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The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is at a crossroads as ethno-tribal caucuses challenge its leadership processes. This year's elections may see a repeat of last year's controversy.
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.'
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.
For context, the NBA elects a new set of leaders every even number year. It has for long been the assumption that ‘the NBA is too important to be left alone.’ Elections into its leadership organs unfold as a political market-place for a complex competition of interests, many of them external to the legal profession.
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 ‘honorable’ (hence HAGF), later becoming 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 serving himself as HAGF. That step opened up a vacancy for the designation of a 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.
To succeed Akpamgbo as president and 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 were 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 association 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 system of leadership selection. 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 – Eastern, Northern, and Western regions. After 15 years, 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. Far from stopping here, 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.’
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 have 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 also came 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 promoting their preferred candidates,
The Nigerian angle is straightforward – the NBA is a national body of lawyers with significant influence on the country’s legal landscape. As such, its internal dynamics and leadership processes have significant implications for the country’s justice system and the rule of law.