Nigerian legal practitioners as endangered endangered: A rejoinder

By Bayo Akinlade

If legal practitioners were relevant in the liberation of the Nigerian people from the economic, social and political degradation upon them, we lawyers wouldn’t be targets!

Are we not as lawyers complicit in the insecurity we face? Are lawyers not part of the police, military and other security agencies?

I worry, when we, individually and collectively cannot take responsibility and fight for what is right. Corruption in our courts alone is enough for us to bow our heads in shame.

The way we even run our branches should cause us to keep quiet about how government and the political parties embezzle our collective funds.

Nigerian Bar Association  (NBA) still have expensive National Executive Council (NEC) meetings four times a year, organising expensive seminars at the national level instead of leaving it to the Branches to organise on the state level for greater reach and impact.

We seek reform in our Judiciary and in our country yet we cannot even carry out reforms within the NBA. The NBA will soon start planning another elaborate National Conference that only serves less than 10 per cent of lawyers with an average cost of nearly one billion Naira while each branch will host a law week with an average cost of 2 million Naira…..what has all these conferences and law weeks achieved for us as a body of lawyers and change agents?

Next year, another set of lawyers will seek elections into national office…another constitutional review is again ongoing with no real plan or vision for the legal profession in Nigeria. No continuity and no direction!

That’s why the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and other Government agencies (where lawyers are and where lawyers lead) can wake up and just take business away from us without a moment’s thought of the economic consequences.

Then we complain about the Judiciary as if the Judiciary is not the product of the Bar……we get the judiciary we deserve because the NBA birthed that institution which is the third arm of government. No other profession can boast of this level of authority and significance but we have now all become a laughing stock….it’s a pity my brother.

It has become a case of Physician heal thy self. So people are now kidnapping lawyers and nobody cares, how courts are being burnt to the ground and people could careless….we have simply failed the people and sold out our core values as protectors of the oppressed and weak amongst us.

I, Bayo Akinlade will continue to look within and ask myself, what role have I played in all these? I will not stop trying to work towards a better Judiciary and a better nation. I encourage all of us to do a little bit more….at least let’s reduce the incidence of corruption within the Judiciary as a start.

Mr Akinlade is a former NBA Ikorodu branch chairman