A SHOW OF SOLIDARITY: Chief Ozoani, SAN, Donates Cash Gift to Assault Victim, Ms. Uduak Adam

Following the news of the mob attack and near-lynching of a 25-year old female young lawyer, MS. UDUAK ADAM on Thursday September 14, 2023, the prominent lawyer and current Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association’s (NBA) Welfare Committee, Chief Emeka Ozoani, SAN, has expressed solidarity with Ms. Adam. He also made a cash donation of N250,000.00 (two hundred and fifty thousand naira) to the victim as she continues her recuperation from her injuries.

NEWSWIRE Law & Events Magazine’s correspondent reports that Chief Ozoani was represented at the presentation of the cash gift, which took place on Tuesday, October 10, 2023, by the national Welfare Secretary of the NBA, Chinyere Obasi, Esq. and a member of the Committee, Adekunle Olaofe, Esq., as well as Gloria Ireka, Esq., Editor-in-Chief of NEWSWIRE Law & Events magazine.

• Ms. Adam, a law graduate of the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus (UNEC) and the Enugu Campus of the Nigerian Law School, was attacked and nearly lynched by a mob at Aborishade Street in the Surulere district of Lagos, while searching for accommodation in a bid to alleviate the discomfort of her prolonged state of near-homelessness.

According to Ms. Adam, she was at the second building she had been referred to, after interacting with a group of neighborhood boys at the first building she’d gone to (after inspecting it and finding it wanting) when a woman accosted her, asking her if she was the person that just came by the first building.

When the young lawyer answered in the affirmative, the woman raised an alarm, accusing Ms. Adam of ‘using juju’ (i. e. deploying supernatural powers) to cause the woman’s 14 year-old son to disappear. The woman referenced another woman who, she said, told her she had personally ‘witnessed ‘ the ‘incident’. This so-called ‘witness’ had described to her how Ms. Adam had given her alleged victim a sachet of ‘pure water’, to drink, upon which the boy had immediately vanished into thin air!

The woman, Ms. Adam said, left briefly after making this accusation – and returned shortly with a huge crowd, who forced the lawyer to sit on the bare ground as they began beating her, all the time shouting the Yoruba words for ‘thief’ and ‘spiritual kidnapper’.

They made her open her phone password to check her most recent contacts. Finding nothing incriminating, they nevertheless proceeded to run their hands all over her body apparently in search of hidden charms – all the time beating her with whips and telling her to ‘confess’ her ‘crime’ and tell them where she’d kept the boy.

At a point in the crude interrogation, she said, the mob took her to a house said to be the base of the local OPC (Oodua People’s Congress) branch.

The more the stunned, disbelieving young lady protested her innocence, the more torture the crowd and the OPC operatives meted on her, telling her she wasn’t going to leave that place alive unless she confessed. At a point, Ms. Adam said, one of her assailants tried to remove one of her toenails as she struggled to remain conscious, delirious from the excruciating pain. All this time, Ms. Adam said, the mob kept taking pictures and pictures of her and her ordeal and apparently posting them online.

It was at this point that she saw, in a haze, two uniformed men appear on the scene and break through the crowd to get to her. One of them, she said, happened to come from her home state of Akwa Ibom. Even as the crowd and the OPC operatives angrily protested the intervention of the police (saying THEY had already found the young woman guilty, and that police would only cause her to go scot-free) more police officers, some of them reinforcements from other divisions, arrived and eventually took the bleeding young lawyer to their station.

They also invited the two women – the mother of the ‘missing’ boy and her ‘informant’ – to the station to make their respective statements.

It was at this point, Ms. Adam said, that the ‘missing’ boy returned. Apparently, after directing the young house-seeking lady to the second location, he had gone off to play football at a nearby field. There was no further interaction between them, he said under questioning, and no pure water. Upon being told by someone who saw him on the field that a lady was being lynched for ‘kidnapping’ him by spiritual means, he had taken the first okada and rushed over.

Even as some in the crowd, who had come to the station were still demanding that she be released to them, the boy’s mother and her relatives began pleading for forgiveness, upon which she and others were taken into custody. The case was charged to court on the day after the incident (Friday, September 15) but has been adjourned Monday, October 30 2023.

Since the incident, the young lawyer had undergone treatment for head, face and other bodily injuries, and for examinations (including x-ray tests for internal bleeding) at a number of hospitals. She is now recuperating at a safe location and still hoping to recover fully, and to secure a better job and her own accommodation.

Thanking Chief Emeka Ozoani, SAN for his generous gesture, Uduak Adam use the occasion of the cash presentation to refute reports currently trending online on legal blogs and other outlets concerning her ordeal (in which she was quoted as accusing the NBA of ‘abandoning’ her).

On the contrary, Ms. Adam said, she had been visited by individuals and by corporate entities like the NBA Lagos branch, etc. She had also received phone calls from individuals and groups based in both Lagos and Uyo, in her home state of Akwa Ibo (and in one instance even from the NBA President himself – in the person of Mr. YC Maikyau, SAN). In some of these interactions, she’d been asked if she’d been offered money and how much. To which she had answered candidly that, no, she hadn’t received money apart from personal donations – such as from the Third Vice President NBA National, Mrs. Mandy Asagba, and her own boss, Eno Mbanugo.

She felt compelled to make that clarification and set the record straight, she said, not to denigrate any person or group within the NBA, but in order not to discourage any potential benefactors who might want to reach out to her, especially in respect to her battle to return to good health and, more importantly, her on-going quest for a befitting job and a decent accommodation of her own. She therefore called on the authors of the online ‘abandonment ‘ stories to retract them forthwith.