Nigeria’s Crisis of Public Intellect

At the recent Nigerian Bar Association’s annual conference in Port Harcourt, Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan or VDM, one of Nigeria’s most famous social media personalities, was invited to speak to lawyers about national security. Not because he is a lawyer,  security expert,  military strategist, political scientist,  scholar of conflict, and certainly not because he has spent years researching Nigeria’s security architecture in the way that academics, journalists, policy experts and practitioners have. He was invited because he is VDM: an internet sensation whose influence extends far beyond the social media spaces where he built his following.

The 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association, held in Port Harcourt from August 21 to 28 under the theme “Beyond Limits,” featured a panel titled “Known Gunmen.” VDM spoke about his experiences visiting communities affected by killings and insecurity, arguing that there were no truly “unknown” gunmen because security agencies knew where many perpetrators were. He also made serious allegations, including claims that government and security officials benefit financially from insecurity, that army generals had received increased salaries because of the worsening security situation, and that cattle were being used to launder government money. VDM offered no evidence to substantiate his claims.

One of Nigeria’s most high ranking lawyers, Femi Falana, SAN, criticised the NBA for inviting VDM, arguing that discussions about national security should involve people with demonstrable expertise in the field. He suggested that previous NBA conferences had featured people who had “paid their dues” and were capable of engaging lawyers intellectually. VDM responded by describing the criticism as classist and insisting that his contribution was based on experience rather than books. He argued that he had been to places that many of the experts invoked had never been to and that he was speaking from the perspective of ordinary Nigerians experiencing insecurity.

Security is a sensitive matter, especially in a country where terrorism, kidnapping, and ethnic and religious violence are rampant. Some of VDM’s statements were full of misinformation and ethnic bias.

There is a difference between bringing someone into a conversation because they have a valuable perspective and treating them as an authority on the subject itself. Experience can tell you what happened; it does not necessarily tell you why it happened.

That distinction matters when the subject is national security. Being present in communities affected by violence is valuable, and so is speaking to victims and documenting what you see, but neither automatically qualifies one to understand the political, economic, or institutional causes of Nigeria’s insecurity. An allegation about military salaries, government corruption, or the financing of violence does not become fact because the person making it has a large audience or has personally visited an affected community. That requires evidence.

The real question is not simply why the NBA invited VDM, it is why someone like him has become one of the people Nigerian individuals and institutions increasingly look to for a public voice on serious national questions.

VDM is not the first person to occupy this space. Before him, there was Ahmed Isah, popularly known as Ordinary President, an activist and radio personality who anchors the popular show on radio, and now TV, Brekete Family. Ahmed Isah built a massive fan base by being an informal judge for everyday people. Using his show, he solved family quarrels, influenced police matters, and even got justice for people who had been fighting an issue for years. Many of the cases he handled belonged to the real courts, but because of the clogged system, people did not mind getting their judgements from him instead. The common denominator is not expertise, it is visibility and the system that allows unqualified people to judge matters they have no jurisdiction on and talk about sensitive topics that they are not experts in.

Everyone is entitled to participate in public discourse. The problem begins when the size of an audience takes the place of credibility, evidence, experience or expertise. Nigeria has a peculiar system of intellectual credentialing. A person’s voice can be regarded as  expert opinion because they are popular or have a large following. They can become authorities because more than enough people quote them. They can become  thought leaders because millions of people watch their videos. Eventually, the follower count itself becomes a kind of qualification.

Social media has made this particularly easy because it rewards confidence far more consistently than it rewards accuracy. Complicated issues are difficult to make viral because nuance does not always survive the algorithm. A careful explanation of the historical, political, and economic causes of insecurity is considerably less exciting than a confident declaration by VDM that someone is secretly responsible for it. The algorithm does not care which one is correct. It cares which one keeps the people watching. This has created an environment in which being interesting can become more valuable than being informed.

The problem goes deeper than social media. Nigeria has a serious deficit of public intellectual culture. That does not mean the country has no intellectuals, it has plenty. There are academics researching insecurity, economists studying corruption and public finance, political scientists analysing state failure, journalists reporting from conflict zones, lawyers working on human rights and constitutional questions, and researchers producing serious work on almost every major problem confronting the country. What is missing is the bridge between those people and the public.

Nigeria has not become intellectually empty. It has become increasingly bad at making intellectualism visible.

Researchers and journalists can spend months investigating a topic and struggle to compete for attention with a six-minute video from someone who never conducted an investigation on the issue discussed.

There was a time when newspapers, magazines, universities, publishing houses, and professional institutions played a much greater role in determining who became part of Nigeria’s intellectual conversation. Editors decided which arguments deserved space. Publishers decided which books reached readers. Universities produced scholars who were then invited onto television and radio to explain national events. Professional associations convened with experts on particular issues.

Today, journalists cannot simply wait for the public to come find their work. If the bridge does not exist, they have to help build it, and that means learning the ways people like VDM have mastered — short-form video and a willingness to be a personality and not just a byline. Playing to the algorithm does not have to mean abandoning facts and rigor, it means repackaging it for today’s audiences.

The digital revolution has dismantled the act of gatekeeping, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It has allowed journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to bypass institutions and speak directly to the public. But it has also removed many of the filters that distinguished expertise from personal opinion.

Now, everyone can be a commentator, and the algorithm decides who gets heard.

This is why the VDM phenomenon should not simply be dismissed as Nigerians being gullible or unserious.  He speaks directly and confidently, in a language that his audience understands. He goes to places where many public officials do not go, he confronts institutions that many Nigerians already distrust. Most importantly, he occupies the space between ordinary people and powerful institutions at a time when that space desperately needs someone to occupy it. His influence is real, even when his analysis is questionable.

The answer is not to tell Nigerians that they should only listen to professors, lawyers, and academics. That would simply reproduce the same elitism that contributed to this problem. Serious thinkers need to become better at communicating outside their institutions, and institutions need to become better at making their knowledge accessible. Journalists, researchers, and academics cannot complain that the public is listening to influencers if they are unwilling or unable to compete for the public’s attention.

But the answer also cannot be to pretend that everyone is equally qualified to explain everything, and this should have been made obvious at the NBA conference.

There is nothing inherently wrong with inviting a non-lawyer to speak at a gathering of lawyers. In fact, there is considerable value in bringing perspectives from outside the profession. But when the subject is national security, an institution as influential as the NBA has a responsibility to distinguish between someone who can only offer a questionable and uninformed personal perspective and someone who is equipped to provide a rigorous analysis of the subject.