“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” — Aristotle.

The Ass in the Lion’s Skin is Aesop’s story of a donkey who finds a lion’s skin abandoned in the forest. He wears it and begins to terrify other animals who mistake him for a lion. Delighted by the fear he inspires, the ass grows bold and starts roaming everywhere with counterfeit majesty. But one day, unable to contain himself, he brays. The sound betrays him instantly. The animals discover that beneath the lion’s appearance stood only a donkey. Soon, he becomes food for the real majesties of the forest.

The moral is timeless: appearances and shortcuts cannot substitute for substance.

At the top of this page, Aristotle urges society to honour teachers, but he attaches a condition to that honour: they must “educate well.” In that single adverb — “well” — lies the entire question of quality. If you teach, teach well. But how does one teach well after escaping the rigours that produce good teachers?

Education minister, Tunji Alausa, some days ago announced that candidates seeking admission into Colleges of Education would no longer be required to sit the UTME. Under the new policy, applicants need only four SSCE credits; no competitive entrance examination. The only other requirement is registration with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). The decision marks a sharp departure from the previous system in which all tertiary institution candidates sat the UTME.

I was reading Luther Sheeleigh Cressman’s ‘The Teacher: An Old Tradition and a New Obligation’, published in November 1930, and came across a striking description of the teacher in antiquity. The teacher, he wrote, was “the one who led the boy and in so doing led him to know what life expected of him.” He was the guide who passed down to the young the values of society and helped them make sense of the world around them.

Now what makes a teacher?

Not all who wear the masquerade’s mask are ancestors. The mask alone does not make the spirit; authenticity matters. A teacher who lacks knowledge of what he teaches, who teaches nonsense, is no teacher at all. Nigeria’s education policy has long produced such teachers. Now, it has embarked on a more ambitious journey: to manufacture the appearance of access while quietly weakening the substance of standards.

I spoke with old and young friends teaching in universities and colleges of education. They all agree that teacher education is the bedrock of a nation’s overall development. “A nation cannot rise above the quality of its teachers,” one of them, an old schoolmate, lamented. He was right.

A nation may celebrate rising admission figures and boast that barriers have been removed, but if the intellectual gatekeeping that guarantees quality is dismantled, the system eventually betrays itself, just as the donkey’s bray exposed him. 

Minimum JAMB admission scores are now 150 for universities, 100 for polytechnics and effectively zero for colleges of education. Some private universities are even pushing for 80. Their argument is that they would patch up the poverty of the intakes later. But what kind of system does that and still expects to stand?

The Yoruba have a proverb: Iyawo bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀, ọmọ bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀ ni í bí fún ni — the wife you marry as “manage” will produce “manage” children. A marriage consummated in patchwork will produce patchwork offspring. Computer scientists call it “garbage in, garbage out.”

The irony is painful. The teacher stands at the foundation of national progress and development. Every professional who preens in personal or collective success first passed through the hands of a teacher. To dilute the entry threshold into teacher education, therefore, is to tamper with the roots while hoping the branches will flourish.

What, if I may ask, are the ultimate goals of this policy? To produce more teachers without substance? The irony is painful: the Tinubu government’s mantra is ‘Renewed Hope.’ But what hope lies in a policy whose disaster is already predictable? Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, wrote in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: “When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.”

But our husbands in power insist that these measures are necessary to save the system from collapse. The colleges, they say, must have students. They must destroy the system in other to save it. 

The whole scenario resembles a Yoruba tale explaining the monkey’s sunken eyes. Dissatisfied with the arrangement of her child’s eyes, monkey’s mother tried to adjust them. In the process, she pushed them too far inward into their sockets, and the deformity became permanent.

That is often what we do with public policy here: in the name of reform, we destroy the very thing we claim to improve. It is the danger of misguided correction — an attempt to fix a problem that ends up worsening it irretrievably.

By abolishing the UTME requirement for colleges that train teachers, and by lowering entry standards into education faculties in the universities, the government has effectively weakened the gate into the profession responsible for producing every other profession including the ‘golden’ ones. 

There is another Aesop fable that speaks directly to this logic. It is the story of the farmer whose hen laid golden eggs.

