A bit disheartening that our dear Marshal lost to his opponent at the polls. He ran all the race in the world alone and while putting on a frustrated look and bathroom slippers. Not even a reasonable number of votes did he find as remuneration for the unending night classes devoted to teaching students carried away by frivolities. We all cried for Marshal!
The name Marshal reminds one of a grassroots politician and student unionist contesting an elective position in the student's union the year I secured admission into the higher institution. This self-acclaimed Marshall and history student lived within his means as an aspirant for one of the kinly contested positions in the student's union as at then. The youth portrayed humility and utmost modesty, he was an embodiment of ideals and thoughts on the resistance put up by the North African Berbers against the invasion of the Arabians who, after the sudden demise of Prophet Mohammed, balkanized into fragments and invaded the innovative Berbers. There are different narratives on the number of years it took the North African Berbers to resist the destitute Arabians: some scholars believe it to be 500 years while others maintained and pegged it at 1000.
A bit disheartening that our dear Marshal lost to his opponent at the polls. He ran all the race in the world alone and while putting on a frustrated look and bathroom slippers. Not even a reasonable number of votes did he find as remuneration for the unending night classes devoted to teaching students carried away by frivolities. We all cried for Marshal!
Another Marshal emerged today just like the different Bigger Thomases captured in Richard Wright's Native Son. What comes to mind on mentioning this variation of Marshal is a human right activist and lawyer of Northern origin. Cool, calm and collected young man with the spartan drive to planting a revival and immediate revolution in the suburbs, churches, mosques, outskirts and streets of Nigeria. He might not have done this by championing the course to the effect of the prompt reinstatement of the socialist revolution but by deploring his legal skills, boldness and polemics.
He has consummated and consolidated the Boss in Mr. Femi Falana, SAN, a man whose irrepressible and revolutionary moves has secured a space in the table of the leading lights. Mr. Femi Falana, being a prisoner of conscience and man of conscience treated, President Olusegun Obasanjo to a lot of courageous questions at the Oputa panel and that disgruntled and highly embarrassed Obasanjo threatened to reconsider his position inside the dock.
Falana, the man who Marshal has chosen to pitch his tent with laced the faces of a lot of papers for his selfless and highly independent assessment of legal problems. Traumatized Adegoke family thought not twice before handling their case over to this Falana with the eagle eye. He had hardly took over when he wrote the police, insisting that the case deliberately filed in Abuja be immediately withdrawn and reinstituted in Osun. It would interest you to know that pompous Adegoke and his accomplices have just been committed to a remand.
I met Barr. Marshal Abubakar sometimes last year at the Magistrate Court in Wuse. Abubakar of average height has regularly put up representations for Sowore in court, most especially at the instance of his boss. He was the lawyer who slugged it out with the counsels to the state after Sowore, Sanyaolu Juwon, Micheal Adenola and about two other passerby raided in the course of brutal police illegal arrests at Gudu, Abuja, were arraigned.
Marshal is really a dependable lawyer and active participator in the history of the times. He succinctly marshaled his points before the scary judge, detonated bombs or ballistic legal missiles, just to drive home his positions which tallies with the fact that his client has never constituted threat to public peace. He was never lousy but composed, jovial and passionate about the job.
The parents of this young man must have enrolled him in the Law school to rescue harmless but demonised individuals like comrade Omoyele Sowore, whose intentions are to the knowledge of the Nigerian people genuine. They would never have expected that the saviour in Marshal will eventually make another captive gasping for breath. They would not have expected that he will eventually dwell in a discrepit prison with the Barrabas of this world and some few innocents at the Kuje prison.
Come to think of it, that a lawyer now has some specific individuals against which he can courageously fight in a legal battle or practice his trade. The Lords of the Manor like outrightly dry and infertile Ned Nwoko whose activities at the legislature was without fruits are the ones to be adored and continually encouraged to continually traumatize the good people of Nigeria over-served with the pando yam of affliction.
Nigerians have found it extremely difficult to
substantiate the broad day kidnap and illegal arrest of a legal practitioner duly
recognised in the roll call of the Supreme Court of Nigeria today. Majority of them are not surprised, as there had been similar developments in the past. It is in this Banana Republic as country that a judge (justice Odili) was ordered to be arrested for a supposed and cooked up illegal activities going on within her compound. The clandestine moves was surprisingly linked with the office of the Attorney-General and Chief Law officer of the Nigerian State. Why on earth should an action to the effect of the enforcement of a citizen's fundamental and civil right be criminalized or possibly seen as a sin? Why on Earth should solicitors for these rights at the temple of justice be taken to the gallows by judges expected to be Chief Sentinels of justice at its temple.
I see a metamorphosis playing out in the practice of law. I also see it becoming what it used to be during the military era when the promulgation of terrible decrees was enough to frustrate the activities of legal practitioners. I enjoin the Nigerian Bar Association to mobilize its rank and file against this injustice by championing a protest, not until the learned lawyer Abubakar is released.
Information has it that he is currently cooling his nerves in the gulag of the Kuje prison and that the false imprisonment was a ploy to entirely disarm comrade Omoyele Sowore or even frustrate the instruments of defence under his control. To Grant him fair hearing is leaving him the access to a legal practitioner of his choice.
Genuine activists and their lawyers should start mobilizing and warming up. The vultures are gathering in their different nests, monitoring every courageous moves. They must not be allowed to take over.