I am Taiwo AKINLAMI, your Roving Public Interest Lawyer, reporting from the land of lockdown, in the county of quarantine, gated by COVID-19.

I guess, I have been dealing with writer’s fatigue or block all day. The symptoms are simple. You know it when words fail to cooperate with you in expressing your thoughts. I think it is simply, lack of utterance.

This piece with which I struggle to write may not finish today, though I am using all the tricks in and out of the books to surmount this invisible enemy of writer’s fatigue.

So, lest you think, it is unto writer’s fatigue, I seek to deliever your attention and disappear, let me defend myself a bit

You see, myself and this problem do not get along very well. I mean I do not allow it to dictate the direction of my writing exercise. I just write.

But do you know what I have noticed just now, this one I am dealing with seems to a stubborn strand. I am tempted to pray the Gethsemane prayer: “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.’

For the cup to pass over me means you will not have access to the contents of my diary this week. I don’t think this is the will of God concerning the matter.

Let my fate be like that of the One, who voiced the Gethsemane prayer and still went ahead to drink the cut to an overflow.

Can you imagine? The writer’s fatigue seems to have had its way. At least, I am now sufficiently distracted from the reason why I keep this diary. Well that is the spirit of OBITER😁.

Well, let me see if I can use the time and space left to address VITAL, now that OBITER has done it’s worst.

My roving eyes caught the newspaper and Social Media story of a judge in Cross River State, who was alleged to have presided over a Jungle Judiciary.

It is the judiciary of the order of the hobbesian state of nature. Milord was said to have ordered the battering and pounding of his official driver, employing the legal procedure of being brutish, nasty and short.

The children of my lord to who the order were reportedly given were not disobedient to his balcony voice as they pounced on their prey and beat dignity out of him for insulting one of the members of their family. My roving eyes caught the picture of the beaten man as released by his family members.

Now, the judiciary of the state is said to be looking into the matter. The judge seems to have gone into isolation or has been quarantined by her family due to her alleged jungle order

But the husband has been available to tell their own side of the sore story. He did not deny the unbecoming case. He only claimed that the family of allegedly assaulted driver did not consult them before making the matter public. He said, ‘my brother, what I can tell you is that it was a domestic matter. It was one of my sons that was involved and not two as claimed in that video.’

The husband, who is also a lawyer sounds to me like an Artful Dodger, who is also trying to be clever by half.

Anyway, I am a Roving Public Interest Lawyer and not a judge. Therefore I cannot judge this matter lest I also find myself donning the wig of the jungle and the gown of overstepping my bounds. I only lawfully bring out VITAL out of our daily OBITER.

My concern today is to bring this to your attention that we may continue to pressure the powers-that-be in Cross River State to get to the root of this matter.

Those who should know better must do better. Those appointed to uphold, preserve and defend the rule of law cannot be seen to summarily execute it on the platter of impunity, grandstanding over its grave, laying the wreath of deception or Artful Dodging, with an epitaph, ‘here lies the remains of the rule of law, murdered by those who swore to defend it and who now thinks they are above it.’

To the family Otu Edem, thank you for speaking up. You did not only speak for your brother, you spoke for justice.

Do stay SAFE, STRONG and INSPIRED.

Here is your Dearly Beloved Roving Public Lawyer, Taiwo AKINLAMI

(C) 2020 Taiwo AKINLAMI
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