Apo Six Lawyer: Quest For Quick Wealth Is Destroying Igbo Apprenticeship System
Princess-Ekwi Ajide
The traditional Igbo apprenticeship system was built on patience: a young person served, learnt a trade and eventually received the support needed to establish an independent business.
Veteran barrister Amobi Nzelu believes that culture is being steadily eroded by the pursuit of instant wealth.
Nzelu, the lawyer who led the legal battle for the families of the six young people killed by police in the Abuja incident popularly known as the Apo Six, said while interacting with journalists at his residence in Abuja during a new yam festival that the decline of mentorship is contributing to a wider social crisis.
“The issue of master-servant relationship and mentorship, we said goodbye to it in Igbo land because of the quest to get money,” he said.
According to him, the problem is two-sided.
Some young people no longer have the patience to serve and learn under established businessmen, while some business owners fail to properly settle apprentices after years of service.
Nzelu said he had personally handled cases involving disputes between masters and former apprentices over settlement.
He believes the consequences go beyond business.
When young people lose access to responsible mentors, he said, they become more vulnerable to the temptation of quick money, fraud and other risky choices.
He recalled an encounter in Anambra State involving a young man who arrived at a traditional ceremony with a large amount of cash and began handing it out.
Nzelu said he questioned the source of the money because he knew the young man’s father was a farmer.
For him, the incident illustrated a dangerous shift in social values: wealth is increasingly celebrated without questions about how it was acquired.
He also recounted an incident at a hotel in Awka where he said he intervened after hearing a young woman crying and discovering that she was being dragged towards a room.
The woman, according to Nzelu, was a university student who had accepted money from men at the hotel.
The incident, he said, exposed the vulnerability of young people caught between poverty, exploitation and the desire for quick money.
Nzelu later said he encountered young men at the hotel whom he described as internet fraudsters.
Their conversation, he said, further demonstrated how money had become the overriding measure of success among some young Nigerians.
For the veteran lawyer, the answer lies partly in rebuilding mentorship.
He pointed to his own legal practice as an example of what long-term mentorship can produce.
One of his long-serving workers, he recalled, eventually acquired enough practical knowledge of legal procedures to remind him of an important statutory requirement he had overlooked in preparing a case.
The man was not a lawyer, but years of working alongside lawyers had given him valuable knowledge.
That, Nzelu said, is what mentorship should achieve.
It should transfer knowledge, discipline, values and opportunity from one generation to another.
Without that chain, he warned, young people will keep looking for shortcuts while older people lose the responsibility to guide those coming behind them.
“Mentorship is gone in Igbo land because of the quest for money,” he said.
For Nzelu, rebuilding that culture is not simply about preserving tradition. It is about giving young people a better alternative to the dangerous promise of getting rich overnight.
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