Impatient with the slow but steady reward, the farmer concluded that if one golden egg came each day, then a treasure must surely be hidden inside the bird itself. In greed and foolish haste, he killed the hen, only to discover that it was no different from every other hen. In trying to get more, he destroyed the very source of his wealth.

That is the tragedy of teacher education in Nigeria. In the desperation to fill classrooms, the country is destroying the very standards needed to produce competent teachers that will produce tomorrow’s wealth.

Removing the entry gate to teacher training schools sends a troubling message: that teaching no longer requires rigorous intellectual preparation. Instead of attracting bright and committed young people into education, the government has confirmed an old social prejudice — that Colleges of Education are refuges for academic rejects. Rather than pull the system back from free fall, government may have pushed it further toward the cliff’s edge.

The cliff is a hair’s breadth from disaster. A nation that weakens the process of producing teachers should not be surprised when ignorance multiplies in its classrooms and mediocrity parades itself as national leadership. Take a look at the quality of some of the persons in charge of your country. Who were their teachers? You would want to know. 

A very senior professor heard the minister, and, with a very heavy heart, fired a message to me: “You have the language… Please can you address this new policy (announced by the Minister of Education) of no entrance exam to study at the College of Education? Already, the quality of output is incredibly poor as only those who could not make the grades are being admitted to Education. Yet, these are the people that will be teaching in our schools. Please, what is wrong with us?

“As vice chancellor, in my fourth year, I insisted that only those who applied for programmes in Education would be admitted to the university’s Faculty of Education and not those who failed to meet the grades in other courses. We cannot afford to afflict our children with people who only found themselves in Education because they could not make the grades elsewhere. It is worse now; they do not have to write any exam again to enter.”

Leading me by the hand, the professor showed me statistics from the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). Between 2015 and 2019, JAMB statistics reveal the depth of the crisis confronting Nigeria’s Colleges of Education. In 2015, the institutions had a carrying capacity of 215,397 students, yet only 18,722 candidates applied, representing just 8.69 percent of available spaces. Admissions stood at 74,555, which was only 34.61 percent of approved quota.

The pattern continued in 2016. Although the carrying capacity rose to 248,446, applications dropped to 18,365, amounting to only 7.39 percent of quota. Admissions also declined proportionately to 71,554, representing 28.80 percent of available spaces.

In 2017, the carrying capacity expanded dramatically to 365,392. However, applications increased only marginally to 35,905, or 9.83 percent of quota, while admissions stood at 74,165, representing just 20.29 percent utilisation of capacity.

The situation worsened in 2018. Out of a carrying capacity of 390,685, only 24,525 candidates applied, amounting to a mere 6.28 percent. Admissions dropped further to 59,366, representing only 15.19 percent of quota.

By 2019, the carrying capacity had climbed to 403,225, yet applications remained critically low at 34,138, or 8.47 percent of approved spaces. Admissions rose slightly to 69,610, but this still accounted for only 17.26 percent of total capacity. Between 2019 and now, the figures have remained embarrassingly tragic. 

What we have above exposes a stark reality: Nigeria’s Colleges of Education are overwhelmingly under-subscribed. Who, with both eyes open, would invest money, years and a future in schools whose certificates command so little worth? At no point within the five-year period did applications reach even 10 percent of approved quota, while admissions never exceeded 35 percent of carrying capacity.

My professor engaged me. He pointed to statistics on university undergraduates studying Education. The figures suggested that many admitted candidates were not originally interested in the discipline but were redirected into it simply because spaces existed there.

We spoke and agonised over the situation.

But what can we do? We may have wisdom, but we do not have power (àwa l’ó l’ogbón, a ò l’ágbára). Fuji musician, Ayinde Barrister, sang that more than forty years ago.

My professor and I agree that those who want to read teacher education should actually have the highest scores in UTME with other loose ends tightened. But who would want to go through all the trouble and graduate into joblessness and poverty? 

There is a reason why some other courses are very competitive. We all know the reason: some assurance of good life after the rigours of school life. Teaching on the other hand is burdened by low prestige, by poor remuneration and absence of social respect. How many of today’s teachers teach out of choice? A society that recruits reluctant minds into teaching should not expect inspired learning in its schools. Reluctant teachers will teach to fail. 

Many candidates entering Colleges of Education today do so not out of passion but out of disappointment. They are often students who could not secure admission into more competitive programmes. Now, dismantling the little barrier of selection into the colleges won’t make the schools attractive to candidates of value. 

The teacher is the quiet manufacturer of civilisation. A nation desperate for greatness cannot, therefore, afford to lower the gate into the teaching profession. If it does, as we do, the consequence is predictable: Badly trained teachers turn out weak in the classroom; weak teachers inevitably produce weak pupils, and weak pupils eventually become weak professionals, and weak leaders who produce weak institutions. The crisis multiplies across spheres, sectors and, even generations.

This is why the issue goes beyond education policy. It is about national survival.

In Aesop’s story, the farmer believed he was solving a problem. He thought he was accelerating prosperity. Instead, he destroyed the source of it. Nigeria is making the same mistake in its approach to teacher education with its choice of convenient quantity over quality. 

An old teacher told me that “the temptation of governments everywhere is to pursue numbers: more admissions, more enrolment, more institutions, more certificates.” But, he said, education is not a factory for producing paper qualifications. It is the cultivation of minds. And cultivation requires standards.

So, what do we do? What Nigeria needs is not the dilution of teacher training but the elevation of the teaching profession itself. Bright students will not aspire to become teachers unless the profession is respected, properly rewarded and intellectually competitive. No self-respecting person will rush to go to gateless Colleges of Education unless they cease being waiting rooms for rejected university candidates.

What the government decided, and which the minister announced, was pure, painful irony: we complain daily about collapsing standards in our schools and we thought weakening the process of producing teachers is the solution. It is like diagnosing a sick person and poisoning their meal. 

Eyo Ita was Leader of Government Business, Eastern Region of Nigeria. Nnamdi Azikiwe took over from him as premier in 1954. In 1948, Ita wrote about what he called “the vanishing race” of teachers and “the paradox of the undervaluation of the teacher.” Few people, he said, regarded the teacher as a significant part of “the wealth of the nation” in the same way they valued minerals and cattle, capital and tools of production, and other “raw” materials of culture. Yet, he argued, the teacher is “the soul of the people, the conscience of the race, the guardian of the spirit, and the shaper of destiny.” 

Ita added that the teacher’s “shrine is so high and so far removed from the realistic world of flesh and blood, of yam and corn and clothes and shelter, that people usually forget about the teacher himself, except for brief moments.

“If the Nigerian teacher would sharpen his skill and strengthen his economic power; his profession would become more respectable and enviable; his economic power and social position would prevent him from being treated as a mere sport or worthless tool of politicians.” He warned that failure to integrate the teacher into the flux of life had “deprived the earth of its salt.”

Ita wrote those words 78 years ago. Twelve years later, Nigeria gained independence. Sixty-six years after independence, it is tragic that all the country can think of is to improve the teacher’s condition by debasing their work and diminishing them.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Max Amuchie

There are moments when an idea moves beyond commentary and begins entering systems.

The week that just ended was one of those moments.

Within the span of days, The Insecurity Triad experienced three separate but interconnected breakthroughs.

First came the Brussels intervention, last Sunday via an Op-ed piece in BusinessDay by hugely respected Collins Nweke, where the framework was interpreted within a European geopolitical context as an explanatory model for Sahel instability and its implications for Europe’s own strategic future.

Second came its consolidation into the global scholarly archive through repositories including Academia.edu, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SSRN, OSF, and SocArXiv — six distinct platforms representing the full architecture of contemporary open-access scholarship.

Then came a third development whose symbolism may ultimately prove just as significant: my integration into the ResearchGate ecosystem.

At first glance, this may appear procedural. Another profile. Another platform. Another account.

But within the architecture of global scholarship, ResearchGate represents something much larger than social networking.

It is one of the world’s largest academic visibility platforms — a digital meeting ground where researchers, scholars, institutions, laboratories, journals, policy specialists, and interdisciplinary thinkers interact within a continuously evolving scholarly network.

To understand why this matters, one must first understand what ResearchGate actually represents in contemporary academic life.

What ResearchGate Really Is

Founded in 2008 by physicians Ijad Madisch and Sören Hofmayer alongside computer scientist Horst Fischbach, ResearchGate emerged as part of a broader transformation in global scholarship: the migration of academic visibility from closed institutional corridors into digital knowledge ecosystems.

Traditionally, scholarly recognition depended heavily on university affiliation, conference access, institutional journals, and physical academic networks.

ResearchGate altered part of that equation.

With over 25 million researchers from 193 countries, it created a platform where research outputs, citations, working papers, datasets, methodological discussions, and scholarly engagement could circulate beyond the limits of geography and institutional hierarchy.

Today, researchers from universities, think-tanks, laboratories, policy institutes, and independent research environments use the platform to upload publications, track citations, share datasets, engage with disciplinary debates, connect with other scholars, and increase discoverability across fields.

In effect, ResearchGate functions as part archive, part visibility engine, and part intellectual networking infrastructure.

And visibility matters in scholarship.

Because ideas do not influence debates merely by existing. They influence debates by becoming discoverable.

The Platforms and What They Represent

The repositories into which The Insecurity Triad has now been archived are not equivalent. Each represents a distinct layer of global scholarly infrastructure.

Academia.edu, with over 250 million registered users, is the world’s largest platform for academic sharing — the first point of entry into the global research conversation for many independent scholars.

Harvard Dataverse is an open-source repository operated by Harvard University, one of the most trusted and widely indexed academic archives in existence. A deposit there is not a symbolic gesture. It is a permanent record.

Zenodo, developed under the European OpenAIRE programme and operated by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), assigns each deposit a Digital Object Identifier — a DOI — making it permanently citable in academic literature worldwide regardless of what happens to any journal or institution that might otherwise have hosted it.

OSF — the Open Science Framework — developed by the US Centre for Open Science, supports the full research lifecycle from planning through archiving and dissemination. It has become a standard for researchers committed to transparency and reproducibility.

SocArXiv is a premier open-access repository designed to ensure that social science research is shared rapidly and transparently.

 It serves as a vital bridge between rigorous academic inquiry and the public interest.

 It was founded in 2016 by Philip N. Cohen, a distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park with a vision to create a “knowledge commons” that returns power to the scholars themselves.

And SSRN — the US-based Social Science Research Network, owned by Elsevier — is where social science scholarship enters the citation economy. With over one million papers and three million registered users, it is the platform through which working papers reach the global research community before and alongside formal peer review. It is also, notably, where Nobel Economics laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Esther Duflo, and Paul Krugman circulate their working papers — not because they are required to, but because that is where the serious readership is.

Together, these six platforms represent discovery, archiving, citation, networking, and dissemination. A coordinated presence across all six creates an unusually broad discoverability footprint for an independent scholar. For a scholar-journalist working from a newsroom in Abuja, it is extraordinary.

The Scholarly Series

Embedded within the developments of the week just ended is a commitment that deserves to be named directly.

Over the next twelve months, The Insecurity Triad will be developed into a ten-part scholarly series — engaging the framework, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and Sahel security dynamics in full academic register. Not as journalism. Not as commentary. As scholarship.

Part One — The Insecurity Triad (Part 1): Foundations of Convergence and Rival Sovereignty — An Analysis of Money, Land, and Mind (MLM) — has already been published and archived across Academia.edu, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, OSF, and SocArXiv, with SSRN forthcoming.

That is the opening instalment of a structured, year-long intellectual undertaking. Nine parts remain.

Why Admission Matters for an Independent Scholar

This is where the significance of these developments becomes clear.

Admission into these global scholarly platforms from outside formal academia carries symbolic and structural weight because it challenges one of the oldest assumptions within global intellectual culture: that legitimate scholarship must originate exclusively from institutional spaces.

For generations, the architecture of scholarship has largely been built around universities as gatekeepers of credibility.

The university conferred identity. The institution supplied legitimacy. The department validated intellectual existence.

But digital scholarly ecosystems are increasingly disrupting that monopoly.

An independent scholar operating from Abuja can now enter the same searchable research environment inhabited by professors in London, policy researchers in Brussels, doctoral candidates in Toronto, and analysts in Pretoria.

That does not erase institutional inequalities. But it narrows intellectual distance.

