Obi Azubike

Data science enthusiast

[Preach Ojukwu 🇮🇪 @TrendfusionNG]

VDM vs Falana

1. There is a peculiar Nigerian talent for missing the point with ceremonial precision.
The Nigerian Bar Association @NigBarAssoc spent an entire week in Port Harcourt discovering, to its own horror, that a man without a wig had been invited to speak about gunmen.

2. Not about locus standi. Not about the finer distinctions between obiter and ratio.

About unknown versus known gunmen. About Yelewata. About judges who now travel as potential cargo. About checkpoints that appear to function less as security architecture and more as a customer-referral desk: “that guy in red Camry can pay.”

3. And the loudest reaction from a section of the learned profession was not “Is any of this true?” It was “How dare they seat him among us?”

4. That is not an argument. That was a class reflex dressed in Latin.

5. @femi_falana SAN, a man whose record of rights litigation is not in dispute, put the objection in its most respectable form. In those olden days, he said, the NBA invited people who had “paid their dues.” Conferences were not circus shows.

6. You do not drag “somebody from nowhere” onto a panel on national security to entertain lawyers who paid good money to be intellectually engaged. It was a tidy complaint. It is also the complaint of a guild that has confused pedigree with proof.

7. Martins Vincent Otse, @thatverydarkman to the street that actually watches him, answered with the one sentence that should have ended the pretence: this is not about book. It is about experience.

8. He had been, he said, a first respondent at scenes the experts later analysed from air-conditioned distance.

9. He told the hall that “your lords are being kidnapped,” and that a conversation about “known” and “unknown” gunmen is no longer a matter of “if I may, my lord.”

10. Then he said the thing that Falana feared the most: that the real offence was not his lack of a law degree. It was that “the son of a nobody was invited to come and speak where elites are seated.” Listen carefully to that sentence, learned friends. It is not poetry. It is sociology.

11. A young, or rather do I say a rather misguided man at KayHikers Club can fume that the NBA invited an untrained influencer into a room of people who “study evidence.” Fine. Evidence is a beautiful word. It would be more beautiful if Nigerian courts were famous for following it. The profession that now clutches its pearls about “high skill” is the same profession whose public reputation is a long corridor of adjournments, missing files, cash-and-carry injunctions, and poor men who discover that justice is a subscription service.

12. You cannot spend decades teaching the country that the law is a private club and then act shocked when the country prefers a loud outsider who, for all his excesses, at least answers the phone.

13. Law, let us say this without kneeling, is a man-made instrument. It is not divine. In other countries, lay magistrates have sat in judgment of facts without first attending Law School. The Nigerian fetish is not law. It is the costume of law. The wig is treated as a halo. The gown is treated as proof of virtue. And virtue, in this republic, has a terrible habit of arriving late and leaving early.

14. If the invitation felt like an insult, ask why the insult landed. Institutions that still command respect do not panic when a non-member speaks. They listen, then they fillet the speaker with better facts. The fury was not intellectual. It was territorial.

This is page 1.

[Ochi @OchiJnr]

Peter Obi.

There is a strange thing happening in Nigeria. A quiet man, unpolished in speech, has become louder than every microphone raised against him.

He doesn’t speak queen’s English. He is not an orator. But when he opens his mouth, something ancient in the Nigerian spirit stirs, because real recognizes real. He speaks the way a father speaks to his children when NEPA fails and there’s nothing left to perform: plainly, urgently, truthfully.

A billionaire, yes. But somehow, impossibly, he feels the pulse of the hawker in Kano, the graduate without a job in Enugu, massacre survivors in Benue, the okada rider dodging potholes in Lagos. The poor recognize him not because he pretends to be poor, but because he refuses to pretend they don’t exist.

The ruling class doesn’t know what to do with him. They cannot buy his silence. They cannot bury him in scandal that sticks. They cannot shrink his profile, at home or abroad, no matter how many microphones they hand to his critics. And when they attack him online, millions rise before he even has to speak, an organic army he never had to build, from every tribe and tongue, because you cannot manufacture what people give freely.

He is not perfect. He is not the messiah some have made him. But he is proof that a nation this bruised can still recognize sincerity when it sees it, still reach for hope when it’s offered honestly.

And by the grace of God, and the vigilance of long-suffering Nigerians who refuse to look away, he will be Nigeria’s next President and Commander-in-Chief, Peter Obi.

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@NDCVanguard_ @Mallam_jabeer So why are you still using the old one in your dp

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@KhalafAlHabtoor Who’s the author

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@Anita_Izato I'll recommend the book Why We Sleep

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@Morris_Monye Probably a key enabler to his being COS today, his boss knows he is ready to do what is necessary.

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@inecnigeria Next time it would be better if the circle sizes are representative of the number of voters, a bit misleading

[Olaudah Equiano® @RealOlaudah]

The child repeated his father’s caution to the rest of the family: “Don’t run on your way to the farm so that you will not come back late”. Now I ask, what is the worth of an elder’s advice?
Our elders are wise. You discountenance their warnings at your own peril.

[Olaudah Equiano® @RealOlaudah]

Only a foolish child will say the mouth of an elder smells. Again, it is axiomatic that an elder who fails to shout when the need arises, will run for his dear life with arched knees when the repercussions come.

[Mr Macaroni @mrmacaroni]

Dear Governor BabaJide SanwoOlu, The level of Insecurity, oppression, brutality and extrajudicial killings since you became Governor has worsened. You don’t control the police? Ok. But you are the Chief Security Officer of the state. What are you doing about it sir?

[Tatiana Prowell, MD @tmprowell]

@StokesNeuro Wishing you a peaceful crossing & your family many beautiful memories & loving supporters. I’m an oncologist, & though we’ve never met, I’ll add you to my reasons why we don’t give up on ending cancer. 🙏

[Dr Joe Abah, OON @DrJoeAbah]

The timeframes proposed by @MoghaluKingsley here are sensible in my view.

[Oby Ezekwesili @obyezeks]

Who else is grateful that we have @ruffydfire Rufai Oseni on @ARISEtv holding the feet of politicians and public officials to the fire? 🙋🏾‍♀️

🙋🏾‍♀️🙋🏾‍♂️?

God bless Rufai for Citizens.😊✍🏾

[Mr Macaroni @mrmacaroni]

The Job Interview 😁

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

For the 2nd year in a row I have been named the Governance Risk Compliance & Anti-Financial Crime Reporter of the Year at the GRC Anti-FinCrime awards.

The recognition for my work exposing banking sector crime, illegal loan sharking and poor corporate governance is appreciated🙏🏿

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@DrJoeAbah @asemota Congratulations

[Eyo O. Ekpo @eyooekpo]

@afalli The commonest denominator amongst the many "adults" pained by this video is that they are mostly "do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do" kind of people who probably want to believe their children are blind.

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@afalli @DrDamages

[Obi Azubike @obi_azubike]

@bornfitnesss @getvideobot