One afternoon in November 1994, I found myself in the modest law chambers of the indomitable Kanmi Ishola-Osobu in Yaba. The air inside his office was thick with cigarette smoke and memory. A dense fog of history, marked by radical protest, resistance, and trial transcripts inked with defiance, hung there, too. 

The walls seemed to hum with past declarations, legal arguments, and the thunder of dissent. Our conversation began within those modest four walls and ended hours later on the backstreets of Isale Eko, as twilight descended slowly into the city’s eyes. Kanmi was restless in spirit and thought. His big eyes, always searching, darted around like a hawk mapping early dusk. 

He was many things at once: a lawyer, chronicler, rebel, street philosopher. Most Nigerians knew him as Fela’s lawyer, the man who defended the unconventional with principled orthodoxy. But to me, he was something more. He had the historian’s passion and the griot’s cadences. He recalled the histories of radical movements, from Harlem to Brixton, and Paris in between, from Accra to Algiers, and from Kingston to Ibadan, with precision and reverence. His words danced through decades, leaping between continents. He could summon images of Stokely Carmichael one moment and pivot to Zikists the next, drawing connections that made the past feel urgent and alive.

That day, admirers kept interrupting us as we walked the back streets, which snaked between old Brazilian architecture. They called him names that felt like titles: “People’s Lawyer!” “Baba the Law!” He nodded, waved, and laughed. Then, like a man tracing his place in the encyclopedia of life, he would return to the sentence he had left unfinished. He never skipped a beat. He was methodical in his iconoclasm. A discipline in his digressions. 

He was a conversationalist in the truest sense, and not just one who merely spoke for the sake of it, but one who listened, who shifted between cadences and swiftly reflected on them. There was no vanity in his brilliance. Just memory, smoke, and conviction. That day, one thing lingered more than anything else. We spoke of Thurgood Marshall, the American jurist, whose life and struggle he deeply admired. He was planning a lecture in his memory and had invited me to help frame it. He saw in Marshall a lawyer-warrior whose battlefield was the court. 

Then, pausing between the drags of his cigarette, he turned to me and said, almost in a whisper: “Mahmud, activism used to mean something. It meant courage. Sacrifice. Conviction. It meant risking everything to speak truth to power. To stand in front of the state’s fire and not flinch. To walk into the storm of injustice without blinking. Even when it was dangerous. Even when it was unpopular. Even when it meant walking alone”. He paused again. His eyes searched the sky, or maybe the past. Then, he added, with a long sigh, “But, that was then”. The words slipped from his lips the way smoke slipped from his nostrils: slow, deliberate, and heavy. 

I have carried those words ever since. And just a few days ago, they returned, unbidden. I found myself thinking of Kanmi again. Of his brilliance, his iconoclasm, his laughter. The friendship we forged, not just in shared glasses of lager or legal debates, but in the small, invisible things. The verbs of principles, I like to call them. The gestures and habits that shape who we are. They form the lightning attributes of our humanity. It is those small things that return to me most vividly now. 

The way he tapped his cigarette on the ashtray before making a crucial point. The way he quoted old judgments as if they were poems. The way he invoked the names of the dead: Kwame Nkrumah, Mwalimu Nyerere, Leopold Senghor, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Sekou Toure, Amilcar Cabral, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, not in mourning; but in invocation. As if they still breathed, still judged, still waited for our reports on the struggle. 

And now, that phrase: “But, that was then”. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It was an indictment. A quiet mourning of a time when activism wasn’t hashtagged, but lived. When sacrifice wasn’t symbolic, but real. When the street was the court and consciences were on trial. He was not romantic about the struggle. He had seen its costs too clearly. He knew what jail smelled like. What betrayal felt like. But still, he believed. Still, he bore the burden. 

Today, I wonder if that era is truly gone for good, and if remembering it isn’t a misguided venture. Have we traded courage for convenience? Sacrifice for spectacle? Do we now perform dissent instead of living it? Do we risk anything anymore? Kanmi didn’t ask these questions directly. He lived them and provided answers in his iconoclastic ways. His life was an answer. One that didn’t shout, but lingered like a shadow on the wall, like the last puff of smoke in a quiet room. That’s the thing about memory. It isn’t passive. It doesn’t just remember, it confronts. It asks: “Where do you stand? What do you believe? What are you willing to lose?” And sometimes it whispers, “Do you still remember who you were?” 

I do.

I remember who I was that November afternoon in 1994. A younger man. A restless soul. Full of ideas and ideals, filled with rage at injustice, but searching for the shorthand of resistance. Kanmi gave me that shorthand. Not just through words, but through the rhythmic cadences of his life. Or what my music-major son often describes as “the syncopation of life, principles and passion”. The rhythm of a man who walked his talk, even when the talk grew lonely, even without passersby. Sadly, Kanmi left us in 1995. May soul continue to rest in power. 

