• DESCRIBES ELECTION AS ILLEGITIMATE AND/OR INCONCLUSIVE
• MIDWEST BAR REJECTED EGBE CANDIDATE, ACTIVELY PROMOTED BADEJO-OKUSANYA
• NBA PRESIDENT-ELECT HAS NO INTENTION FOR ELECTORAL REFORM
• ECNBA SHOULD CONDUCT FRESH ELECTION FOR 70% DISENFRANCHISED VOTERS

THE CONTINUED RELEVANCE OF THE NIGERIAN BAR ASSOCIATION

BY JOSEPH BODURIN DAUDU

NBA as the Nigerian Bar Association will be referred to herein as the umbrella body of all Nigerian Legal Practitioners. It is also a pressure group which ensures that all agencies and even government itself operate strictly within the bounds of the Rule of Law. Indeed her motto is ‘Promoting the Rule of law’.

The NBA is not a creation of statute but is recognized by name in several legislations including the Nigerian Constitution 1999. Such statutory mention does not make it a creature of the National Assembly but it is a voluntary association that is created under Part ‘C’ of the Companies and Allied Matters Act. It can therefore be sued or it can sue persons in Nigerian Courts through her Registered Trustees of which I am a member of its Board of Trustees.

All my life since being called to the Nigerian Bar in 1980, I have been a member of this association and have served in numerous capacities, ultimately emerging by the grace of God Almighty in the year 2010 at Ibadan Oyo State as the 25th President of the NBA. I have since then served the legal profession in virtually every relevant capacity such as the LPPC (the statutory body that screens and appoints legal practitioners who have applied for the coveted rank of SAN); the NJC (the body set up by the Nigerian Constitution to manage the affairs of the Nigerian Judiciary); Chairman for 6 years of the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee, the body statutorily mandated to discipline erring Nigerian lawyers and legal practitioners; chairman of the NBA All purposes committee from 2014-2018, and membership of other numerous committees and interest groups in the legal profession too numerous to detail here.

I have not set out part of my resume here above for reasons of self promotion or aggrandizement but to show quite distinctively that I am a person interested not only in the affairs of the NBA but in anything that affects the legal profession in particular and Nigeria in general. I can therefore safely declare myself a stakeholder.

In the past 10 years the NBA has promoted some reforms, which has placed it in the invidious position or situation that it now finds itself. The reforms are (1) a switch in the mode of electing her national officers from the delegate and manual mode of election to the much disputed ‘universal suffrage’ whose excesses collapsed the first house in 1992 and left the Association comatose for 6 years until 1998 when Chief TJO Okpoko SAN emerged as President and the beginning of the 2nd house of the NBA (2) the introduction of electronic or computer based system of voting thought to be transparent and capable of eliminating glitches and illegitimacy from the process.

Progressive elections since 2018 have posed serious credibility and legitimacy concerns. Firstly, the elections are heavily monetized with hapless candidates being forced by ‘barmen’ to spend humongous sums of money in the name of campaigns, the elections involve traveling to virtually all the branches in the 36 states of Nigeria and thirdly other numerous inconvenient acts not relevant at this point in time but some of which will be alluded to as this write-up advances.

The 2026 national officers election by the peculiar arrangement in the NBA Constitution was zoned to the ‘West’ which means the old west and mid-west regions of the Nigerian first Republic. It is this constitutional approval of zoning that brought about the emergence of ethnic or regional based pressure groups such as Otu Okaiwu and Eastern Bar Forum for the East, the Egbe Amofin and the Midwest Bar Forum for the West and the Arewa Lawyers Forum and the Middle Belt Lawyers forum for the North.

The mandate or objective of these Ad HOC but relevant bodies is ostensibly to ease the process of voting whenever the Presidency is zoned to them. They make their impact felt by endorsing their own candidates and selling same to other bodies so that there can be unanimity and concord in the process.

Consequently 2026 was no different as the constitution had effectively zoned the office of the President of the NBA to the West, whereupon Egbe conducted a screening and weeding process among her 4 candidates and came with the name of Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro SAN as it preferred candidate. Incidentally, the Midwest Bar Forum led by Ama Etuwewe SAN rejected the Egbe choice and actively promoted her own candidate in the person of Mrs Oyinkan Badejo Okusanya SAN, a person under the Egbe umbrella but who later emerged as the President-elect in highly disputed circumstances.

I need to place on record here that I promoted and actively supported the candidature of Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro SAN for very obvious reasons, which are as follows: 1. He was my General Secretary as the 25th President of the NBA and I could never have worked with a better GS. He was and still is hard working, industrious, honest, gentle mannered, brilliant, urbane and circumspect. A consummate bar man. Consequently, I had no option than to support him when he shared with me his aspiration to be the 33rd President of the NBA.

The deficiencies of the just recently concluded election are legion i.e., too numerous to set out here. But I will endeavor to set out the major defects in the last election.

Firstly, the candidates had complained about the ill preparedness and probably bad faith of the election body the ECNBA. It is alleged to have prepared its voters register not in line with the NBA Constitution, the election umpire also appoint untested and ill-prepared service providers, whose system for the provision of electronic voting crashed for the first 6 hours after voting commenced until according to the election umpire, they moved to another server. So, who moved or authorized the movement to another server. This remains an unanswered sore point.

Secondly and to me this is the most important, that although approximately 80 000 lawyers were registered to vote, computer interference and or unreliability allowed only 26, 600 persons to vote. The rest 70% willing and available voters were schemed out of the voting exercise. Consequently, I had no hesitation in adjudging the outcome of the election as illegitimate and lacking in the average constituents of a free, fair and credible election.

Thirdly is the complaint that during the campaign period, high officials of the NBA actively campaigned at various NEC meetings for the candidacy of the person who eventually emerged as President-elect.

Finally, for this purpose is the frightful complaint that the votes had been predetermined and the system had been preset to achieve a constant margin of lead between the candidates as configured by the powers-that-be who control the voting portal. Now, this last allegation must not be treated lightly. It strikes at the heart and soul of our leadership selection system. For over 6 to 8 years now the rumors of election manipulation has been rife in the NBA system. Over the years stakeholders have always demanded for a system that allows not only for post election audit but for the security of the back end of the server that was used to conduct the election. Both matters appear to have been treated with great levity. I will not have any hesitation to if I had the powers to declare this election inconclusive and/or illegitimate.

The reason why NBA elections must be seen to be above board like Caesar’s wife Calpurnia is that the NBA is the conscience of the larger society. Nigeria is on the throes of conducting its own general elections in the year 2027.

Having itself conducted such a visibly badly conducted election, will the NBA have the moral justification and standing to challenge the larger Nigerian government should and this is only speculative, God forbid, that the general elections is marred by poor or indeed fraudulent electoral practices?

That is why it is necessary at this stage for all parties to acknowledge these deficiencies in the election that was conducted by the ECNBA. If nothing, a re-election should be conducted to accommodate the well over 70% disenfranchised lawyers who we were not allowed to vote at the election conducted last week.

If the NBA powers-that-be persist or persevere in its apparent, unshakable belief that it conducted a pristine election then it will be difficult to predict the future as this election has struck at the unity of a hitherto united Bar.

I must also say that I am appalled by the position of the President-elect who views this complaints as merely a matter of perception. By treating these weighty complaints with such levity, it is clear that the President-elect has no intention to either disassociate herself from the system that brought her into office or prepare herself to clean the Augean stable. I find myself unable to congratulate any member of this elected National Officers until justice has been served and the needful done to put the Nigeria Bar Association on the right track.

Finally, it is necessary to state at this point in time that because the NBA is not a statutory monopoly, dissatisfied members may, if pushed to the wall, move in droves to form an honest association that will push the ideals of good Legal Practice and honest political interaction as their prime objectives. It is not too late to save the day. Those in charge know what to do.

▪️ Joseph Bodurin Daudu, SAN, is a Trustee and former President of the Nigerian Bar Association.

• The views expressed in this article are entirely those of the author

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