By Chidi Odinkalu

The on-going leadership transition at the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) offers an opportunity to articulate a different future for our Bar. The outgoing President, J.B. Daudu SAN, himself squarely launched this debate unwittingly with his extensive interviews in the media.

This debate is necessary and, given the surprisingly strident views articulated by the learned Senior Advocate, long overdue. The question that he firmly poses in these interviews is whether our Bar should, to borrow the words of Cesare Lombrosso, wallow in a “proud mediocrity” or commit to a monitorable programme of modernization that offers clear benefits to our members, our Association, and our country.

Inadvertently, the out-going President offered in his interviews with the media the important portents for the tenure of his successor. The gist of his views concerned how our Bar is organized in general and addressed, in particular, leadership selection at the Bar.

In response to calls for reform of this process, including suggestions for a return to universal suffrage to replace the present system of leadership election by delegates, the learned Senior Advocate offered up a dog’s breakfast of adjectives.

He variously denounced suggestions for universal suffrage at the Bar as “vile”, “preposterous and unworkable”,  “a demonstration of the utter bankruptcy of ideas as to how to run a professional organization in this day and age”, and in a turn of reasoning that induces indigestion even in his most ardent admirers, inspired by “the hatred of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs).”

Not yet finished, he also dismissed the NBA’s membership as “a nebulous electorate”,  justifies the present system as in the best traditions of “Bar Councils” in other places (like the American Bar Association (ABA), Ghana Bar Association (GBA), Bar Council of England and Wales, East African Law Society (EALS)) and somewhat concludes that it is best for the NBA to be organized in such a way that “

it is possible to identity the leadership for 10 years to come.” Tellingly, these views were offered in the course of an interview in which the learned Senior Advocate acknowledged that the present system of leadership selection at the Bar is an inexcusable “Jamboree” and that NBA’s elections can be organized in “a more efficient and less time consuming manner”.

Given the importance of this debate, I enter into it recognizing the need to credit all involved in it with good faith and with a desire to advance our Bar. No one has a monopoly of good ideas, good intentions or goodwill towards our Bar or our country and all who bring goodwill should debate freely without any need to deny the capacity of others to harbour same.

The views I summarize above represent, perhaps, the most articulate case ever made for why we must turn the page on the current system of membership management and leadership selection at the NBA and why universal suffrage at the Bar is the way to do it. I will return shortly to the strident insecurity of its tone.

FIVE FALLACIES

The learned Senior Advocate puts forward five fallacies that deserve a response. First, the resort to emotive adjectives like “vile” does not belong to a debate among professional colleagues and citizens. Disagreements are not unusual among human or, indeed, lawyers.

The idea that an alternative put forward in a constructive frame of mind is “vile” suggests an absence of a capacity for “integrative complexity”, described by Nassir Ghaemi who heads the Tufts Mood Disorders Programme on the outskirts of Boston as the absence of an essential leadership “ability to see things from multiple perspectives.”

Second, I never thought I would live long enough to hear a President of our Bar argue a case for professional exceptionalism of the Bar from the foundational tenets of elective democracy. In the year before he died, the late Lamidi Adedibu did the same thing.

In an interview with a leading newsmagazine in the Nigeria, he advocated for a monarchical system of government for Nigeria because, as he put it, in England they always know the successor to the reigning Sovereign and he didn’t see why what works in England cannot work in Nigeria. In this way, Adedibu sought to justify his determined subversion of the foundations of elective democracy – an indeterminacy of outcomes and a determinacy of rules.