“But, that was then”. I hear his voice, raspy and angry, echoing in my ears. 

But, if the phrase invokes the past, what the past provokes is that we must be the principled worth of the past in the present. The present must not interrupt us. It must not let us rest in comfort or conformity to the shenanigans of now.

Today, activism in our country is undergoing a transformation. And not for the better. A new breed of activists now dominates our public discourse. They are called transactional activists. They speak the language of justice but whisper in the ears of politicians. They raise placards by day and write invoices by night. They are not fighting the system. They are negotiating with it. What defines transactional activists is simple: they have a price. Their loyalty is not to a cause, but to a contract. Their voices are for the highest bidders. For sale. Their conscience can be bought at the right price. They emerge in every major national crisis. They insert themselves into public outrage. They lead protests. They host Twitter Spaces. They write threads and hashtags that go viral. But the question is always the same: who is paying the piper? And many are now asking: Who are these self-styled activists who seem to appear only when there is media attention to harvest or when governments’ stipends are available to collect? Why do they move from critic to political appointee so quickly? How do they end up on government committees, or in the entourage of the same men they once condemned?

The truth is bitter, as they say in our country. But we must face it. Activism has become a career path. Not one built on principle, but on proximity to power. It is a business model. You raise a storm, attract attention, then step into the corridors of influence through the back door. It is no accident that some of our country’s loudest voices online are also the quietest in the presence of power. They criticise with one hand, but collect with the other. 

Their activism is performance. A show. A trade. This is not a new problem. But it has become more visible in the age of social media. The internet has democratised outrage. It has given everyone a platform. But it has also created an army of “clicktivists” and “cashtivists” who confuse clout with credibility. In the 1980s and 1990s, when true activism meant risking death or detention, transactional activism was not a viable option. The costs were too high. You could be shot in a protest. Or disappeared. Or detained without trial. Men like Solarin, Ohonbamu, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Gani Fawehinmi, Chima Ubani, and Bamidele Aturu did not fight for contracts. They fought for justice. They died poor, but rich in honour. Today, some activists die rich in contracts, poor in legacy.

We live in an age where activism has been reduced to a hustle. Where outrage is monetised. Where loyalty to causes depends on political calculation. One day, an activist condemns a governor; the next day, he is seen having lunch at the governor’s lodge. What changed? Nothing except the transaction. Some transactional activists justify their actions with clever language. They call it engagement. Or stakeholders’ dialogue. Or realpolitik. They say you must enter the system to change it. But that’s a lie. 

They don’t enter to change the system. They enter to benefit from it. This must be made clear: there is nothing wrong with activists working with governments or advising policymakers. Many true activists have served in public office and done so with honour. However, the difference is that their values remained untainted and their principles uncorrupted by the influence of dirty power. But the problem is not about activists entering governments. The problem is that when they enter silently, suddenly, and shamelessly, without accountability to the people they once mobilised, they begin to parrot the nonsense they once criticised. That’s not activism. That’s betrayal.

This betrayal has consequences. It fuels cynicism. It weakens public trust. It creates confusion. Who speaks for the people? Who is a genuine advocate and who is a paid actor? This blurring of lines is dangerous. It allows governments to manipulate dissent. It allows politicians to buy silence. It allows powerful interests to turn resistance into consultancy. And when real activists rise, their voices are doubted. People assume they, too, have a price. That is the damage transactional activists do, not just to movements, but to the very idea of activism. Transactional activism is not just dishonest. It is corrosive. It erodes the moral authority that activism relies on. It turns idealism into opportunism. It turns movements into markets. Some may argue that everyone must eat. Survival is a priority. That our country is too hard to do activism for free. But if you can’t stay true to your principles, then don’t wear the activist badge. Don’t claim moral high ground when you are standing on a platform built on opportunism. 

What our country needs today is not more celebrities in activist clothing. What we need are active citizens and citizens of conscience. People who stand for truth, regardless of whether it’s trending. People who will defend the voiceless, even when it is costly. People who will say no, even when it is easier to say yes. Activism must return to its roots: service, not self-interest. Integrity, not influence. Sacrifice, not spotlight. This is not a call for puritanism. No one is perfect. But we must draw a line between principled activism and profitable activism. Between advocacy and opportunism. 

Let every activist examine himself. True activists fight for the future. Transactional activists fight for contracts. The difference is not in their slogans, but in their silence when it matters most. Who do you speak for? What do you stand for? Are you willing to be forgotten rather than bought? And as Kanmi Ishola-Osobu showed through the examples of his life by living his convictions and answering the hard questions with principle, our lives, too, must become the answers we seek to the questions: that the price of principles is to remain faithful to them, without compromise, without excuse. No ifs. No buts.

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja