By Ebuka Ukoh

Here is a critique of the Nigerian Bar Association’s decision to feature a popular social media influencer in a plenary session on insecurity, arguing that professional organisations are increasingly emphasising digital visibility and virality over substantive expertise and institutional standards.

I was initially hesitant to write this.

Then I wondered whether my hesitation was part of the problem.

The 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association is underway in Port Harcourt. On Tuesday, 25 August, one of its main plenary sessions, “Known Gun Men,” examined the legal and institutional gap that is fuelling negotiations in Nigeria.

The programme placed security leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, in the conversation. His inclusion has since divided lawyers and the wider public.

I found myself asking a question that some will consider elitist, but which I think every serious professional institution should be willing to answer: Why this voice, on this subject, at this level? My question is whether VeryDarkMan has the right to speak about insecurity. Of course, he does. Insecurity belongs to all of us. You do not need a SAN after your specialised rate on your wall, or military stars on your shoulder, before kidnapping, terrorism, banditry, or communal violence becomes your concern. Nor should professional conferences become echo chambers populated exclusively by people with impressive titles.

Sometimes the person closest to a problem sees what the expert sitting behind a desk does not. VDM himself offered precisely this defence. He told the conference that he was not there to teach lawyers law. He said he was there to share his experience from visiting communities affected by violence and witnessing the aftermath of attacks. That perspective deserves consideration. But it does not entirely answer the question. Because the issue is not whether VDM has a perspective. The issue is why the NBA determined that his particular perspective merited a seat at a main plenary examining the legal and institutional gaps fuelling insecurity.

Those are different questions. We may have become too uncomfortable asking the second. The fairest way to assess the NBA’s decision, then, is not to ask whether VDM was important enough to share the stage. It is to ask what contribution the organisers expected him to make. If he were invited to represent the experiences of communities affected by insecurity, that is one standard. If he were invited as a public accountability advocate, that is another. If he were invited to diagnose the legal and institutional gaps fuelling insecurity, then a much higher evidentiary threshold should apply.

When did visibility become automatic expertise? When did having an audience become a sufficient qualification for every audience? When did popularity become interchangeable with relevance? These questions extend far beyond VeryDarkMan. They are concerned with what is happening to our institutions. There was a time when being invited to address a major professional gathering carried a particular meaning. The platform itself communicated something. Someone had presumably examined your body of work, professional experience, research, public service, or demonstrated knowledge and concluded that you possessed something sufficiently substantive to contribute to the subject before the room.

That did not mean every speaker needed to be an academic. Expertise comes in different forms. There is academic expertise, personal expertise, institutional expertise, community expertise, and lived experience. A woman who has survived years of displacement in a conflict-affected community might understand dimensions of insecurity that someone writing security policy from Abuja does not. A community leader who repeatedly negotiates access during violent conflict has knowledge worth hearing. A journalist who has spent years investigating terrorist financing might bring evidence unavailable to many lawyers. A researcher who has studied policing might identify institutional weaknesses hidden beneath individual incidents.

Lived experience belongs at serious tables. But lived experience must still be relevant to the question the table generalises to answer. That distinction matters. We also need to distinguish expertise from representation. A person may deserve a seat because they possess specialised knowledge. Another may deserve one because they represent an affected community whose experience experts need to hear. Both belong in serious conversations, but they do not occupy the same role. Confusing the two serves neither the expert nor the community voice.

The NBA’s session was not simply titled “Nigerians Share Their Experiences of Insecurity.” Its stated purpose was to examine “legal and institutional gaps fuelling insecurity.” That framing raises the threshold. If the conversation concerns legal gaps, who has studied them? If it concerns institutional failures, who has investigated them? If it concerns security architecture, who understands its design? If it concerns communities experiencing violence, which community voices should be represented? If lived experience is essential, whose lived experience and why? Those are legitimate curatorial questions. They are not elitist questions.

Professional institutions exist partly to make precisely those judgements. And inclusion does not relieve them of that responsibility. This is why the controversy reminds me of the NBA conference a few years ago when Portable, another enormously popular Nigerian entertainer, appeared and generated a similar debate. At the time, I largely shrugged: “Nigeria na cruise,” I thought. Perhaps I should not have. Because individual choices eventually become institutional culture. But my instinct to shrug it off was itself worth interrogating. Each invitation should stand on its own merits. The larger question is whether professional institutions are becoming increasingly willing to trade the traditional logic of expertise for the contemporary currency of visibility.

To be clear, this is not an attack on either man. Portable has built an audience. VeryDarkMan has built an extraordinary digital following and inserted himself into several national conversations. His ability to command public attention is itself worthy of study. But Ratel is not yet a security institution. Virality is not a research methodology. Followers are not citations. And a microphone does not transform experience into expertise.

