By Fatai Abiodun Esq
Yesterday, 25th August 2026, social media was busy with the participation of social media critic, Martins Otse known as Very Dark Man, appearing as a panellist on the Day Five plenary titled “Known Gun Men.” The session focused broadly on the legal, security and institutional gaps contributing to insecurity in Nigeria at the 66th Annual General Conference (AGC) of the Nigerian Bar Association in Port Harcourt.
A number of commentators are questioning the basis on which VDM was selected as a panellist for the “Known Gun Men” session. The objection is not simply that he is a non-lawyer; it is that he is a social-media activist whose public persona is controversial and whose expertise in security is being questioned.
Some lawyers questioned whether members who pay registration fees, travel and accommodation expenses should be presented with a social-media personality at what is regarded as the Bar’s premier professional gathering.
There is a general principle that there is nothing inherently wrong with lawyers learning from non-lawyers. It’s also important to reiterate that Courts routinely rely on expert evidence and on-site assessment where eyewitnesses can give explanations, and legal practitioners certainly do not operate in isolation from society. The fact that someone is not a lawyer does not, by itself, make his contribution irrelevant as provided under the Evidence Act.
There are several established legal theories and jurisprudential approaches that support the proposition that lawyers should not rely exclusively on formal legal texts, but should also engage with lived experience, community knowledge and “street-level” realities.
Legal Realists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank challenged the idea that law can be understood entirely as a closed system of legal rules. Holmes famously argued that the life of the law is not simply logic but experience.
Under Sociological Jurisprudence, a theory that posited that law must be understood in its social context. The implication is that a lawyer cannot fully understand a legal problem without understanding the social environment in which that problem occurs.
The criticism that a non-lawyer should not speak to lawyers misses the point entirely. The NBA did not invite him to teach criminal law, constitutional law or legal ethics. VDM was invited to a plenary session on “Known Gun Men”, an issue that goes far beyond the courtroom and directly affects the lives, safety and independence of lawyers, judges and ordinary citizens. The session brought together legal practitioners and security stakeholders, making it an appropriate setting for different perspectives to confront one another.
What makes the invitation particularly significant is the opportunity for lawyers to hear from someone who says he has physically visited communities affected by violence and interacted with victims and survivors. VDM told the conference that he was not there to teach lawyers the law but to share his experiences from places affected by killings, kidnappings and other attacks.
Inviting VDM as a guest speaker does not necessarily mean that the NBA has certified him as a security expert, nor does it mean that every opinion he expressed must be accepted as fact. Sometimes, therefore, the lawyer needs to hear not merely what happened according to a police report, a newspaper story or a legal submission, but what a person who physically went to the affected community says he saw, heard and experienced.
No security officer would have the ‘gut’ to express what VDM said at that panel, and that does not make every account automatically true. It does not convert personal experience into expert evidence. And it certainly does not mean lawyers should accept every allegation without scrutiny.
The value of such an engagement may lie precisely in exposing lawyers to perspectives outside the traditional professional environment. Lawyers do not practise law in a vacuum. The law operates within society, and sometimes the “street” provides perspectives, experiences and narratives that may not find their way into textbooks, chambers or courtrooms.
Indeed, if the NBA only invited lawyers to speak to lawyers, we might unnecessarily limit the profession’s exposure to the realities of journalism, technology, politics, security, business, social media and other fields that increasingly intersect with the law.
As for the argument that there are more qualified security experts, that may well be true. But the purpose of an engagement can determine the choice of speaker. If the objective was to understand how issues of security, governance and justice are perceived from outside the conventional establishment, then VDM’s experience as a prominent public commentator may itself have been considered relevant.
I therefore would not defend the invitation on the basis that VDM is the greatest security expert in Nigeria. That would be difficult to sustain. I would defend it on the basis that lawyers can engage, interrogate and learn from unconventional voices without necessarily endorsing every claim made by those voices.
Ultimately, the real test should be what the participants took away from the engagement. If it provoked lawyers to think differently, question established narratives, understand public perception and engage more critically with issues affecting society, then the engagement has served a useful purpose.
The Nigerian Bar Association deserves commendation, rather than condemnation, for thinking outside the box by inviting VeryDarkMan to participate in a discussion with lawyers on the disturbing issue of insecurity in Nigeria.
Fatai Abiodunn, Esq
Counsel at Levite Solicitors
ICT Expert, Constitutional and Developmental Law Researcher
Writes from Abuja
fatai.abiodun200709@gmail.com
