The Barrister Who Forgot to Mention His Client
Your Galloping Blood Pressure Will Really Climax When Atiku Emerges As Nigeria’s President in 2027
Being a Response to “The Politics of Perpetual Ambition and Naive Followership: A Response to Atiku’s Interview and the Illusions of His Cheerleaders” by Dan Osa-Ogbegie, Esq
By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
There is a peculiar, morally invertebrate species of Nigerian political mercenary who writes a thousand words against a man without writing a single word for anyone. Dan Osa-Ogbegie, Esq. has produced the definitive specimen of that genus. His piece on Atiku Abubakar is a magnificent monument to intellectual cowardice, ideological prostitution, and shameless opportunism dressed in borrowed silk.
Read it again. Slowly.
He attacks Atiku. He attacks David Mark. He attacks Peter Obi. He attacks Obi’s supporters. He attacks the ADC. He left the PDP. He left his principles. He made his choice. And then he sits down. No name. No candidate. No alternative. Not a syllable.
The barrister rested his case without calling a single witness for the defence.
Somewhere in Benin City today, a man is eating eba with Osa-Ogbegie’s article laminated under his arm, and that man’s name is Monday Okpebholo. But our learned, invertebrate, chronically unprincipled friend will not say so. Because saying so requires courage, and courage, unlike the Esq. after his name, was not awarded on call to bar.
THE CLIENT HAS A NAME, A PARTY, AND A FEDERAL PATRON
We might have allowed him his anonymity had he been what he presented himself as: an independent mind troubled by Nigerian politics. But the record speaks.
Dan Osa-Ogbegie, Esq. served as Edo State Publicity Secretary of the PDP. He was not an observer of partisan politics. He was its instrument. He did not watch from the press gallery. He wrote the press releases. For years.
On 12 March 2026, he resigned from the PDP, cited lack of visible aspirants, and pledged his full personal support to Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State. Monday Okpebholo of the APC. The party of the man whose presidency Osa-Ogbegie’s entire article was constructed to protect. The party whose preferred outcome in 2027 is Atiku’s permanent retirement from Nigerian politics.
When he left, his own party was so unmoved by his departure that it remained publicly silent for eleven days. Calls to the State Chairman went unanswered. The PDP did not convene an emergency meeting. It did not issue a statement. It did not even acknowledge that he had gone.
That silence is not incidental. That silence is a verdict. His party, having watched him operate from the inside, treated his departure with the significance one accords the loss of an office pen. He was not a leader. He was a letterhead.
Now read his article again. Every target he selects. Every platform he undermines. Every coalition he dismisses. Every alliance he ridicules. Read it knowing what you now know about where he was standing when he wrote it.
He did not write as a commentator. He wrote as a recruit. The only difference between a PDP Publicity Secretary and an APC sympathiser is the letterhead. The function is identical.
He was the barrister who forgot to mention his client. His client’s name is Monday Okpebholo. His client’s employer is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. His client’s interest is the continued discrediting of every arrangement that does not serve Aso Rock.
THE MAGNIFICENT, DOCUMENTED HYPOCRISY OF THE RECYCLING CHARGE
Now we arrive at the passage that reduces this entire article from dishonesty to breathtaking farce.
This politically promiscuous, ethically unmoored, conveniently amnesiac barrister had the spectacular audacity to write the following words: when the same actors simply change platforms, what you have is not reform. It is recycling.
Let us now read that sentence with full knowledge of who wrote it, and precisely when.
In November 2025, writing as the duly appointed Publicity Secretary of the Edo State PDP, Osa-Ogbegie published a blistering attack on Governor Monday Okpebholo, describing his government as a drifting canoe steered by those who cannot read a compass, condemning his administration as a carnival of mediocrity presided over by clowns masquerading as statesmen. He invoked the memory of Anthony Enahoro and Samuel Ogbemudia as celestial witnesses to Edo’s shame under Okpebholo, and declared that the governor had failed the people catastrophically.
In December 2025, he was publicly demanding that the same Governor address what he called the usual silence and subterfuge that had become his preferred method of avoiding accountability.
