I grew up in a village called Omuo in Ekiti State Nigeria dominated with poverty and lack of education, but I was privileged to be fathered by an educated man who vowed and strive to give all his children the best education he could afford.
I saw my father use his education and oratory skill for the best of his community. I saw him stood for the poor in our community in the face of oppression, he defended his community in land and boundary dispute even though he was not a lawyer. From the little age of 6, I would follow him to community meetings and witness how he mediates on disputes and conflicts, I saw our community in panic when he was not available to intervene because there were few of his kind in the community and with this attribute he was conferred with the title of a justice of peace (JP).
Seeing all this attribute of my father from the age of 6, I dreamt of a world where everyone could access justice regardless of their status and I vowed to contribute my quota in making it happen. When I became a lawyer in 2013, it dawned on me that thousands of people who had been unjustly incarcerated needed help, they needed lawyers to defend them, but they could not afford to contract their services.
Even though I was a young lawyer with less than $10 to my name, I took it upon myself to defend as many poor people as I came across. I would go to Prisons and take cases of poor people who had no lawyer to defend them, and I would represent them in court for free. I started doing this with no help from anyone until 2019 when I decided to register the initiative as a nonprofit organization to create a platform where more young lawyers could render their legal services for free. I registered Headfort Foundation in 2019 and today the organization has 325 volunteers across Nigeria with 25 full time employees who are working tirelessly to defend poor unjustly incarcerated inmates. As at today, my team and I has secured the freedom of 455 poor inmates for free.
I dream of a world where everyone regardless of their status can access justice freely and one day at a time, I am making my dream a reality starting from my country, Nigeria.
Nigeria 