By Olanlokun Omolodun, Esq
I remember when I graduated in ‘92 and Gani was my role model and I swore I would become a human rights advocate like him. It is amazing how much a 4-year LL.B course opens one’s eyes to citizens’ rights and the amount of wrongs and injustices we overlook due to ignorance, begging, societal pressure, etc.
When I was posted to Port Harcourt for Youth Service at the Ndele campus of the college of education I saw it as an opportunity to serve Nigerians and help change our country for the best. My old man was a litigator and assured me that after service he would get me suitable pupillage with a firm of SANs but I told him I would not need it as I was determined to make it on my own.
So, bristling with legal principles and with the mindset to fight for the oppressed at every opportunity to occasion legal engineering, I went for service and my place of primary assignment was the prisons office or HQ on Ikwerre Road. I reported to the office and one officer told me to enter into an arrangement where I could sign away my monthly allowance in exchange for someone signing my monthly clearance notices and forwarding them to NYSC so I could return to Lagos to return for discharge but I refused and said I was there to serve my fatherland. There was dead quiet in the open plan office as everyone paused to look at the idealistic fool who just spoke.
So I was detailed to the Rumuokoro police station to oversee removal of detainees to the prison on Aggrey Road. It was a rude introduction to detention facilities in our police stations. They never did anything in a hurry even with relatives of detainees and their lawyers pleading for the release and seeking to prove wrongful detention.
Then the holding cells were the sorriest sights I ever saw when they needed to corral detainees for Black Maria evacuation. Approaching the cell, one was literally hit by a wall of stench of human bodily waste, unwashed nearly naked bodies with almost everyone clinging to the cell bars. It was a most dejecting experience. Nobody did more to knock the budding activism to engineer legal revolution in Nigeria more than watching how policemen work and treat ordinary citizens. Their insensitivity to human suffering is so baked in as to almost be part of their DNA.
From the prison it was too late to return to the office so I went back to the flat I was sharing with other ‘corpers’ and the first thing they said was I smelt terribly. Even after having a bath I still could taste the stench of the police station in my mouth and it killed my appetite. It was our Ikwerre landlord who suggested they ‘take the Lagos boy out and give him pepper-soup so he can regain appetite’ that saved me that night.
The police assignment was, with hindsight, probably deliberate because the next day at the office I noticed that no one spoke to me and I just went to write up my report of the previous day. All the while I was looking around for the guy who made me the offer to sign away my ‘allawee’ to see if I could get redeployed to a private law firm. When he eventually showed up around noon and saw me he bellowed ‘corper Gani how was yesterday’?’ I took him aside and whispered that I wanted to redeploy to a law firm. But he laughed and turned around to announce to the entire office that ‘our Gani say him wan redeploy say him nor wan fight for the masses and his fatherland again.’ The entire office exploded into laughter as I slinked back into my seat.
I eventually got a Law firm which also handled criminal briefs and quickly learned that any assignment to any police station to secure release of any detained person or property was a whole day affair which seldom yielded desired results.
Meanwhile, in litigation there, one got per diem fees of N2k for each file one appeared in, so 3 files daily for at least 3 times weekly was a great week for this rookie associate in the mid-90’s. Upon my relocation to Lagos in 2001, litigation was more dynamic and financially rewarding and made me look back on those days when I thought I could be a people’s advocate in the mold of Gani.
Watching the police work effectively killed that vision for me.
Olanlokun Omolodun, Esq. lives and practices in Lagos.