In January 2026, he was accusing the APC-led Edo State government, Okpebholo’s government, of orchestrating the arrest and imprisonment of 52 citizens who had done nothing more than protest kidnapping in their community.
By March 12, 2026, this same man had resigned from the PDP, described Okpebholo as a friend and brother, and pledged his full personal support to the governor’s administration.
The timeline runs as follows. November: Okpebholo is a clueless jester steering a drifting canoe. December: Okpebholo governs by silence and subterfuge. January: Okpebholo’s government orchestrates the imprisonment of protesters. March: Okpebholo is my friend and brother, and if he succeeds, Edo succeeds.
Four months. One hundred and twenty days. Not a single election. Not a single policy reversal by Okpebholo. Not a single documented achievement. Just a private conversation that presumably took place somewhere in Benin City, after which the drifting canoe became a vessel of hope, the carnival of mediocrity became a platform for Edo’s progress, and the clowns masquerading as statesmen became friends and brothers.
This disingenuous, transactional, self-serving, intellectually bankrupt man then sat down to write 1,200 words about recycling politicians.
The audacity does not merely stagger the imagination. It obliterates it entirely.
ON PROVINCIAL REASONING, FROM THE MOST PROVINCIAL MAN IN THE ROOM
This faithless, geographically anchored, parochially motivated operator accused Atiku of narrow, almost provincial reasoning. Of sectional arithmetic dressed up as fairness.
This, from a Benin City-based legal practitioner whose entire public intervention in national politics consists of protecting a local investment in Edo State. His national commentary is provincial in origin, provincial in purpose, and provincial in outcome. He does not write for Nigeria. He writes for Okpebholo. He does not argue for principle. He argues for a position, and that position happens to be located on Osadebe Avenue, Benin City.
If that is not provincial reasoning, the phrase has ceased to mean anything in the English language.
ON THE OBASANJO REFERENCE: THE MOST EMBARRASSING PARAGRAPH A LAWYER HAS EVER PUBLISHED IN NIGERIA
Now we reach the centrepiece of this reckless, evidence-suppressing, professionally disgracing submission. His star exhibit. His smoking gun. A passage from a memoir.
Not a court judgment. Not a tribunal finding. Not a charge sheet. Not a conviction. Not even a corroborated allegation tested under cross-examination. A memoir.
Let me be unambiguous before proceeding. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo is a towering figure in Nigerian history. A former Head of State who voluntarily returned power to civilians in 1979, a statesman of continental stature, a man who has served this nation at its most critical moments, and one of the most consequential Africans of his generation. This writer holds him in tremendous respect, and nothing written here is intended to diminish that standing or the legitimate contributions of his remarkable life.
But truth, as they say, is truth. And the truth must be stated plainly, regardless of who it inconveniences.
What Osa-Ogbegie cited from Chief Obasanjo’s memoir My Watch are personal assertions. Assertions made by a single witness. A witness who, at the time of writing, had been in the most bitter, documented, publicly venomous political rupture with the subject of his remarks. A witness who shared executive power with the accused for eight years and never once initiated a prosecution, never filed a petition with the EFCC, never presented a dossier to the ICPC, never referred a single transaction to the Code of Conduct Bureau.
And a man who calls himself Esq. planted this as his legal foundation.
Let us apply the most elementary principles of law, the kind taught in year one, semester one, of every Nigerian law faculty, before students have even purchased their wigs.
Allegatio et probatio non sunt idem.Allegation and proof are not the same thing. This is not advanced jurisprudence. This is the door. A lawyer who cannot find the door has no business inside the building.
But there is a far more devastating problem, one that this deliberately misleading, evidence-suppressing, intellectually dishonest barrister chose to bury entirely in silence.
Chief Obasanjo did not merely write. He acted. He was so convinced of his own allegations that he constituted a formal panel, equipped with instruments, powers, and the full machinery of the executive, specifically to investigate Atiku Abubakar. And Atiku Abubakar, rather than hide behind the considerable constitutional shield available to him as a sitting Vice President, voluntarily, formally, and unambiguously waived his immunity and submitted himself to that investigation.
