Social media influencers, among whom a certain Martins Vincent Otse is numbered, have a reputation for exaggeration and irreverence, habits and vices directly opposed to the fundamentals of the law profession. At last week’s Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) annual general conference in Port Harcourt, Mr Otse, aka VeryDarkMan or VDM, and the NBA bridged the gap between the sacred and the profane in a way no one thought possible. VDM was invited to address, as a panellist and perhaps an iconoclast, the august body of lawyers in his capacity as a social media influencer. It was a controversial invitation; but he went and wowed the lawyers, many of whom scrambled to take selfies with him after the session.
That the VDM invitation was controversial and even unseemly was not the main issue. What has reverberated through the rank and file of the legal profession, nay the country itself, is that the street has finally met the wig. Having tasted blood as it were, and having exposed the deterioration of the legal profession, VDM and others like him, not to say lawyers themselves, will increasingly reconcile themselves to the obliteration of the divide between the street and the wig. That many lawyers still fail to see the contradictions in the VDM invitation, and in fact still argue forcefully that the influencer was invited to share his street and practical perspectives, is an indication of just how far the society has decayed. So, let the NBA defend their invitations, let them abandon their hallowed heights and wallow in the affectations of the street, and let them remain enamoured of persons and systems that contradict and undermine the central dynamics of the legal profession. While the choice is theirs, there is nothing to indicate they can make a wise choice.
NOTE: Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Theliberationnews
