Olisa Agbakoba’s Administration Was A Failure — Ojo

He is not known to be a rabblerouser, but Adekunle Ojo who is the sitting second vice president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in this no hold bared interview, passes a categoric vote of no confidence on the immediate past administration headed by the renowned legal practitioner, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN. ADEYEMI ADEBANJO reports.   

Your executive took over from an administration led by one of the most renowned legal practitioners in the country who many a lawyer believe performed exceedingly well. What will be the starting point of your administration vis a vis that of Chief Olisa Agbakoba?
Well, I will not like to join issue with those who have attached extremity to the performance of the last executive because apparently the man can be better judged after leaving office but behold I don’t actually think a standard was set by the immediate past regime. I will rather want to say that what was left by Alao Aka-Bashorun is still the point of reference till tomorrow. No other regime that came after has been able to meet up, not to talk of even excelling beyond what they did. The last administration talked about re-branding. Re-branding is English, as far as I am concerned it is semantic. It is one of those slogans that people can use. I thank God for the life of Olisa Agabakoba because it is not every lawyer that will become the president of NBA, and he played with ideas most of which were better on the pages of the newspapers.
I will rather want to see an NBA that will care more for its members, I will rather want the present executive committee to see ourselves as a regime that should look into the welfare of members, build on it and take it to the highest, if possible because lawyers are becoming endangered specie in the nation, journalists too and that’s the truth. And we appear not to have anybody to run to for protection. Lawyers have been arraigned on phoney allegations, arrested, de-humanised in one way or the other. Yes we have a duty to contribute our quota towards finding solution to the problems of the country but then above all if you are not responsible to yourself, because as the saying goes charity begins at home.  
So talking about the last regime I can say I didn’t see much of internal protection and I am incline to believe that an association is about the welfare of its members. Any other thing tat you do at the expense of the welfare of your members then you are not an association. So I believe that this regime will play more role in enhancing the societal recognition and protection of the welfare, the rights and duties of lawyers.
If you are asked to do a bit of grading what percentage would you rather award to the last administration in terms of performance?
Well, unfortunately I am not a percentage person but I think there were still good side of the past administration, if you want me to talk about them. The attendance of NBA in IBA has increased and it is to the credit of that regime that actually popularised the IBA before Nigerian lawyers, and may be that earned us better recognition at the IBA. The recognition though did not translate into empowerment for the NBA or even to any of our members but perhaps for recognition because the NBA had the largest contingent perhaps aside the host countries. That I have seen. And when you now come home, our NEC meetings were not what they used to be. But generally I don’t want to give them percentage. But personally I am not satisfied, and that is the truth. And I will say that even if the person concerned is my kinsman, next door neighbour, my brother I will tell him if I am satisfied with what he has done or failed to do. Conferences were badly organised, and it did not matter what anybody wanted to say. If this regime of ours will not live up to its bidding I will be the first person to say so and I will condemn it. So I won’t mince words in saying that I was not satisfied. Agbakoba’s regime is a regime that has gone whether we like it or not but I can’t see any reasonable thing that was actually done by it. Over national issues, may be once in a while but then even on the national issues they never actually pursued any to any logical conclusion. The most that they did was to make noise on the pages of newspapers and when it came to practical implementation of some of these things I never actually witness anything happen. But above all that, the regime is gone and gone for good and we are talking about another one now. A man who wants to run the affairs of NBA must be a man of vision and must be in the know of what the bar is all about, not just activism. I am one but then I combine mine with NBA activism, grounded in the affairs of NBA. I know that the current president is grounded too and so I cannot see why this administration should fail. But for the last administration, I think I have said so much about them already.
Talking about you own administration now sir, what should members be expecting from your own administration. Yes, the members as it is now we are taking one thing very seriously, and that is the welfare of members?
The young lawyers, the old ones, the entire association itself we are to ensure that every lawyer is protected. We are out to ensure that this profession is capable of fending for its own. I mean young lawyers must be able to survive, the old lawyers that are not doing pretty well, we must create an avenue for people to actually survive. We have so much… we want a situation whereby all lawyers are fully engaged by way of employment. We are going to liaise with the government on ways to ensure that lawyers have a role to play in the local government system, not as politicians but perhaps as technocrats now.
These are part of the things that this administration is looking at and we want to ensure that access to justice remained unhindered. As it is now most of the inhibitions to cost of litigation have gone astronomically high, despite the fact that there is no uniformity in all the jurisdictions. We realised too that the popular provision of presumption of innocence of defendants of persons arraigned in courts is almost wilfully eroded, eroded in the sense that the conditions are becoming astronomically unattainable. In fact, it is becoming unattainable in the sense that when you ask somebody to go and bring a former head of state and the question is how many former heads of state do we have in this country, before you can grant bail. If the essence of arraigning a person is for him to answer to his charges, and if the essence of bail is to ensure that he appears to face trial then why are you asking him to go and look for a first class oba from his town when the monarch in his town is a third class oba.
