Death, with all the vehemence of its inevitability, had coming knocking before. The latch, as it were, always managed to stay in place. But not this time. Death crashed the door and cornered its quarry, as one day it will corner us all.
Death took from us the physical presence of a remarkable man. But that’s all it can do. It’s true that we will no longer see Babatunde Oshilaja, *(the atari ajanaku)* in this world. It is also true that his legacy lives on with us; seated here among us and written into the annals of posterity especially in the legal profession.
When Babatunde Oshilaja ran away from his hometown Iperu due to lack of prospect to further his education, because his father lacked the financial capacity to do so, not many would have thought that Habibu, *(his sunnah as a Muslim at birth)* would come to be a legal colossus in no distant future. The escape itself was daring, bearing all the classic hallmarks of what would come to define the man. Nothing was too unknown.
In Ibadan where he ran, he became many things: apprentice car painter, motor park boy, warehouse attendant. He slept in the full glare of the elements wearing the two trousers, the ethics of nighttime at Ogunpa Motor Park where he found himself. These were low, low times in the formation of one of Nigeria’s most formidable and fierce advocate. He never stopped reading. The one other habit that would come to define him. When finally his luck turned, he was ready. And his luck did turn.
From Ibadan, he would later move to Lagos in the company of some friends. Unfortunately, he couldn’t secure employment as a clerical staff like most of them, because he lacked secondary education. Never mind that he could command good spoken and written English his sustained trademark even till he breathed his last in practice of Law.
Because Babatunde Oshilaja could hold his own amongst his illustrious friends, no one guessed he was essentially a mere gateman at Apapa where most of them got employed as clerical staff at the Nigerian Ports Authority, a secret further buried beneath the books they saw him tot about.
He ingeniously learnt from these friends how to prepare and sit for the London GCE and spent whatever money he earned on books and countless trips to the library. When his O Level results were released, he made them in flying colours.
Finally, when he was qualified to seek admission into a university he opted and chose the University of Ife. At Ife, he learned from the famous Professor Sam Aluko, Head of the Department of Economics that he could not study his favoured Economics for the lack of Mathematics. He had read Oyebola and Aromolaran’s *Economics of West Africa* from cover to cover as he had done J.L. Hanson’s *A Textbook of Economics*, both staple texts in Nigeria’s economics education at that point in time. At the Central Library, Lagos, he had vanquished Adam Smith’s *The Wealth of Nations*. Would it all come to nought? Professor Aluko sent the crest-fallen Babatunde Oshilaja over to the nearby Faculty of Law where the hand of fate through Professor Ijalaye was fortuitously waiting for him. Thus was Oshilaja offered a place in the Class of ’74.
Back home in Iperu, Babatunde Oshilaja was presumed dead. He had not been seen in something close to a decade.
There was more adversity to come, all surmounted with aplomb. His story, in the final analysis, was impressive bordering on the miraculous. It is like writing a script for a movie, typical of that genre with a fierce determination of the hero to surmount impracticable odds. It is the type of story that we all love, dripping with dramatic tension, great odds arrayed against its protagonist, eliciting from us all great emotional investment. Such stories always reach a breaking point that the *deus ex machina* would intervene. This is the point at which the protagonist’s luck breaks.
In the final analysis, Babatunde Oshilaja was a deeply complicated man, as anyone who has associated with him can attest.
I have an everlasting imperishable impression about him, being his junior and Associate in the Legal profession for over twenty-five years, I can attest without equivocation that he was in a class of his own when it comes to Advocacy. He was an active volcano ready to erupt at the slightest trigger. He was a Counsel to behold and admired in Court even by adversaries,
Babatunde Oshilaja waged and fought many wars and battles in the Courtrooms. Notable was his being the first Lawyer in Nigeria to argue and persuade the High Court of Ekiti State in 2007 to find jurisdiction in Section 188 of the Nigerian Constitution 1999 (as amended), an obscure and arcane exercise. Oshilaja’s ground breaking feat was performed in the purported irregular impeachment saga of the erstwhile Abiodun Aluko, Deputy to Governor Ayodele Fayose. The matter was challenged and contested in the celebrated unreported case of ABIODUN ALUKO V. HON. JUSTICE OYEBISI OMOLEYE, (Chief Judge, Ekiti State) & Ors. The precedent and ruling in Oshilaja’s case later formed the basis followed in the locus classicus of INAKOJU V. SPEAKER, OYO STATE HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY.
Although Babatunde Oshilaja escaped the material reality of his circumstances, he could not escape their influence. His peculiar circumstances fed his air of invincibility, his frightening courage, his sense of detachment and his fierce loyalty to the pursuit of knowledge.
Depending on where you found him, he could be either a formidable ally or a formidable adversary, and both on the same day. The legal profession in this country is poorer for his loss.
Gani Faniyi is a legal practitioner based in Lagos