And that narrowing matters enormously for African thinkers working outside formal academic systems.

The African Reality of Intellectual Production

Across Africa, some of the continent’s most original analytical work often emerges under structurally difficult conditions.

Many researchers operate without university grants, funded research assistants, subscription journal access, institutional methodological support, conference travel funding, or formal research laboratories.

Yet despite these constraints, important ideas continue to emerge.

This is partly because African intellectual production has historically developed through hybrid spaces: journalism, activism, policy observation, civil society, strategic commentary, and independent inquiry.

In many cases, African thinkers are forced to become researchers, archivists, editors, publishers, and distributors simultaneously.

That reality makes entry into global scholarly ecosystems especially important.

Because platforms like Harvard Dataverse, SSRN, ResearchGate and others do more than host publications. They insert researchers into discoverability networks where their work can be found, cited, discussed, questioned, and expanded upon.

For an independent scholar, that visibility is not cosmetic. It is infrastructural.

The Insecurity Triad’s Expanding Scholarly Geography

Taken together, this sequence reveals the expanding geography of the framework’s circulation

The Insecurity Triad is no longer confined to one medium, one geography, or one intellectual ecosystem.

It now exists simultaneously across media discourse, policy interpretation, repository preservation, and scholarly networking systems.

From Abuja’s grounded observation of insecurity dynamics, to Brussels’ geopolitical interpretation of Sahel instability, to integration within global repository and research infrastructures, the framework is beginning to circulate through multiple layers of international knowledge production.

That circulation matters because frameworks gain strength through repeated engagement across different environments.

Some will critique it. Others will refine it. Some may reject aspects of it. Others may adapt it to new contexts.

But circulation itself is the beginning of intellectual life.

Beyond Personal Achievement

It is tempting to read these developments purely as personal achievement.

That would be too narrow.

What makes this moment significant is what it signals for African media institutions, independent scholars, and emerging researchers across the continent who operate outside traditional academic pathways.

It suggests that the global knowledge system — while still unequal — is becoming more permeable.

An idea no longer needs to begin at Oxford, Harvard, or Sciences Po before it can enter international circulation.

It can begin in Abuja.

It can emerge from a newsroom. From a scholar-journalist’s research desk. From a media-backed analytical unit. From a self-funded intellectual project.

And if sufficiently coherent, persistent, and discoverable, it can travel.

The Deeper Meaning of This Convergence

Perhaps the most important lesson of this moment is not institutional.

It is psychological.

For many African thinkers, the greatest barrier has often not been intelligence or originality, but proximity to recognised systems of validation.

The old model suggested: first secure institutional acceptance, then produce ideas.

The emerging reality increasingly suggests the reverse: produce durable ideas, and institutions may eventually begin to engage them.

That is the quiet significance of last week.

From Brussels to ResearchGate, from repositories to scholarly circulation, The Insecurity Triad is beginning to move through systems that were historically difficult for independent African frameworks to enter.

Not as charity. Not as symbolic inclusion. But through interpretive engagement.

And in the evolving geography of global scholarship, that distinction changes everything.

Interlude

In the last eight or nine weeks, this column has birthed The Insecurity Triad, defined its architecture, examined its dynamics, and from there developed the Trinity of State Decay theory. There is still much more to explore.

But next week, we step briefly away from the Triad and the Trinity to pay tribute to one of the outstanding intellectual giants of twentieth-century Africa.

Thirty years after his passing, Claude Ake remains profoundly missed.

Trust Is Sacred. Stay seasoned.

•Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad Analytical Framework, and the Trinity of State Decay theory. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.

X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: [email protected] | Tel: +234(0)8053069436

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

On the eve of his decision to nominate Oliver Wendell Holmes as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, that “the ablest lawyers are men whose past has naturally brought them into close relationship with the wealthiest and the most powerful.” What he left unsaid was that they are also men who profit from such relationships. Profiting from the deployment of unrivalled skill and intellect in the service of the wealthiest and the most powerful is not criminal but it is possible to achieve material wealth and end up craven or hollow.

Continuing his letter to Senator Cabot Lodge, President Roosevelt also expressed his joy and gladness at being able to find the great lawyer who “has been able to preserve his aloofness of mind so as to keep his broad humanity of feeling and his sympathy for the class from which he has not drawn his clients.”

