John Olusola Bayeshea; Lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, called to the bar in 1982. In a celebrated case, Bayeshea acted as counsel to 49 lecturers sacked by the authorities of the University of llorin, securing a reinstatement for them by order of the Supreme Court in 2010. Before him, the lecturers did not have money to prosecute the case. For nine years they were not paid, except that some of them got menial jobs.
Origin
Bayeshea is a native of Ole in Kabba/Bunu Local Government Area, Kogi State.
Places of Growth
At age eight or nine, Bayeshea was brought to Ilorin to live with an uncle. He hawked groundnut oil round Ilorin, especially the old GRA. He also worked a lot on his uncle’s farm outside Ilorin; a place called Adio after Alapa. Olusola was among the very first set of the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) in 1978. In the secondary school he attended he was the best student in History, Literature in English and Geography. Naturally, those were the subjects he went to offer at the Kwara State College of Technology where he was also the best student in history.
Education
John Olusola attended Saint Barnabas Primary School, llorin from 1966 to 1971, and Fatimah College, Ekan-Meje near Omu-Aran from 1972 to 1976. . In 1978, he was admitted into the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) for a degree course in Law, and he graduated in 1981 with a Second Class Upper division. About 16 years later, in 1998, he proceeded to Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) for master’s degree in Law and he emerged as the best graduating LLM student in 2000. He got a second Master of Philosophy in Law in same university in 2009. Olusola got a second Master of Philosophy in Law. Then in 2012, he graduated from the United Mission African College in Ilorin with a master’s degree in Divinity.
Experience
Bayeshea worked as counsel in the Chambers of Bayo Aluko Olokun. During the elections of 1983, he was posted as a young counsel to be the lawyer for the National Peoples Party, led by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the whole of what has now been broken to Zamfara, Sokoto and Kebbi states. After the elections in November 1983, Olusola returned to join the Kwara State Ministry of Justice as a state counsel. He was with the Ministry of Justice from 1983 to 1986. It was in November 1986 that he set up the Chambers of John Olusola Bayeshea & Co. In 2008, John Olusola became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)[i].
[i] Nation 8 October, 2016