Then you are putting unnecessary clog in the wheel of progress. These are the types of things we are looking at, the delay in the administration of justice. We want to ensure that things work out fine in that area too. We want to make our conferences the best in the entire world and I know that that we are capable of doing that and by God’s grace I am assuring you that it will become a reality. We are equally bothered about the nation because governance as not been able to meet the yearnings of the people and we want to continue to be in the vanguard of ensuring that democracy does not only come to stay, we want to ensure too that the dividends, all those things that are accomplishments of democracy are fully with us here. The law of course, we want to ensure that this governance enhances the standard of living of the people. We want to look at all the sectors, we want to talk when necessary, we want to do everything necessary at the bar to ensure that Nigerians are not short-charged in the system that we have now. The education of our members too, we are taking that more seriously. The Continuous Legal Education, we are taking it more seriously and we want to get rid of charlatans from the profession. We want to put measures in place that will ensure that at the end of day that charlatans and interlopers are weeded out of the entire system.
Perhaps you can avail us of the specific measures being put in place to address this issue of fake lawyer that is fast eating deep into the profession?
Fake or counterfeit is not peculiar to the bar alone. We have fake journalists, we have fake doctors. In fact we even have fake Jesus. So you can imagine if you have fake Jesus, fake malams, you have fake everything. There is barely anything that God has created that has not been faked But having said that, much we have it in other profession does not mean that it should continue to be part of us and as it is now at every given opportunity when a fake lawyer is identified we ensure that the case is handed over to the police for investigation and prosecution. when I was chairman of NBA, Ikeja branch several fake lawyers were actually arrested and brought to book. But then we need assistance from several quarters, we are working on Legal Practitioners Act now. The Legal Practitioners bill is already before the National Assembly and I am even aware that it’s being there for a while now but the National Assembly characteristic of them have refused to pass it into law. Having said that, I can tell you that we’ve done everything humanly possible to ensure that the issue is addressed. We are still working on it and we know that they will do it. But if you lay hands on it you will know that that law on its own is a substantial detector.
The stamp and zeal will become law; the issue of statistic license will become a law. As it is now it is not yet a law. So we are working at all these modalities put together in ensuring that it becomes law, because basically it is pretty difficult if somebody has practiced for about 19 years as a lawyer and he was not detected, he speaks flawless English, he had gone through some rudiments (I wonder who taught them) and you don’t carry a certificate on your face any man can go and pay for practicing fee now and you won’t even know because where you pay there is nothing to show whether you are actually the person or not. I can send anybody to go and pay in the name of Adekunle Ojo and we will succeed. So any other person can as well go there and pay. So, but with the stamp and zeal of a thing that has been moribund for a while due to the fact that the Legal Practitioners Act had not been fully amended to incorporate this, and the issue of practicing licence, I think all these will go a long way in detecting fake lawyers. We are putting in place modalities, and I thank God for the vigilance of some of our chairmen in the branches. I know that Ikeja has detected several. I know that Lagos has also detected several too.
But then when you now look at the prosecution, a good  number of them we have had cause to re-open all over again. A man that is detected today and he now move out of jurisdiction, may be move out of Ikeja and now start practicing in Warri where he is barely known because he has not been put in check by the legal framework that we have, the number of years that he will spend there, at times most of them go for six months and at times for a year and when he comes back, what does he come back to do, re-offend and this time around he’s gotten the experience. And I think we need to be more vigilant. Registration of lawyers at every branch becomes very important because we feel that you must have a branch for you to be a lawyer so that when they have to call for who you are…
But then I think that the crisis of charlatan is a national problem in the sense that we don’t have a data base that anybody can key in, touch a button and be able to detect whether the man he is dealing with is a lawyer or not. Again, this is a national thing and I will expect that for a man to live on a street, his identity must be known to the government, to anybody, to everybody. If I ask who is Adekunle Ojo, it must be open for every Nigerian to see. But I think it’s a national thing and I know we will get there some day. Look at what the Lagos State Government is doing. Some of us have actually suggested to him that we need record of every Lagosian, and if we have that record crime will easily be detected. Let all the police stations have all the records of everybody that stay in a particular locality. Even in the area of detection of crimes, by the time a police man stops a particular person and inquire from him where he is from, and the man presses  a button and avail himself of all the particulars of people in that particular I think we would have taken a giant leap. So when you are talking about detecting criminals that come into our midst you should also be talking about the criminals outside. But I think a data base that we can log on to and pick the accurate number of lawyers with approved membership for whosoever is not on that list….But I think NBA is actually working to ensure that every lawyer has a data, has a place. As soon as you are coming out from the Law School, there is a place for you to be identified with.