Men who become gods are not divine. They are imperfect and not immune from ego and sin. Yet, the gods are revered not only for benevolence but also for wrath. Their punishment can be severe for transgressors. So, he that will waylay a god or another for whom he is no match is warned to be ready to be brutalised. On the other hand, the indignant is cautioned to bear incontinence stoically like a masquerade would a fart lest he be demystified as man behind mask and not ancestral spirit invoked from the dead.

Someone must tell the world’s principalities of the futility of muscling truth or expression, and urge robust confrontation to expose falsehood of allegations instead of flogging a speaker. And where truth or falsehood is unverifiable, to engage to defang or mitigate damage, and reflect on and redress foibles. ‘Drop your luggage and repack’ is not ‘Drop your load and share’.

Questions: Will Amazon obey A’Katungan court order to end sale of its Bestseller book in extra-jurisdictional and extra-terrestrial markets to a global audience? Can the ruling be enforced in light of Amazon’s position that the author and book have not violated its policies? What of the bootleg supply chains that fill the gap for prohibition? Can memory be erased from all that have read a censored book?

Apparently, SANpion, had defeated ActivistEsq in an appeal over land 10 years earlier, allegedly with ways and means which the lawyer said slapped him awake to the brazenness of judicial rot. He allegedly attempted to get him disbarred which ended in the lawyer suing for libel. To clear doubts as to who is Champion-at-law, the senior also allegedly denied junior his day in court and the fruit of his suit by exertion of influence. The case was dismissed pre-trial and he didn’t discover nine months after the fact, wrote the orator.

A lad clobbered six times is enjoined to take it philosophically seeing as it is the cultural priviledge of the elder to beat or cheat the young. He got disillusioned but will neither bow nor cow. He waited 11 years, then published his book which allegedly libelled the totem and a system whose standard fare, he argued, is that justice is for the rich and strong whilst judgements are for the poor and weak.

Matters have been joined. Following a petition to police by the law lord, the author was arrested (he says abducted) and charged for an offence under a law said to have been abolished for years in forum said to have been shopped. Anyhow, after outcries by voices powerful and weak, charges reportedly mutated. With the author out of circulation, SANpion and SANyeris fashioned weapons of lawfare. If the torrent of civil and criminal cases in different forums in three weeks (six or more, two per week) during which writer cooled his heels in prison is an indicator, there may be more than enough to come to preoccupy, pauperize and keep the lawyer in and out of courts and prison for some time, not as advocate but as defendant or respondent.

He has survived another petition by SANpion’s camp to the legal Monitor to strike his name off lawyer’s roll. He was adjudged to have carried out the alleged conduct unbecoming of a lawyer not while donning the wig and gown, but in literary endeavour for intellectual property. The failed bid and redirection of petitioner to regular forums likens itself to Goliath’s javelin which was ducked by David.

From detention, ActivistEsq posted word: defiance, and dissociation from pleadings on his behalf in the manner of using the home leg to untangle thorny affairs outside. Free and out, he announced that God spoke once and he heard twice. That it is never easy to fight evil, but that truth, to which he said he had fastidiously kept fidelity and that is both shield and sword, will suffice for him to slay the monster of A’Katunga’s mongers of injustice that holds the citizens victim. Juxtapose that with David’s declaration to Goliath, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, whom you have defied.” And his ominous warning, “This day the LORD will deliver you to me, and I shall strike you down and cut off your head.”

In the Elah Valley conflict between the forces of Israel and Philistia, diminutive David felled Goliath with a slingshot to the skull and slew him. His feat impelled the Israelites to victory over the panicked Philistines who fled and were pursued and vanquished, “as far as Gath and the gates of Ekron.”

The ongoing tussle is however no single combat. It is a war series across several battlefronts featuring potentially many blows and cuts from multiple javelins, swords and daggers of law arrayed against a slingshot with potentially obstructed line of sight to target.

David didn’t employ rhetoric or theatrics to recruit Israelites for his fight with Goliath at any time during the combat. He confronted the giant in spite of them. His victory rallied them to route the fleeing Philistines. According to the author, he wrote not for contemporary readers that he’d warned in a previous book to not die in others’ wars, but to inform future generations that not all are complicit in the mess made of the country for which all pay a heavy price.

These contrasts and dynamics raise questions on the allegorical validity. Is Activist Esq a candidate for hero whose sacrifice ends in vain or self-immolation? One doctrinal implication of the Goliath story is that divine grace helped the righteous or saintly David to surmount the foregone outcome of the mortal combat with the iniquitous giant that no other Israelite without his ‘anointing’ could have.

So, can a lawyer who professes no sainthood and had devised and deployed a ‘legal but unlawful’ tool in aid of his clients be David incarnate? And is the champion-at-law Goliath? Scriptures sometimes blur or shift the delineation between right and wrong when applied outside the realm of faith and spirituality to matters in the rational plane or on the probability of alternative futures for past events. Therefore, is reference to the Goliath story apt, seeing as this is an ongoing story? Or does it invoke other tales? Will it evolve to call other scripture stories or epics as it unfolds?

The ongoing series will play out with mostly lawyers as dramatis personae. To a writer, it offers content for chronicle and commentary. To a patriot, it stirs hope that when the dust settles, not just the judiciary and law enforcement system but the nation itself, may be reformed and repurposed for the delivery of justice and rule of law. To the lawyer, it is a call to duty to minister in the temple of justice in service, hopefully, of the cause of justice.

The weeks and months ahead promise to be momentous for the country’s jurisprudence. Hopefully, the nation will be the better for it.

Concluded.

Suleiman, Essayist, Commentator and Analyst, wrote from Lagos.