The panel investigated. It probed. It examined. It had every resource a sitting Nigerian president could deploy against a man he had already publicly declared his enemy.
It found nothing.
Nothing warranting prosecution. Nothing warranting charge. Nothing that could survive the elementary test of evidence that Osa-Ogbegie, as a lawyer, should have applied before citing a memoir as a conviction.
Now answer the question this contemptible, fact-suppressing, professionally compromised operator refused to ask. If the panel that Chief Obasanjo himself empanelled, with full state resources and the complete political will of a sitting president who desperately wanted a finding, could not produce a single actionable conclusion against Atiku, what precisely is the legal and evidentiary value of the paragraph later put in a commercially published book?
THE SELF-DESTRUCT: WHEN YOUR OWN STAR WITNESS BURNS YOUR CASE TO THE GROUND.
This writer repeats: the respect for Chief Obasanjo is genuine and unwavering. But intellectual honesty requires that we follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to uncomfortable destinations.
In 2019, Chief Obasanjo actively, publicly, and enthusiastically supported Atiku Abubakar for the presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Not quietly. Not reluctantly. Not with reservations buried in footnotes. He supported him with the full weight of his considerable public influence, passed glowing commendations about him, and threw his political endorsement behind the very man he had described in print as propense to corruption, disloyal, and lacking in transparency.
Let that sit for a moment.
A man writes a book describing another man as morally unfit for public trust. That same man, six years later, stands before Nigeria and declares: this is the man who should be your president.
In the cold, merciless language of evidence law, which is the only language Osa-Ogbegie should have been speaking, what does that sequence of events do to the witness’s testimony?
It destroys it. Completely. Irreversibly. Without remainder.
There are only two logical conclusions available when a man calls another man corrupt in a book and then recommends that same man for the nation’s highest office. Either the original allegations were not sincerely held, meaning they were the product of personal bitterness and political malice rather than genuine conviction, or the man who made them has so little regard for Nigeria’s welfare that he would knowingly recommend a corrupt person to lead 220 million people.
There is no third option. There is no comfortable middle ground. One of those two conclusions is true, and Osa-Ogbegie must choose.
Either the book was wrong or the endorsement was wrong. Either way, the testimony collapses. And a witness whose own subsequent conduct publicly shreds his original testimony is not a witness. He is a liability. He is the witness opposing counsel prays for, because he dismantles himself before you finish your opening address.
Any first-year law student who has passed the Law of Evidence paper knows that prior inconsistent conduct by a witness goes directly to credibility and obliterates testimony. This is not advanced doctrine. This is foundational. This is the door.
Osa-Ogbegie walked past the door, past the window, past every opening available to honest reasoning, and built his entire prosecution on testimony whose own internal contradictions had already rendered it worthless.
That is not legal argument. That is a legal catastrophe.
NINETEEN YEARS AND NOT ONE INDICTMENT: THE RECORD THAT SPEAKS LOUDER THAN ANY MEMOIR
And then there is the matter of time. Because time is the ultimate and most pitiless judge of allegation.
Atiku Abubakar left office in 2007. Nineteen years have now passed. Nineteen years of successive administrations, some of which had every political incentive in the world to indict him. Nineteen years of an EFCC that has demonstrated, abundantly, that it is not incapable of prosecution when the political will exists. Nineteen years of opposition research, hostile governments, adversarial media, and international scrutiny.
In those nineteen years, not one court of competent jurisdiction anywhere in Nigeria or the world has indicted Atiku Abubakar for embezzlement. Not one charge has been filed and sustained. Not one judicial finding has been made against him for financial crime. Not one shady deal has been established before a tribunal with the power to make binding findings of fact.
Not one. In nineteen years.
Compare that unblemished judicial record against the memoir of a self-contradicted witness who endorsed his own subject for the presidency six years after denouncing him. Compare it against the non-finding of the very panel Chief Obasanjo himself constituted. Compare it against the narcotics forfeiture sitting in the court records of the Southern District of Illinois, attached like a barnacle to the man Osa-Ogbegie is invisibly serving.