When Holmes turned 90 in 1931, Benjamin Cardozo, no slouch in the pantheon of great judges himself, described Holmes as “the great overlord of the law and its philosophy.” Posterity would prove a lot less generous.

At the fortieth anniversary of Holmes’ death in 1977, his literary executor, the Harvard Law School, declined to publish the essay of Yale Law School professor and his authorized biographer, Grant Gilmore, because it was explosively critical. Gilmore regarded Holmes as “the only man of the law who ever became a folk hero”, but concluded that “the real Holmes was savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak.” Gilmore died in 1982, his work on Holmes unpublished.

Sheldon Novick, author of arguably the most authoritative published biography of Holmes, answered “no” to the question “would you have wanted Justice Holmes as a friend?” University of Chicago law Professor, Albert Alschuler, concluded that Holmes’ was a life of “Law Without Values.”

The greatest lawyers somehow manage to both profit from their association with the great and the good and simultaneously make a lasting contribution to the lives of the class from which they have not drawn their clients. Former US Chief Justice, William Rhenquist, had an appellation for this genre. He called them “the Lawyer-Statesman.” Former Dean of the Yale Law School, Anthony Kronman, writes of such lawyers that they care “about the public good and is prepared to sacrifice his own well-being for it, unlike those who use the law merely to advance their private end. He is distinguished too by his special talent for discovering where the public good lies and for fashioning those arrangements needed to secure it.”

Hard won forensic battles will always be acknowledged in the law reports but that is for interested lawyers only. They’re getting fewer. Ten days before he died of cancer in January 2001, George Carman Q.C., arguably the most celebrated English Barrister of his generation, requested his son, Dominic, to undertake a post-humous biography. Published in 2002, the son’s No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman, QC, painted the picture of a sad, insecure, violent man who “was so intelligent and articulate and yet so brutal and barbaric.”

The material appurtenances of vocational success will be easily visible to those who care but those are irrelevant as measures of greatness. It is possible to make money and win cases while hollowing out the law and making life impossible for ordinary people. In Nigeria today, that species can be found in abundance. Here, comparisons with leading lives in the law and justice from other African countries may be useful.

Nelson Mandela needs no introduction. But Bram Fischer does. He was lead counsel to Mandela at the Rivonia trial. Scion of a most privileged Boer family, Bram chose to deploy himself in the transformation of South Africa. Born in 1908, his father was the Judge-President of the Orange Free State, and his grand-father was the Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony. As South Africa’s leading Silk, Bram had nothing to gain from placing his considerable skills, intellect, and pedigree at the disposal of a struggle that offered him what appeared to be no direct benefits. For this he was to pay the ultimate price.

Persecuted and jailed by the Apartheid regime, Bram Fischer died in 1975 of cancer diagnosed in prison. He was released on 10 March to die on 8 May 1975. Nelson Mandela considered him the greatest South African. At the first Bram Fischer Memorial lecture in June 1995, Mandela explained why: “Bram was a courageous man who followed the most difficult course any person could choose to follow. He challenged his own people because he felt that what they were doing was morally wrong. As an Afrikaner whose conscience forced him to reject his own heritage and be ostracised by his own people, he showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself. I fought only against injustice not against my own people.”

Maison des Avocats (Bar centre), which houses Senegal’s Bar in Dakar, was the only home of Dr. Lamine Guèye, Senegal’s first lawyer, who died in 1968. Admitted to the French Bar in 1921, Guèye mentored Senegal’s independence leaders, including Leopold Senghor whom he introduced into politics. An early anti-fascist and advocate of the human rights of women, Guèye emerged in 1937 as leader of the French section of Workers International. La loi Lamine Guèye which granted the citizenship of France to all inhabitants of France’s overseas colonies on 7 May 1946, memorializes his egalitarian advocacy. Guèye was the President of Senegal’s legislature and is widely credited with laying the foundations of that country’s inclusive politics.

