Disclaimer: This essay is a work of fiction, inspired by real events, but altered and embellished for literary purposes. Any resemblance to actual individuals, living or dead, or specific events, is purely coincidental and unintentional. The characters, events, and settings depicted in this essay are entirely fictional and not meant to be taken as factual. The author does not intend to harm or defame any individual or group, and any interpretation or inference to the contrary is unintentional.
Regardless of faith or lack thereof, one may not but occasionally recall some of the scintillating stories of practical or scientific improbability in religious literature. The timeless collections serve endless melodrama and miracle. Yet as credible or fabulous as they may seem to faithful Abrahams or doubting Thomases, the accounts serve multifarious purposes: they lull tired but restless bodies to sleep, stimulate curiosity, infuse fear, entertain minds, titillate imaginations, teach morals, nurture spirits, inculcate piety, fuel superstition, or rationalize good over evil or vice versa. They also offer the believer a choice between redemption and damnation.
Scriptural stories can inspire souls to noble aspiration and action, or to gallantry and glory. A favourite is the Goliath story, told of an epic fight between the Philistine giant and the Israelite David. It is the stuff of legends and has been retold and woven around other stories over the ages to highlight contests of mismatched odds. It teaches invaluable lessons on the potential for courage to emerge from unlikely quarters and for victory to be had over seemingly invincible behemoths by underdogs on just causes.
The Philistines, warlike settlers of the coastal plains of the Levant in today’s West Asia, who had come to war against Saul, first king of Israel, were portrayed as proud and iniquitous; whilst the Israelites were depicted as righteous underdogs. They competed for turf and resources, leading to that epic battle.
In commentary regarding the saga involving SANpion, an octogenarian legal juggernaut, who bestrides the legal profession and law like a colossus, and ActivistEsq, lawyer, orator and author, following the latter’s publication of a book in A’Katunga and on Amazion that allegedly libeled the former; reference was made to the bible story. This essay contemplates potential parallels of the David vs Goliath combat and the extant tussle as a literary exercise.
Goliath had taunted the Israelites and mocked their God twice daily for forty days. He challenged them to put forward their champion to fight him in single combat. None dared, until David arrived the Israelites’ camp to deliver supplies to his brothers on his father’s errand. The clash of the giant in armour who bore shield, javelin, sword and daggers, and the Israelite lad with stick and stones is, to say the least, improbable. Goliath was until the mortal combat the Philistine champion while David was a mere shepherd boy who showed no fear and engaged on his own terms. He had a rudimentary but powerful weapon to which the giant was unaccustomed. Goliath must have felt diminished by the ludicrous confrontation. He demanded, “What is that stick for? Am I a dog that you come to chase away?”, and dared, “Come to me, and I will feed your body to birds and wild animals”.
Consider the controversial book vis a vis David’s stand against Goliath and invariably, the Philistines. It shook and threatens to overturn or break the table of the judiciary and legal profession The lawyer wrote that the country’s law enforcement and criminal justice system is corrupt. He contended that the system itself is criminal and so incapable of delivering justice. And that only concerted patriotic action and systemic regeneration can save it from its putrefaction and citizens from its vice grip since, he argued, the institution is incapable of self-regulation.
He didn’t stop there like others had before him. He did that which if it be not death wish, is an extreme act of courage. He alleged that the undisputed champion-at-law corrupted a panel of Supreme Forum justices to procure in 2014 a fraudulent review of the apex court’s 2013 ruling in service of his client. A mere mortal, he dared gods to walk where angels tremble: he named very senior lawyers and judges that he said were allegedly malfeasant.
It is apt to state here that this writer is in full accord with the right of a purported defamed party to guard and defend name and reputation, and to require an alleged defamer to prove allegations, failing which he should redress.
SANpion and proxies rose and charged at author and book; and detonated, perhaps inadvertently, what was until then only potentially a subsonic cruise missile. Consequently, the launch jet engines were boosted in the ascent phase to deploy as rocket motors. Propeller and payload mutated mid-trajectory into supersonic ICBM to explode as Amazion #1 bestseller.
The effort that followed, to censor book and author, calls to mind the Ayatollah-Rushdie affair. Ayatollah Khomeini’s February 14, 1989 fatwah over his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses” did not cut short Salman Rushdie’s life or career or fame, or the book’s spread beyond perhaps in Iran. The Ayatollah passed away under 4 months later on June 3, 1989; but Rushdie lives, surviving attacks, including a stabbing in 2022; and has since written many more novels, essays, and non-fiction to solidify his reputation as a literary figure. His fifteenth novel, “Victory City” was published in February 2023, and more recently his autobiographical “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” in April 2024.
Men who become gods are not divine. They are imperfect and not immune from ego, error and sin. Yet, the gods are revered not only for benevolence but also for wrath. Their punishment can be severe for transgressors. So, he that will waylay a god or another for whom he is no match is warned to be ready to be brutalised, win or lose. On the other hand, the indignant is cautioned to bear incontinence stoically like a masquerade would a fart lest he be demystified as man behind mask and not ancestral spirit invoked from the dead.
