By Chidi Odinkalu

In Nigeria, Adedibu and his ilk sought (and still seek) elections that guarantee a pre-determined outcome based on indeterminate rules. One must hope that the learned Senior Advocate does not genuinely believe that the NBA should or could reprise the Lamidi Adedibu Playbook.

Third, in an effort to clothe an anodyne idea with an adverse animus enough to elevate it to a non-existent danger of an existential proportions, the learned Senior Advocate attains undesirable genius with a line that gratuitously insults Senior Advocates and simultaneously gives offence to juniors in claiming that “The only way to dislodge the leadership offered by the rank (of Senior Advocate) is to go for universal suffrage where by way of example juniors who will then be in the majority can be persuaded to vote for the Chairman of the Young Lawyers Forum or any other aggressive Junior or any of the midlevel seniors who are in the forefront of the clamour for universal suffrage.”

Line of argument

This line of argument manages – rather painfully – to imply that Senior Advocates lack the capability to win through to the Presidency of the Bar unless they are protected from competition and also that juniors lack the judgment to discern from among competitors the ones with serious credentials.

Yet, it is clearly the case that even in the current system Senior Advocates make up less than 18% of the presumptive electorate and thus have shown themselves to be much more durable and competitive leadership materials – but not as a right of birth, tribal hygiene or patronage as the learned senior Advocate implies.

In pursuing this line of argument, the learned Senior Advocate demonstrates an appetite for the Richard Nixon school of democracy. As recalled by Christopher Matthews in Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America (1996), Nixon’s politics was shaped by two precepts the first of which was that “voting was a negative act: people don’t vote for someone; they vote against someone.”

The suggestion that if given a free vote, juniors would blindly vote against Senior Advocates rather than for a Bar that offers them value is beneath a Bar President. A President of our Bar cannot who genuinely believes this calls the very basis of his own mandate as President into question. Gratefully, many Senior Advocates enthusiastically support universal suffrage.

Membership and leadership

Fourth, the illustrations offered by the learned Senior Advocate with respect to what transpires in other Bar Associations and how they organize membership and leadership are inapplicable and mis-placed. Take the ABA, it has a much younger history than the NBA, having been founded only in 1978; but a much larger membership – the ABA’s current membership is 410,000, comprising about 50% of the lawyers in the USA.

The ABA knows its membership and offers them value. In Nigeria, with a membership merely in high five digits, not even our President can tell us how many lawyers we have or appeal to our members with a programme of value-added unique to the Bar. Or maybe the GBA? The GBA has fewer than three thousand current members.

In the second quarter of every year, the GBA issues a publicly accessible list of its “members in good standing” who, thereby, have the right to vote in its elections or participate in membership activities. The latest list of GBA’s members in good standing is available at and downloadable from  http://www.ghanabar.org/pdf/good-standing.pdf.

The East African Law Society and the Pan African Lawyers Union (EALS) and PALU respectively, have competitive elections. The EALS’ last leadership election took place in Arusha March 2012 (I was there); and PALU’s leadership election will take place in Nairobi in September 2012. The example of Bar Councils that he cites are otherwise inapplicable because in Nigeria, unlike in those other places, the Bar Council is a statutory body not established or controlled by the NBA.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the learned Senior Advocate pays admirable homage to the learned (and mostly now departed) pioneers at the Bar who led the resurrection of our Bar from the debacle of Port Harcourt. In response to this, one can only say that these respected and departed leaders of our Bar surely cannot have made the sacrifices they made on the assumption that they would freeze our Bar perpetually in a looking time capsule.

THE CASE FOR MODERNISATION WITH UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

This then is the argument for modernizing our Bar – that there is an imperative to adapt, change which begins with leadership. We have at our disposal today, a Bar that is not recognizable from what it was 20 years ago in terms of its demographics, footprint or skills.

The data capture, integration and management capabilities we have today were not there 20 or even 10 years ago. Thus we can easily re-organize membership records and management as the bases for a different way of doing things. And remote access and voting is now at the finger tips of any lawyer who has access to mobile telephony.

The benefits will mean a richer and better organized bar, able, therefore, to invest in upgrading the skills of its members who, in return, acquire the right to determine who leads them and what programmes these resources get spent on. The biggest argument for universal suffrage, however, was born of the Boston Tea party – no taxation without representation.

If a lawyer pays practising fees and branch dues, which, in turn, are the mainstay of the NBA’s finances, why should he or she be compelled to proxy their votes to someone when they can, by themselves, exercise the right to decide who leads their Bar and how?

This is the question that our dear and outgoing President failed to engage or address. In avoiding this, the learned Senior Advocate suggests that our Bar is in a state of what German Psychiatrist, Ernst Kretschmer, described as “stable equilibrium”. But Krestschmer also warned that this state has “never been spurs to great deeds.”

If our Bar cannot evince modest reform to advance its internal management, membership governance and leadership selection, then our corporate standing within Nigeria as well as individual standing as professionals will continue to diminish and so will our earnings.

In summary, the arguments in support of universal suffrage are both instrumental and ethical: There is the technical capacity to achieve it. It enhances inclusion. It will improve the governance of our Bar because we cannot do it without reforming membership records and their management.

It’ll also enhance our revenues because it will be tied to verifiable payment of annual practising and branch dues. It is also compatible with advocacy for inclusion at the Bar. The benefits of the present “Jamboree” are neither clear nor demonstrated beyond its historical links to an admittedly painful historical episode in Port Harcourt 20 years ago. But the world has moved on from 20 years ago. Do we have to get stuck in the past?

A TRIBUTE AND A PRAYER

In closing, let me be clear. The NBA is a voluntary association. Service to it in any elective or leadership position is also voluntary. Those who put themselves forward for such service deserve our support and gratitude for as Winston Churchill said in a generous eulogy to Neville Chamberlain at the latter’s funeral in 1940: “In one phase men might seem to have been right; in another, they seem to have been wrong, and when the perspective of time lengthened, all stood in a different setting.”

Our outgoing President has offered wholehearted and voluntary service to the Bar. As he relocates to “a different setting”, we must wish him well and look forward to having his wisdoms at the service of our Bar and our country. This is also a good place to wish the in-coming President the best as he takes on a difficult legacy and pray for the success of his tenure.