Centenarian, Abdoulaye Wade, is Senegal’s oldest living president. He is also Senegal’s senior-most lawyer and law Professor. Wade was founding dean of the faculty of law and economic sciences at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. Professor Wade was also an outstanding advocate whose distinguished list of clients included Ahmed Ben Bella in Tunisia, Houari Boumediene in Algeria, Omar Bongo in Gabon, and the French hydro-carbons behemoth, Elf Aquitaine. Back home, Professor Wade was also an equally energetic advocate of open government and alternance in a country that was until the tail end of the last millennium a de facto single party State. Even as a mere professor, Wade’s modest home in Dakar was a city landmark. It remains so.

Moleleki Didwell Mokama was Botswana’s first indigenous lawyer and first Ambassador to anywhere. At the independence in 1966, he was designated Botswana’s High Commissioner to Britain, with concurrent accreditation to all the then six member States of what later became the European Economic Community. He was also Botswana’s first indigenous Attorney-General and first Chief Justice. Like Nelson Mandela, Mokama was a product of Fort Hare University in South Africa.

At the Inns of Court in London, Mokama was a pupil of legendary trial lawyer, Dingle Foot Q.C. In his professional life, he was for a long time on the Board of the solid-minerals conglomerate, De Beers. Botswana’s tradition of rigorous governance of its solid minerals earnings owes a lot to his temperance, restraint, and institutionalized legality. As Attorney-General, Mokama singularly persuaded the government of Botswana, then under pressure from Apartheid South Africa, against imposing emergency rule. At considerable risk as Chief Justice, Mokama ensured that the ruling party did not alter the law to overturn unpopular judgments of a fragile judicial system. When he died in 1997, the country paused in unison to pay its respects to a son who lived to make his people better.

As different as they were, these five men were all pioneering lawyer-statesmen for whom the law provided an Archimedean point to transform for the better the world and institutions that they met. At the price of considerable personal discomfort, and through commitment to goals greater than mere legalism or the winning of debating points in law’s name, they chose to transcend the law by transforming the mechanisms and institutions that make it. Millions of their compatriots are better for their having been lawyers. Where can we find their ilk in Nigeria?

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

Hajiya Gambo Sawaba (1933-2001) is one of the reasons no one is prepared to teach anyone a thing about contemporary Nigerian history. Had this political activist’s remarkable odyssey been generally known, people would long have internalised protest against state-sponsored injustice as a way of life. She was routinely subjected to torture. She once told an audience that all her front teeth were artificial, the natural ones having been knocked out by oppressors. On one occasion, a piece of broken bottle was used to shave off her hair. She was chased from Kano, ordered never to return to the commercial city, and forcefully deposited in Zaria, from whence she came. With 16 incarcerations, she holds the record for the most imprisoned Nigerian woman.

Wetin the woman do sef? Plenty! To begin with, she had the temerity to campaign from the rooftops for gender equality right in the heart of conservative territory. She preached against child marriages, against forced labour and – wonderment! – against the law that denied women the vote. All the persecution she suffered made her stronger and more defiant in her life struggle for socio-political justice. Sawaba’s formal education ended in primary school. But she routinely argued better-educated folks to the ground floor of their unreasonableness. Extra-generous, this mother of only one daughter had a home always teeming with adopted and homeless children. There was more to her uniqueness.

Dig this: On weekdays, while others prepared for work, for travel or for idleness, she readied herself for the courts. If a notorious judge was scheduled to deliver judgment, Sawaba pushed other concerns to the back burner to witness it. Inside the courtroom, she would post herself in the front row, staring unblinkingly at the judge, saying absolutely nothing. Whether in an Alkali, Magistrates’ or High Court, it was a settled matter that any day Gambo Sawaba installed herself in a courtroom, magomago abruptly went on leave. No judge or qadi dared to miscarry justice in her presence. Without practising or advocating violence, she represented the potent force of moral authority, charging no fees for wrenching justice for victims.

Dear Obidients. Sawaba’s example teaches that the regular national fare of injustice must be fought all the way down to a humiliating capitulation. Yet, the consequential fight for justice never means burning tyres on road intersections, torching houses, shattering craniums and ending human lives. It only means appropriating courage and integrity and employing them for resolutely uttering, whenever and wherever necessary, a resounding NO in the face of thunder. That is the Gambo Sawaba Constant. The Obidient Movement must cultivate this attribute now that it has reached a fork in the road.