The distinction matters because Nigeria desperately needs serious conversations about insecurity. People are being kidnapped. Communities have been devastated by attacks. Judicial officers themselves have faced insecurity, as VDM noted during the plenary. These are not abstract matters. They demand evidence. They demand institutional memory. They demand difficult questions about policing, intelligence, prosecution, border management, weapons flows, terrorist financing, criminal justice, inter-agency coordination, community trust, accountability, and the constitutional limits of state power.

And serious claims demand serious evidence. That became particularly apparent during the plenary itself. VDM made broad allegations concerning corruption within security institutions and alleged links between insecurity and political or financial interests. Military representatives challenged him to substantiate sweeping claims rather than generalise about entire institutions. Independent reporting on the session likewise noted that several of his allegations were presented without supporting evidence during the discussion. That exchange unintentionally demonstrated why speaker selection matters.

A main plenary at a professional conference should do more than generate provocative statements. It should advance knowledge, clarify problems, interrogate evidence, and leave the audience understanding something they did not understand before. Weeks later, its arguments should still be strong enough to be examined, challenged, cited, and developed further.

That is the standard I remember associating with major NBA conversations. Speeches travelled beyond the conference hall because the ideas deserved further interrogation. Commentaries followed. Lawyers debated propositions. Scholars responded. Arguments entered the national conversation because there was intellectual substance to wrestle with.

That may be what worries me most. Nigeria is living through an age in which attention itself has become currency. Institutions compete with TikTok. Universities compete with influencers. Newspapers compete with Twitter. Professional associations compete with algorithms. Institutions now operate within an attention economy that rewards engagement, virality, and reach. The temptation to select speakers who attract attention is therefore understandable. But professional institutions should resist confusing reach with contribution.

There is value in bringing popular voices into professional spaces. A person with millions of followers might help translate an important conversation to audiences that professional institutions struggle to reach. But if reach is the reason for an invitation, say so. If lived experience is the qualification, define it. If community representation is the objective, explain why the selected individual represents the relevant community. If expertise is required, demand expertise. Institutions should know what kind of knowledge they are placing on their platforms and why.

Otherwise, we risk teaching young Nigerians a dangerous lesson. We tell them to study. Develop expertise. Spend years mastering a field. Conduct research. Build professional competence. Gather evidence. Publish. Serve. Learn. Then, when the country’s most consequential conversations arrive, we sometimes have the microphone to whoever commands the largest digital audience.

What exactly are we teaching them? The question is not whether a person without formal credentials deserves a microphone. Many of the most important voices in public life have emerged outside formal institutions. The question is whether we still care about the relationship between the subject being discussed and the knowledge, experience, or perspective of the person we ask to discuss it.

This is bigger than VDM. Tomorrow, another viral personality will emerge. The algorithms will crown someone else. The question for the NBA, universities, professional associations, governments, media organisations, and every institution responsible for shaping serious national conversations is whether they will follow the algorithm or exercise judgment.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between elitism and populism. Experts should not monopolise knowledge. Ordinary citizens should not be excluded from rooms where decisions affecting their lives are discussed. Professional institutions should hear the street. But hearing the street does not require abandoning standards. Invite victims. Invite community leaders. Invite activists. Invite journalists. Invite young people. Invite unconventional voices.

Then match each voice to the question it is equipped to illuminate. That is inclusion with intentionality. And perhaps there is a challenge here for the legal profession itself.

If Nigerians increasingly turn to social media personalities rather than lawyers, researchers, journalists, civil society organisations, or public institutions to expose injustice, professional institutions should ask why. The problem may not be that VDM entered the room. The more uncomfortable question is what vacuum existed for him to fill.

And professionals should resist laughing too quickly. If a citizen with a smartphone has become more trusted by millions of Nigerians seeking redress than some institutions staffed by trained professionals, the embarrassment does not belong exclusively to the citizen with a smartphone. Our institutions must ask what they stopped doing, or what citizens believe they stopped doing, that created the market for alternative arbiters of justice. Why do millions of Nigerians believe an influencer will amplify their complaint faster than an institution? Why does viral outrage sometimes appear more effective than formal grievance mechanisms? Why do people increasingly take cases to social media before taking them to systems supposedly designed to deliver redress?

Those questions deserve their own plenary. So perhaps I was wrong to ask only, “How did VDM get into that room?” The better question is this: What does the NBA believe he brought to it? What does his presence tell us about the changing relationship between expertise and influence? What does his popularity tell professionals about the public’s declining confidence in traditional institutions? And how do we democratise important conversations without diluting the standards that make those conversations worth having?

I do not have all the answers. What do I know? I am only a commentator.

But commentary still allows us to ask whether every person with a microphone should automatically be given another. Because popularity is not automatic relevance. Visibility is not automatic expertise. And inclusion, however necessary, does not absolve serious institutions of the responsibility to know why a particular voice belongs in a particular room.

Ukoh, a PhD student and coauthor of Built By The Ancestors, writes from his base in New York, the United States.