Thieving female lawyer escapes jungle justice

Thieving female lawyer escapes jungle justice

Indeed, the times are hard and people will do anything just to survive. Gone are the days when parents forced their children to pursue careers that they considered highly lucrative. And law is one of them. The other money-spinners include medicine, engineering and architecture. Woe betide you if you chose courses like history, Christian Religious Studies or Islamic Religious Studies. But what do we see in Nigeria’s unemployment market today? Doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers are among those pounding the redundancy space in search of elusive jobs.

However, those in the medical profession have found an escape route … they seek for greener pastures overseas. Their counterparts in the law business are not that lucky. The population of lawyers in Nigeria today has outstripped the number of litigations in our courts. In other words, there are many lawyers chasing fewer cases. Besides, the older ones known as Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) have cornered the space, leaving the non-SANs to feed on the crumbs, like charge-and-bail cases, that hardly fill the tummy in these difficult times.

Perhaps, it is in the light of this that an Abuja-based female lawyer decided to develop light fingers last week while commuting in one of the buses shipped into the country by the Federal Government in the wake of the nationwide strike that paralysed socio-economic activities in the first week of January, this year. The lawyer had boarded the bus from AYA, a popular location in Asokoro. Then somewhere between the Police Headquarters and the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation, a female passenger raised an alarm… her purse containing a bundle of N1, 000 notes had vanished from her bag. She had just cashed the money from the bank, so there was no question of the money returning to the source by way of juju.

Enraged passengers quickly ordered a search on all the passengers, insisting that no one should disembark unsearched. After frisking almost all the passengers, there was still no trace of the missing cash. No one suspected the female lawyer, judging by the way she carried herself. But some of the passengers smelt a rat because the lawyer was earlier sighted changing her seat. She was previously sitting next to the female passenger who had been robbed. So, she was asked to explain why she left her original seat. That was when she announced to them that she was a lawyer and such accusation should not be extended to her. They insisted that she too must be searched, in the belief that lawyers are well schooled in the art of lie-telling in the face of naked truth and that anyone who trades in lies must be prone to stealing. On a closer look at the floor of the bus, they sighted the missing purse lying between the seat separating the lawyer and the complainant. When the purse was unzipped, the cash was gone.

Then one of the passengers screamed at the lawyer: “I put it to you, surrender yourself for a search!” She screamed back and warned them that they risked being sued for wrongful accusation and defamation of character. As if to rattle her accusers, she reached for her cell phone and began to drop names but the passengers were unfazed by her antics. They yanked her bag off her grip, turned it upside down and inside out but no cash fell out. Being a fellow woman, the victim was asked to frisk the learned suspect. She did, and discovered that she had padded her right thigh with the missing cash held in place with the skin-tight she wore under her skirt. She squeezed it and raised an alarm. Lined inside her skin-tight, which most women wear under their gowns and skirts should they want to open up to climb okada, were the stolen cash, the exact amount that was declared missing.

After a feeble resistance from the lawyer, followed by commotion and curses from the angry crowd, the lawyer climbed down from her high horse and begged for forgiveness even as the angry crowd rooted for jungle justice.

“You are a disgrace to the law profession!” The crowd screamed after her as she alighted from the bus at the Eagle Square, wishing that the ground would be kind enough to open up and swallow her.