Disreputable characters are desperately trying to discredit the movement, setting it up for institutional hammer blows. To sunder it, agent provocateurs are disseminating the objectionable in its name. One clown even crashed into social media to claim that he had established the Obidient Movement for a different purpose, only for Mr. Peter Obi to hijack it for his vested political interests! In the light of these vexations, the movement must strengthen its structures for real political change by going beyond theory and social media action to engage in direct praxis.

The Obidient Movement should adopt Order as its motto, for wherever order is in ascent, election rigging is anathema. Order denotes a state of organisation and peace. Wherever it reigns, harmony thrives. The Obidients could adopt the Black Power salute as a symbol of defiant salutation. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos used it during a medal ceremony to protest racial injustice in their country. Obidients should use it to abominate criminal politics, perverted governance, electoral fraud, treasury plundering and divisive policies. The Obidient Movement’s identity must outlast the present political generation.

It should become the benign breeze to blow into Nigerians a new heart of interethnic and interreligious harmony. In terms of praxis, what to do is straightforward: Follow who know road ! Sawaba knew the road. Mrs. Margaret Ekpo (1914-2006) knew the road, as did Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900-1978), who mentored both Sawaba and Ekpo. All three were detribalised. All three championed human rights. All three taught the masses with the thesis of personal example. People of the threesome’s distinction abound in today’s Nigeria. They include Mrs. Nnenna Otti, a professor of Soil Science and a university Vice Chancellor, who, rejecting vicious threats and dollar-denominated backhanders, bluntly refused to falsify the 2023 presidential election results in Abia State.

The Obidients must emulate these honest, dedicated and courageous women, and pay no attention to menopausal professors who announce election results at 3 a.m. or deny their social media imprints because of payoffs, ambassadorial portfolios and such ephemerality. Obidients should not be despondent because Professor Oti has no national honours. Those honours have become the exclusive and intangible toys of convicted criminals with transcontinental disreputations. The concrete honours for Ekpo, Oti, Ransome-Kuti, Sawaba and other patriots, both male and female, are global, enduring, meaningful and straight from the hearts of rational Nigerians who genuinely recognise and appreciate their legacies.

Obidients should celebrate nationals with impeccable moral rectitude, not hypocrites who postulated half a century ago that “justice is the first condition of humanity,” only to be speechifying the unwary today about the imperative of justice genuflecting before the altar of ethnic bigotry. People were in this country when someone called President Goodluck Jonathan a drunken fisherman. People were also very much around when someone else called First Lady Patience Jonathan a sheppopotamus . When such pretenders shriek today on the fine points of decorous language, the Obidients must respond with this retort: “ Tishas , don’t teach us nonsense!”

The Obidients must, like Sawaba and Company, go into the countryside, teaching the long-suffering that the Greek gift of stone-riddled rice is insolent to parents whose sons and daughters perish daily on account of abject destitution and unprecedented insecurity. They should be teaching the pauperised that N10,000, which can hardly produce a decent meal today, debases anyone who collects such filthy lucre to vote for demons. The Obidients should understand that when, to manipulate elections, any thug calls himself a Master of Ceremonies for Mayhem and Chaos (MC 4 MC), even in Oshodi, Lagos, their cadres must confront his platoon of illegally armed marauders with a million-strong, flag-waving chanters of patriotic songs.

Obidients should replicate Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution. When a judge is to pronounce on electoral matters, a million chanting Obidients should deluge the court’s precincts. Following any unjust verdict, the judge must run the gamut of their numbers, to trade unfelt handshakes with 500,000 unsmiling males and embrace the formidable bosoms of 500,000 grimacing women. Such mass rallies will brand base judicial psyches with the truisms that khaki no be leather and kinkana no de sour.

Obidients should number heavily among permanent and ad hoc electoral personnel, preventing shifty hands from election-day superimposition of falsity on already counted and signed votes. Obidients should, in their millions, occupy the approaches to polling booths and collation centres, certain that neither uniformed force nor hired hoodlums can erase a people thoroughly fed up to the hairline with kakistocracy. Dear Obidients. Remember that a peaceful disposition does not discount the human right of self-defence. Never forget that your name is Order. Your name is Courage. Your name is Presence.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.