*By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Three score and three years ago, a defining dispute erupted in the old Western Region of Nigeria over the scope and reach of constitutional conventions in determining or terminating the tenure of high-level political leadership. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which ultimately had to pronounce on the matter, described conventions in that case as “a body of understandings which no writer can formulate.” The aftermath of that decision took the country to the brink of ruin.
This year, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) confronts its own moment of truth concerning how far conventions initially designed to accommodate national diversity in its leadership processes can be converted into ethno-tribal vetoes by entities that, in fact, are not part of its institutional or constitutional organs. The consequences for the association could be far-reaching.
(Mazi Afam Osigwe, current President, Nigerian Bar Association (NBA)
For context, the NBA elects a new set of leaders every even-numbered year. It has long been the assumption that “the NBA is too important to be left alone.” Elections into its leadership organs unfold as a political marketplace for a complex competition of interests, many of them external to the legal profession. This year, the biggest issue is arguably the role of ethno-tribal caucuses at the Nigerian Bar.
The road to this point was paved by a combination of ordinarily unrelated events. On 14 August 1991, Taslim Elias died. He was Nigeria’s Attorney-General at independence at a time when the position was deservedly prefixed with the honorific “Honourable” (hence HAGF) and later became Chief Justice of Nigeria. At his death, he was a judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). To replace Elias for the remainder of his ICJ tenure, Nigeria nominated Bola Ajibola, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), who was then himself serving as HAGF.
That step opened up a vacancy for the designation of the new HAGF. To fill that vacancy, military ruler Ibrahim Babangida nominated Clement Akpamgbo SAN. At the time, Akpamgbo was in the middle of his tenure as the 15th president of the NBA. In keeping with its constitution, the NBA’s first Vice-President, Priscilla Kuye, succeeded Akpamgbo as president. She was the first woman in that position.
The next cycle of elections into the leadership of the association was scheduled to occur the following year in 1992. In August 1992, members duly convened in Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers State, for the elections, but the conference broke up in extraordinary fracas. Five years later, as the embers of military rule began to fade, the NBA was resuscitated.
In the aftermath of that crisis and at the turn of the Millennium, the NBA introduced two reforms into its leadership process, one explicit and the other initially by convention. First, it abolished universal suffrage among its members, replacing it with a delegate-based system for selecting leaders. In 2015, however, universal suffrage returned. Second, it introduced a convention of rotating the most important leadership positions in the association among the founding three regions of the country – the Eastern, Northern, and Western regions.
Fifteen years later, the NBA wrote this convention into its constitution by way of an amendment, which mandated that “the Association shall, for the purpose of elections of National Officers be divided into three geographical zones namely – Northern zone, Eastern zone and Western zone.” The positions of President, three Vice-Presidents, and General-Secretary rotate among the three zones. In particular, the NBA constitution prescribes that eligibility to run for any of the rotated offices shall be determined with reference to natal origins, not establishment.
The NBA constitution goes further to prescribe that “where a position is zoned to any particular geographical zone, the position shall be rotated and held in turn by the different groups and/or sections in the geographical zone.” Remarkably, it does not say who can have a say in deploying these arrangements concerning zoning and micro-zoning.
The result has been a bazaar in nativist interest groups of lawyers in Nigeria, such as the Arewa Lawyers Forum (ALF); Eastern Bar Forum (EBF); Egbe Amofin Oodua (Egbe); Middle-Belt Lawyers Forum (MBLF); and Mid-West Bar Forum MWLF). They are not organs of the NBA in any form. Operating as ethno-tribal caucuses, these interest groups have sought to mediate the jostling for positions in the NBA. Until now, their roles had been informal, operating at best at the level of unwritten conventions.
In 2018, when the presidency of the NBA rotated to the East, the EBF endorsed Arthur Obi-Okafor, SAN, as their preferred candidate. In the election, however, Paul Usoro, who is also from the same region, was declared winner.
