At the NBA’s Port Harcourt conference, the controversial activist answers questions about his invitation by confronting lawyers with the violence playing out beyond the courtroom
PORT HARCOURT — The Nigerian Bar Association invited Martins Vincent Otse, better known as VeryDarkMan, to speak about insecurity. Before he could get to the substance of his intervention, however, he had to answer a question that had been circulating since the invitation became public: what, precisely, qualified a social-media activist to address one of Nigeria’s largest gatherings of lawyers?
VeryDarkMan did not attempt to disguise the controversy. Instead, he acknowledged it at the beginning of his intervention and offered an answer that went beyond his credentials, telling the lawyers that he had not come to teach them law but to speak from his experience of travelling to communities affected by violence.
The exchange unfolded on Tuesday at the 66th Nigerian Bar Association Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt, where the activist took part in a session on insecurity. The conference, being held under the theme “Beyond Limits,” has brought together members of the Bench and Bar, public officials, academics, security professionals and other voices to examine some of the country’s most difficult legal and institutional problems.
VeryDarkMan’s appearance was always likely to be different.
His public profile has been built largely outside the traditional institutions represented in the conference hall. He is known for confrontational social-media campaigns, investigations and public accusations that have frequently generated controversy, while his methods and some of his claims have attracted criticism of their own.
The NBA’s decision to give him a platform therefore raised a legitimate question about the boundaries of a professional conference. Why should a gathering of lawyers, judges and legal scholars turn to a social-media personality when discussing a subject as grave as national security?
VeryDarkMan’s response was that the question was being asked from the wrong end.
He told the gathering that his contribution was based on what he said he had personally seen in communities affected by attacks, rather than on an attempt to compete with lawyers on questions of law. His travels, he said, had taken him to places including Yelwata in Benue State, Bokkos and Angwan Rukuba in Plateau State and parts of Borno State, where he claimed to have witnessed the consequences of violence and spoken with people living through its aftermath.
“I’m not here to teach you people law; I’m here to share experience,” he said.
That formulation became the central defence of his presence at the conference. His argument was that insecurity could not be discussed solely through statutes, judgments and policy documents when its consequences were being experienced by communities far removed from the institutions debating them.
He was particularly pointed in addressing the vulnerability of the justice system itself, referring to the reported abduction of a judge and arguing that the legal profession could no longer regard insecurity as an issue affecting only distant communities.
The remark struck at the heart of the conference’s discussion. Lawyers spend much of their professional lives dealing with insecurity through constitutional provisions, criminal law, human-rights litigation and judicial review. Yet the institutions through which those arguments are pursued are themselves exposed to the same security failures.
A judge who cannot travel safely, a lawyer who cannot reach a court without fear, a witness who is too frightened to testify and a community that has lost confidence in the police all raise questions that no statute can resolve by itself.
That was the space VeryDarkMan attempted to occupy.
He also challenged the conventional media, accusing major news organisations of failing to adequately document the aftermath of attacks in parts of the country and arguing that social-media activists had increasingly taken on the role of bringing those stories to a wider audience.
His criticism, however, was accompanied by claims that require the same scrutiny he was challenging the mainstream media to provide.
In discussing the attack on Yelwata, for instance, he attributed responsibility to Fulani attackers and described the violence as retaliation for the killing of a Fulani boy. Such claims should not be treated as established fact merely because they were made from an NBA conference platform. The Yelwata violence has generated competing accounts and continuing legal and political debate, and allegations concerning the identity and motives of perpetrators require independent evidence.
That caveat is particularly important in a discussion about insecurity, where unverified claims can inflame precisely the communal tensions that the justice and security systems are struggling to contain.
There was also a broader disagreement about the Armed Forces and the conduct of security agencies. During the discussion, a military representative challenged aspects of VeryDarkMan’s criticisms, pressing the need to distinguish between allegations against particular individuals and accusations directed at an entire institution.
That exchange may have been more useful than the controversy over his invitation itself.
The NBA had effectively placed two very different forms of authority in the same room: the institutional authority of the legal profession and the informal influence of a digital activist whose enormous online following gives him access to an audience far beyond the reach of conventional professional organisations.
Neither form of authority is sufficient on its own.
Personal experience can reveal what official reports overlook, but it does not substitute for evidence. Legal expertise provides a framework for testing claims and assigning responsibility, but it can also become detached from the people whose lives produce the cases that eventually reach the courts.
The challenge is to bring the two together without allowing either to overwhelm the other.
That may explain why the NBA’s decision to invite VeryDarkMan has generated so much debate. His appearance is not simply about one activist being allowed to speak at a lawyers’ conference. It reflects a wider change in how public conversations about Nigeria are being conducted, particularly on issues such as corruption, insecurity and institutional failure.
Social media has created its own centres of influence, populated by people who have no formal institutional position but can command audiences larger than those of many established organisations. Their influence can be valuable when it exposes neglected stories, but it can also become dangerous when allegations are presented as established facts or when complex security problems are reduced to the actions of a single group or institution.
The responsibility of the Bar, therefore, is not necessarily to exclude such voices. It is to interrogate them.
That is what a professional conference should be able to do.
VeryDarkMan’s invitation may have unsettled some lawyers precisely because it disrupted the familiar hierarchy of who gets to speak with authority. But the more consequential question is what the NBA and its members do with the information, allegations and experiences brought before them.
Nigeria’s insecurity has already crossed the boundaries of geography and profession. It affects judges, lawyers, journalists, doctors, traders, farmers and students. It has disrupted court proceedings, displaced communities and weakened confidence in the ability of the state to protect its citizens.
A lawyers’ conference cannot solve that crisis from a podium.
But it can decide whether the conversation remains confined to people who already speak the language of the law or whether it is prepared to hear from Nigerians who encounter the consequences of institutional failure in very different ways.
That was the wager behind VeryDarkMan’s appearance in Port Harcourt.
He came into the room as the outsider whose credentials were being questioned.
He left having forced the room to confront a different question: What good is the law if the people and institutions expected to uphold it cannot remain safe enough to do their jobs?
And that is where the controversy over his invitation becomes more interesting than the invitation itself.
