USA Africa Dialogue Series - When the Bar Invites the Street Into the Room

When the Bar Invites the Street Into the Room

The controversy over VeryDarkMan at the NBA’s 2026 Annual General Conference is less about one panelist than about who gets recognised as an authority in a changing society.

I did not attend the Nigerian Bar Association’s 2026 Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt. My reflections therefore come not from being in the room, but from following the controversy that emerged around the participation of Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), in one of the conference sessions. As a lawyer, I find the controversy more interesting than the immediate arguments for or against his invitation. Beneath the personalities is a question that deserves much wider consideration: who gets to speak with authority in contemporary Nigeria, and what should professional institutions do when important knowledge comes from outside their traditional boundaries?

The NBA’s Annual General Conference, held in Port Harcourt from 21 to 28 August 2026 under the theme “Beyond Limits ’26,” is not an ordinary public event. It is the flagship gathering of Nigeria’s legal profession. Its platforms carry institutional significance because the Association represents a profession whose authority depends substantially on training, ethics, evidence, reasoned argument and respect for law. That makes the decision to place any individual on a major conference panel legitimate grounds for scrutiny. On 25 August, VDM participated in a plenary session titled “Known Gunmen or Unknown Gunmen,” focused on insecurity and the experiences of victims. On 27 August, Femi Falana, SAN, publicly questioned the appropriateness of his participation, arguing that the NBA's conference should maintain standards of professional and intellectual relevance. The criticism deserves to be taken seriously precisely because professional institutions cannot be indifferent to the meaning conveyed by their platforms.

Yet I am not persuaded that the strongest response is to ask simply whether VDM is qualified to speak at an NBA conference because he is not a lawyer. That would be too narrow an understanding of expertise. Insecurity is not experienced only by lawyers, academics, security professionals or government officials. Communities affected by violence possess knowledge of how insecurity actually operates; victims understand institutional failures in ways that policy documents may not capture; journalists and civil-society actors sometimes uncover information that formal institutions have failed to surface. A social-media activist may also acquire a form of experiential and investigative knowledge through sustained engagement with citizens and cases that would otherwise receive little institutional attention. None of this makes such a person an expert on everything. It does, however, mean that professional credentials should not become a proxy for a monopoly on knowledge.

The more important issue, in my view, is what happens to unconventional knowledge when it enters a professional institution. The answer should not be automatic acceptance, but neither should it be automatic exclusion. It should be scrutiny. A lawyer understands this instinctively. Our professional discipline is built around testing assertions, examining evidence, challenging credibility, distinguishing allegation from fact and allowing competing explanations to be interrogated. Those principles should apply regardless of whether the speaker is a Senior Advocate, a government official, an academic or a controversial social-media personality.

This became particularly important in the aftermath of VDM's appearance. During the session, he reportedly made serious allegations concerning the conduct of some police officers at checkpoints and their alleged role in passing information about wealthy travellers to kidnappers. The allegation is sufficiently serious that it cannot be treated as merely another social-media claim. The Nigeria Police Force subsequently challenged VDM to provide evidence. On 27 August, VDM said he had released what he described as his first evidence in response. That sequence illustrates the principle that should govern the entire debate: an unconventional voice should be heard, but an unconventional claim must still carry the burden of evidence. If the evidence supports the allegation, it should be investigated. If it does not, that should be established. Neither institutional status nor social-media popularity should determine the outcome.

There is, however, a deeper phenomenon behind the controversy. VDM represents a form of public authority that Nigerian institutions can no longer afford to ignore. His influence does not come primarily from a professional licence, academic appointment or government office. It comes from reach, visibility, mobilisation and the perception among many citizens that he is willing to take up issues that formal institutions sometimes overlook. Social media has therefore created new forms of parallel public authority. These actors do not necessarily possess legal authority, but they can shape public narratives, expose alleged wrongdoing, mobilise citizens and place pressure on formal institutions to respond.

This development should concern professional institutions—not because it is inherently bad, but because it reveals something about institutional legitimacy. Where formal systems are trusted, accessible and responsive, citizens have less incentive to look elsewhere for accountability. Where institutions appear distant, slow or unresponsive, alternative centres of authority inevitably emerge. The rise of the social-media activist is therefore not merely a media phenomenon. It is also a governance phenomenon.

This is why I think the NBA controversy should ultimately be judged less by whether VDM was invited and more by why he was invited and what the institution expected the engagement to achieve. If the rationale was to bring into the conversation a voice with access to citizens and communities that professional institutions may not ordinarily hear, the invitation is defensible. If the rationale was principally that a controversial personality would generate attention and social-media traffic, then professional standards have a legitimate reason for concern. A professional conference should not confuse visibility with value.

At the same time, the legal profession should resist the temptation to retreat into professional exceptionalism. The fact that someone is not a lawyer does not mean that his experience is irrelevant to the law. Indeed, much of what lawyers ultimately deal with crime, insecurity, poverty, discrimination, corruption, displacement and institutional failure—is experienced first by citizens who possess no professional credentials. The profession becomes weaker, not stronger, when it hears only voices that already speak its institutional language.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between professional expertise and lived experience. It is to bring them into the same conversation while maintaining differentiated standards of evidence. The lawyer should bring legal analysis; the security professional, operational knowledge; the community representative, lived experience; the journalist, investigative scrutiny; and the activist, perhaps, a different window into public sentiment and institutional failure. Their contributions need not be treated as equivalent. They need only be subjected to a common discipline of questioning.

That, ultimately, is the lesson I take from the VDM controversy as a lawyer watching from outside the conference hall. Professional institutions must remain demanding without becoming closed, and open without becoming indiscriminate. They should be confident enough to hear uncomfortable voices, rigorous enough to challenge them, and principled enough to subject official voices to exactly the same scrutiny.

The question, therefore, is not whether VeryDarkMan belongs in the room. The more important question is whether the room is strong enough to accommodate voices from outside its traditional boundaries without lowering the standards that give the room its authority in the first place.

Invite the unconventional voice. Test the unconventional claim. Follow the evidence. Protect the integrity of the institution.

That is how the Bar can go beyond its limits without losing its standards.

John Onyeukwu, Esq.,

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va6de2U7oQhkR1uYDA1S

John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/

 http://about.me/onyeukwu
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn
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