Someone must tell the world’s principalities of the futility of muscling truth or expression, and urge robust confrontation to expose falsehood instead of flogging a speaker. And where truth is unverifiable, to engage to defang or mitigate damage, and reflect on and redress foibles. ‘Drop your luggage and repack’ is not ‘Drop your load and share’.
Questions: Will Amazion obey A’Katungan court order to end sale of its Bestseller book in extra-jurisdictional and extra-terrestrial markets to a global audience? Can the ruling be enforced in light of Amazion’s position that the author and book have not violated its policies? What of the bootleg supply chains that fill the gap for prohibition? Can memory be erased from all that have read a censored book?
Apparently, SANpion had defeated ActivistEsq in an appeal over land 11 years earlier, allegedly with ways and means which the lawyer said slapped him awake to the brazenness of judicial rot. He allegedly attempted to get him disbarred which ended in the lawyer suing for libel. To clear doubts as to who is Champion-at-law, the senior also allegedly denied junior his day in court and the fruit of his suit by exertion of influence. The case was dismissed pre-trial and he didn’t discover until 9 months after the fact, wrote the orator.
A lad clobbered six times is enjoined to take it philosophically seeing as it is the cultural priviledge of the elder to beat or cheat the young. He got disillusioned but will neither bow nor cow. He waited, then published his book which allegedly libeled the totem and a system whose standard fare, he argued, is that the rich and strong buy justice whilst the poor and weak get judgement. But who does not know that justice and judgement are not the same things?
Matters have been joined. Following a petition to police by the law lord, the author was arrested (he says abducted) and charged for an offence under a law said to have been abolished for years in forum said to have been shopped. Do law lords and enforcers forget that an abolished law is no source of crime? Or is it corruption or incompetence or impunity or a combination of the drivers of the decadence the author alleged? Anyhow, after outcries by voices powerful and weak, charges reportedly mutated. With the author out of circulation, SANpion and SANyeris fashioned weapons of lawfare. If the torrent of civil and criminal cases in different forums in three weeks (six or more, two per week) during which writer cooled his heels in prison is an indicator, there may be more than enough to come to preoccupy, pauperize and keep the lawyer in and out of courts and prison for sometime, not as advocate but as defendant or respondent.
He has survived another petition by SANpion’s camp to the legal Monitor to strike his name off lawyer’s roll. He was adjudged to have carried out the alleged conduct unbecoming a lawyer not while donning the wig and gown, but in literary endeavour for intellectual property. The failed bid and redirection of petitioner to regular forums likens itself to Goliath’s javelin which was ducked by David.
From detention, ActivistEsq posted word: defiance, and dissociation from pleadings on his behalf in the manner of using the home leg to untangle thorny affairs outside. Free and out, he announced that God spoke once and he heard twice. That it is never easy to fight evil, but that truth, to which he said he had fastidiously kept fidelity and that is both shield and sword, will suffice for him to slay the monster of A’Katunga’s mongers of injustice that holds the citizens victim. Juxtapose that with David’s declaration to Goliath,“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, whom you have defied”. And his ominous warning, “This day the LORD will deliver you to me, and I shall strike you down and cut off your head”.
In the Elah Valley conflict between the forces of Israel and Philistia, diminutive David felled Goliath with a slingshot to the skull and slew him. His feat impelled the Israelites to victory the Philistines panicked, fled and were pursued and vanquished, “as far as Gath and the gates of Ekron”.
The ongoing tussle is however no single combat. It is a war series across several battlefronts featuring potentially many blows and cuts from multiple javelins, swords and daggers of law arrayed against a slingshot with potentially obstructed view of target. David didn’t employ rhetoric or theatrics to recruit Israelites for his fight with Goliath at any time during the combat. He confronted the giant in spite of them. His victory rallied them to route the fleeing Philistines. According to the author, he wrote not for contemporary readers that he’d warned previously to not die in others’ wars, but to inform future generations that not all are complicit in the mess made of the country for which all pay a heavy price.
These contrasts and dynamics raise questions on the allegorical validity. Is ActivistEsq a candidate for hero whose sacrifice ends in vain or self-immolation? One doctrinal implication of the Goliath story is that divine grace helped the righteous or saintly David to surmount the foregone outcome of the mortal combat with the iniquitous giant that no other Israelite without his ‘anointing’ could have achieved. So, can a lawyer who professes no sainthood be David incarnate? And is the champion-at-law Goliath? Scriptures sometimes blur or shift the delineation between right and wrong when applied outside the realm of faith and spirituality to matters in the rational plane or on the probability of alternative futures for past events. Therefore, is reference to the Goliath story apt, seeing as this is an ongoing story? Or does it invoke other tales? Will it evolve to call other epics as it unfolds?
The ongoing series will play out in courts and with mostly lawyers as dramatis personae. To a writer, it offers content for chronicle and commentary. To a patriot, it stirs hope that when the dust settles, not just the judiciary and law enforcement, but the nation itself, may be reformed and repurposed for the delivery of justice and rule of law. To the lawyer, it is a call to duty to minister in the temple of justice in service, hopefully, of the cause of justice.
The weeks and months ahead promise to be momentous for the country’s jurisprudence. Hopefully, the nation will be the better for it.
Tunji Suleiman, essayist, commentator, analyst, and Security Monitor Editorial Director wrote from Lagos.
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