In 2026, the presidency of the NBA rotates to the West. The Egbe (an association of lawyers of Yoruba descent) and the MWBF are both active in this region. In the current election cycle, the MWBF decided not to present any candidates for the presidency, ceding it to lawyers native to the six states of south-west Nigeria.
The Egbe asserts primacy in the role of mediating the ambitions of lawyers from that region desiring to run for the NBA presidency. This year, the Egbe put forward Muyiwa Akinboro SAN as its candidate. However, Yemi Akangbe SAN and Oyinkan Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, who are both from the same region, declined to step down their ambitions. Egbe argues that it micro-zoned the position to the part of the South-West from which Mr Akinboro comes and asked the NBA to elbow the other candidates out of the contest so that he can emerge effectively unopposed.
In reality, this micro-zoning which the Egbe speaks of had been in existence since 2019. But in the 2020 contest for the NBA president from the western region, both Dele Adesina SAN and Tunde Ajibade SAN, who contested the position, came from outside that micro-zone. In 2008, Rotimi Akeredolu SAN emerged unopposed as the 24th president of the NBA by persuading other aspirants informally to stand down for him. The ethno-tribal trump asserted by the Egbe this year would be unprecedented.
In the face of predictable resistance, the association sued at the High Court in Ibadan seeking to get its way. The court issued rapid-fire interim injunctions against the NBA’s election process. The NBA appealed. On 11 June, the Attorney-General of the Federation, a defendant in the suits in Ibadan, ostensibly claiming permission from the Court of Appeal, called a meeting of the disputing parties with all living former presidents of the NBA.
The meeting constituted a three-person subcommittee headed by Wole Olanipekun SAN, the 20th president of the NBA. It included Lanke Odogiyan and Paul Usoro SAN, respectively the 22nd and 29th presidents of the association, but there is a dispute over the sub-committee’s remit.
An unsigned majority report by Olanipekun and Odogiyan claims the sub-committee was constituted to inquire into “the causes of the present conflicts within the NBA” and to make recommendations on the way forward to the HAGF. A separate report by Paul Usoro disputes this, saying the sub-committee was confined to helping the HAGF to fulfill his commitment to the Court of Appeal, to broker an amicable settlement among the parties.
The Olanipekun-Odogiyan report makes far-reaching recommendations. Among them, it asks for the postponement of the BAR elections (to August) and mandates the incorporation of the National Identification Number (NIN) as a voter identifier, claiming -rather incredulously – that the enrollment number, a unique identifier assigned by the Supreme Court to each lawyer in Nigeria, “is not a security number.” In particular, the report wants an end to universal suffrage in the NBA and insists that “The micro-zoning by the Egbe in line with the NBA Constitution should be allowed to stand.” Paul Usoro largely disagreed.
The main recommendations of the report are mutually irreconcilable.
If the Olanipekun-Odogiyan report had investigated the matter, it would have learnt that the bureaucratic process and data integration that should precede the NIN integration into the unique identification system for all lawyers in Nigeria can only be implemented by the Supreme Court in collaboration with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC). This cannot be accomplished before August 2026 “or soon thereafter.” By prescribing impossible conditions, that report effectively sought to create conditions for the tenure of the current leadership to lapse, which would enable government to end the idea of an independent bar, just as the military regime did in 1992.
Rather than take his proposals to the parties or to the Court of Appeal from which he claimed his mandate, the HAGF mostly amplified the Olanipekun-Odogiyan report, endorsing nearly all of its recommendations in an error-strewn document ostentatiously headed “Directions and Outcomes.” But even he could not bring himself to accept the Egbe’s insistence on imposing its ethno-tribal preference on the NBA in the current cycle.
On 8 July, the Court of Appeal declined his thinly disguised effort to end-run the cases before the court. Judgment by the court is awaited.
Pending that, the NBA’s leadership election is likely to proceed as scheduled on 18 July under court protection. Two offices will be returned unopposed while eight will be contested. When the association last voted in 2024, there were 72,071 eligible voters. On 18 July, there will be 82,213 eligible voters (an increase of 14.07%), the largest in the association’s history.
(A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu)
