'Just How Learned Are We?' By Adesina Ogunlana

It took quite a while for the bubble to burst. For Sampson Bamgbose. The gentleman fraudster was in business as a legal practitioner for almost 19 years; even though he never trained as a lawyer nor was he called to the bar.
And was he a successful practitioner? No doubt. Information has it that the Attorney at Lie has a big “law chambers”, and two or three cars including a Jeep. To cap it all, he was in Ikorodu his last place of operation, a leading light of the bar! I mean, this was a chap who in year 2007 was a co-chair of the Law Week Programme of the Ikorodu Bar and had the opportunity and privilege of chairing a Disciplinary Panel of the same Ikorodu Bar!
The question should be asked how learned are the members of the legal profession? In fact are we learned at all? For if we are learned as we trumpet about, how come that a fellow who never studied law at any level could have done so well for himself, albeit illegally and for so long in the bar without detection for close to two decades?
Bamgbose was not a quiet felon who practiced his deceit silently. In fact he was like the old but extremely virile Pa Masaba of the 86 wives fame! Masaba was not a closet polygamy or a mass marriager! Pa Masaba took all his wives, one after the ardour, sorry, one after the other. For more than thirty years, he demonstrated his women or wives’ accumulation prowess in public. He did not practice his trade in the dark or in the clouds!
Before his down fall, Bamgbose must have given congratulated himself, more than a million times over his ingenuity, in successfully deceiving members of the bar. It is no big deal fooling lay men, to think of one as a legal practitioner, or a doctor, or an engineer. An effective pose hardly goes beyond donning the appropriate professional apparel, ‘blowing’ the appropriate parlances and jargons in proper English and above all wearing a cool and confident mien.
But one needs a superior intellect and act to fool professionals, to the level that they accept the fraudster as a good penny. I am only on a supposition however. Really how many truly certified lawyers are possessed of superior intellect even common sense or a sharp native intelligence? All too often one comes across qualified lawyers who behave foolishly, who are fooled easily by street wise clients and conduct themselves so sloppily in court that a judge may be tempted to order their caning.
For example I have come across lawyers who didn’t know why they were in court. I have seen those who did not know their clients and even more amazingly who did not know whether they were representing the defendants or the plaintiffs!
Only last week before Dada J of the Ikeja High Court I saw a lawyer who asserted strongly that “this is my first time in this court for this case” only for him to accept the very next minute upon proof shown by the court that he had appeared in court, at least once previously in the matter.
That Bamgbose could survive, excel even, for so long in the bar, suggests that possibly our trade is not all heavy intellectual stuff as we like to believe and make others believe.
I suspect something even worse that there are collaborators who for long knew that Bamgbose was just an imitation yet decided to keep their peace. Yet how can any learned man know of an abuse of his own profession, by an impostor and yet keep quiet? Such learned fellows should be regarded as ‘participis criminis’ in the “Barrister” Bamgbose scam. They provided the foliage and fauna for the imp to hide and flourish, or should we say, fester?
At the rate the scam was going, with a bit of more derring - do, Bamgbose could well have ended up in the inner bar or even on the bench!
And how ghastly that would have been- to have a fake judge or a fake silk. But then this is ‘Naija’ - anything including Bamgbose can happen.