Allegations in a book versus nineteen years of clean judicial record. A self-contradicted witness versus two decades of prosecution opportunity never taken. A suppressed panel finding versus a 2019 presidential endorsement by the same accuser.
Any sane, minimally honest, professionally competent observer applying basic logic to this evidence set would arrive at one conclusion. The allegations did not survive scrutiny because they were not capable of surviving it. They were personal. They were political. They were the published residue of a broken relationship between two powerful men, and they carry exactly the evidentiary weight that such material deserves.
Which is none.
Osa-Ogbegie is not a sane, minimally honest, professionally competent observer. He is a recently recycled party spokesman with a new patron, a suppressed panel, a self-contradicted witness, and a deadline. And he hoped Nigeria would not notice the difference.
Nigeria noticed.
A lawyer who practises deception in broad daylight, before a literate audience, in a published article, armed with full knowledge of what that panel produced and what Chief Obasanjo did in 2019, and who chose to suppress both material facts entirely, is not merely wrong. He is a material fool. A credentialed, gowned, Esq.-bearing, thoroughly material fool. Because he had every instrument of reason, every principle of the profession he swore to uphold, and the complete evidentiary record, and he chose instead to hand his readers only the book jacket.
If this intellectually fraudulent counsel had walked into any courtroom in Nigeria and tendered that memoir as Exhibit A in a criminal matter, the judge would have looked at him over reading glasses with the particular expression Nigerian jurists reserve for counsel who have wasted the court’s morning, and asked quietly whether he had any actual evidence.
He does not. He had a book. He had a grudge. He had a paymaster. He suppressed a panel. He buried a 2019 endorsement. He had a deadline.
He had no case.
THE JOB INTERVIEW ANALOGY: RETURNED TO SENDER WITH INTEREST
He closes with theatrical gravitas, asking whether any of us would hire a man whose former boss gave such a damning reference.
We have now established three things about that reference. First, the same boss constituted a formal panel to prove it, and the panel found nothing. Second, the same boss endorsed the man for the presidency six years later. Third, the reference has not produced a single indictment in nineteen years of sustained political hostility.
That reference is not damning. That reference is demolished.
But very well. Let us complete the game on his own terms.
Here is your preferred applicant’s file. A narcotics-related civil forfeiture of 460,000 dollars paid to the United States government in the Southern District of Illinois. A university certificate whose authenticity has been contested longer than most Nigerian marriages endure. A track record of managing public resources that multiple credible organisations have examined with visible discomfort. References from institutions that investigate financial crime across two continents.
Would you, running an enterprise, hand that man the keys to the national treasury?
The analogy bites back. It always does when it is constructed by a bad faith actor in service of a hidden client.
2027 IS COMING. STOCK UP ON MEDICATION.
This is no longer about Osa-Ogbegie alone. It is about a culture of political mercenary work that dresses itself in the language of principle while avoiding the discipline of consistency. That deploys legal vocabulary while suppressing legal reasoning. That condemns a drifting canoe in November and boards it in March. That lectures Nigeria about recycling while being freshly recycled. That asks hard questions of one man while refusing to ask any question at all of another.
Nigeria in 2027 will not be decided by a turncoat barrister who suppressed material evidence, recycled himself across party lines within one hundred and twenty days, argued eloquently for nothing, and never once had the courage to name his client.
It will be decided by millions of Nigerians who remember what their lives looked like before the naira became a museum exhibit, before petrol queues became a national pastime, and before governance became a daily performance of managed suffering at the hands of the man Osa-Ogbegie served with his silence.
When Atiku Abubakar is sworn in as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, we shall remember this article. We shall remember the panel that found nothing. We shall remember the 2019 endorsement that was buried. We shall remember the November 2025 drifting canoe and the March 2026 friend and brother. We shall remember every material fact this incorrigible, opportunistic, conveniently forgetful operative chose to suppress.
And we shall take the learned friend’s blood pressure very seriously indeed.
He should stock up on medication. 2027 is coming.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, is the Director General
The Narrative Force.
Aare Atayese of Odo Oro ÉkÃtÃ.
