defended the arrangement and accepted responsibility for the conference’s programming. His role is therefore relevant to the institutional judgment under examination, not because he authored Portable’s conduct, but because he was the person responsible for determining what the NBA platform would accommodate. An institution may legitimately entertain its members, but in choosing its entertainment, it also chooses, at least to some extent, what it is prepared to associate with its public image. Yesterday it was Portable; today it is VDM; tomorrow, who will it be?
A related but distinct dimension of platform coherence is illustrated by the choice of the AGC’s keynote speaker rather than its entertainment or its panelists. The choice of George Weah as keynote speaker raises a serious question of institutional consistency for the Nigerian Bar Association under its President, Afam Osigwe, SAN. The NBA presented judicial independence, constitutional democracy, accountability, and the rule of law as central values of its conference. Osigwe reportedly told delegates that “democracy does not survive on strong men, but on strong institutions.” That statement sits uneasily with the choice of a former president whose administration faced serious concerns over judicial independence, the protection of human rights, and the failure to implement decisions of the ECOWAS Court concerning judicial and property rights. The contradiction weakens the moral and institutional credibility of the NBA’s choice, and on this point, I must agree with the objection raised by the learned silk, Femi Falana, SAN, against the invitation of George Weah. Falana’s criticism was directed at Weah’s record as President of Liberia, and in particular that aspects of his administration’s relationship with the judiciary and its alleged failure to comply with decisions of the ECOWAS Court. These are not peripheral matters when the speaker is invited to address lawyers on democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial independence; they go directly to the credibility of the messenger in relation to the message.
Taken together, the VDM, Portable, and Weah episodes are not three unrelated controversies but three instances of the same institutional question, posed at different points on the programme. The existence of different categories of participation does not establish that one person is inherently worthy and another unworthy; it establishes that different kinds of participation require different forms of justification. That, ultimately, is the question the NBA ought to be able to answer.
If the Association wishes to expand the AGC beyond conventional legal discourse, there is nothing inherently wrong with that ambition. Indeed, there is considerable merit in bringing lawyers into conversation with politicians, judges, economists, technologists, security professionals, academics, activists, journalists, and others whose experience illuminates the operation of law in society. But openness should not become indiscriminate inclusiveness. There must remain a discernible relationship between the person, the subject, the contribution, and the institutional purpose of the conference. That relationship can be tested with a few simple questions to wit:- Who is the person? What does this person know, or what has been this person uniquely experienced? What exactly was the person invited to contribute? Why was that contribution relevant to the AGC? And was the manner of the person’s presentation consistent with the dignity of the institution? These are not questions of elitism. They are questions of institutional accountability.
Nor should criticism of a particular speaker’s selection be read as a demand that the NBA become intellectually closed or socially conservative. A profession confident in its own intellectual foundations should not have any difficulty hearing voices from outside its traditional boundaries; sometimes the uncomfortable voice is precisely the one that ought to be heard. But hearing a voice and endorsing its authority are different things. The NBA can invite anyone to speak without endorsing every assertion that speaker makes. It can recognise the value of lived experience without elevating that experience into technical expertise. It can tolerate unconventional personal appearance without abandoning professional decorum. It can embrace popular culture without allowing celebrity to become the measure of institutional relevance. The NBA must not allow substance to be displaced by a populist agenda, and it should be equally alert to the risk of granting its future platforms to speakers who bring no credible value to the profession, regardless of their popularity.
The difficulty arises only when these distinctions become blurred.
The real concern, then, is not that the NBA invited a non-lawyer, nor that the speaker was controversial. The concern is whether the Association has a sufficiently coherent philosophy of selection to explain why a particular person belongs on its platform, and what institutional significance attaches to that invitation. The message matters, but so does the messenger, and where the NBA itself chooses the messenger, so does the platform. The NBA, as an institution, should be capable of saying all three things at once: we will hear the message; we will scrutinise the messenger; and we will remain conscious of the dignity of the platform on which both appear. The objective is not to serve only a perfectly polished cup, indifferent to what it contains, nor is it to pretend that the condition of the vessel does not matter. It is to ensure that, in opening its doors to new voices, the NBA does not lose sight of what the house represents: the rule of law and justice; professional excellence and decorum; institutional independence, credibility and reputation; integrity and ethical responsibility.As these form part of the shortcoming of the former President,Mazi Afam Osigwe SAN leadership of the Bar , it should not escape the reform eyes of the Badejo’s leadership afterall we all desired an NBA that represent the moral aspirations of the Nigerian people
The house can and should change with the times. But changing the furniture is not the same thing as demolishing the very dear and sacred foundations of our cherished Bar.
Umohinyang writes from Westminster, London.
