*The day that we see CAC cross the line, we’ll sue, but right now they haven’t crossed any legal line
*The way things are going we’re probably going to have splinter groups at the Bar
*We can’t have a bill that says the regulator of the legal profession is the Body of Benchers, a government agency, funded by government
By Lillian Okenwa
The Annual General Conference (AGC) of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) 2022 has kicked off in Lagos South-West Nigeria and certain matters arising from the 2021 AGC held in Port Harcourt, South-South Nigeria will feature for deliberations.
During the 2021 AGC, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) stunned conferees by its refusal to present its Statutory Report contrary to the practice and convention over the years for all Federal Government agencies headed by members of the Legal Profession to submit and present their activities before the General Council of the Bar during its annual Convention. This has remained one way of showing their scorecard to members. It is also aimed at allowing members of the Profession to make inputs with a view to promoting transparency and accountability. As a result, agencies like the Council of Legal Education (CLE), the Legal Aid Council (LAC), the National Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS), the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the Nigerian Law Reform Commission (NLRC) all submit annual reports at the august body during its Annual General Meetings.
At the AGC last year the Registrar-General of CAC was quoted to have said that the ÑBA being a glorified Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) registered by CAC and filings its annual returns at the Commission, the latter was not bound to submit any reports to the NBA. This stance generated a lot of controversies for which Olumide Akpata, the NBA President stated that the association will not stop calling out CAC for rendering poor service to its customers. In this interview, however, Mr. Akpata disclosed that there’s no law mandating the CAC to present its statutory report to the NBA. He spoke with Lillian Okenwa.
Akpata: He should have left things as it is but I’m personally not a slave to precedents. When you read his letter, there’s a lot of logic in it. He wrote a letter at a time the relationship between the NBA and CAC was not very good. So it’s easy for us to say he wrote the letter out of spite because he’s not happy with us. We’ve been pretty much hard on him and that’s because the service they’ve been providing is below par. But let us examine the point he’s making dispassionately. NBA was incorporated under Part C with CAC. Essentially, we’re one of the entities that he as Registrar General regulates. So his argument in his letter was how can your regulator be presenting a report to you? So you must go back and trace the tradition. Why did we receive reports from CAC? It’s one of those conventions that I cannot explain. I guess it’s because of the traditional relationship between the Bar and the Companies registry.
Fast forward to modern times, we are an incorporated entity and we are regulated by this same regulator so how can this same regulator be presenting reports to us? He says that he sees no legal basis for coming to report to us every year and that he’s not going to be doing it any longer. But like I said, he did it at a time our relationship with CAC was not very good. Our members were extremely unhappy with the services rendered by CAC so it was easy for our members to be upset. I personally was unhappy about the letter but when you ask for my views as a lawyer, I really can’t quarrel with the logic. People are used to doing things in a certain way. People generally resist change but in this case, what is the legal basis?
L&S: But I recall you last year saying that the NBA will not take the non-presentation of CAC’s statutory report lying low. What has changed?
Akpata: No what I said was that nothing anybody does or says will stop us from criticising CAC’s poor service. Meaning that if you’re giving bad service, we’ll tell the world you’re giving bad service. If you’re not doing well… I’m giving you the context. He wrote us at a time the relationship between the Bar and CAC was low and we’re still not very happy with CAC. They’re performing really poorly, so I and some of us saw that letter as his own reaction to the fact that we criticised him. Legally speaking, however, there’s nothing we can do to compel the CAC to present a report to us.
L&S: What then can the NBA do with regard to the poor services CAC is rendering?
Akpata: That is where we have power. We can call them out. We can report to the Minister of Trade and Investments. We can petition the CAC. What we did initially was to set up a task force to work with him but whenever our task force goes there… like I said, some people don’t take criticisms well. It became obvious to us that this task force was not going to work so we now had to call them out and say you guys are not doing well. We reported to the supervising ministry that their service is poor.
L&S: But it’s almost a year since the last NBA conference and it doesn’t seem like NBA has taken a hard stance against the poor services rendered by the CAC.
Akpata: CAC provides poor service. Immigration provides poor service. So do other government agencies. What do you do? You can only call them out. First, we said let’s engage and we set up this joint task force. Because he worked closely with us at the Section on Business Law, I got the Section on Business Law Chairman who’s friendly with him to engage with him and understand what the problems are, what the lawyers are complaining about …, let us engage with him since we know him… They tried but at the end of the day the services weren’t getting any better and then he also decided that CAC should be a revenue-generating agency. Meanwhile, the services got no better while they were charging more money.
Except you say we want to boycott CAC and that will be at the peril of your clients… If you boycott CAC your clients will look for somebody else that will do their job for them. It’s a public interest issue. This very important agency of government is performing sub-optimally and we need to keep letting them know. Put a fire under them and get them to perform better. We had assumed that because our colleague runs the place and because we’d always had a close relationship with the place, we could convince, encourage and work together. We even set up a help desk at the NBA… if you have any CAC problem, call us we’ll try and troubleshoot but really it’s not working and the general feedback is that the services are still quite poor.
And most of it has to do with their migration to digital platforms. It messed up a lot of things. Instead of him explaining that they tried to digitise, sorry for the poor services, we’d try to do better, instead, he takes offence and is upset… You know that every year they sponsor the conference, so the conference committee went to them as usual and I hear he said he’d sponsor but that he’s very unhappy with the NBA because we’re always on their case…always making them look bad… and my response was that he’s going to be unhappy for a while because the place is not working and we can’t pretend. The majority of our colleagues in corporate practice operate there and they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the service. But let’s go back to the issue of CAC reporting to us. There is no legal basis for us to insist he reports to us and so what can we do? For me frankly, I’m not interested. Whether or not he reports, the important thing is for him to give good service. It’s easy for us to shout and say how dare he, but you can’t force him.
L&S: It then means that since NBA can only call out CAC and other government agencies in Nigeria, there’s no hope. It’s just going to be business as usual.
Akpata: I don’t think there’s no hope. He has a supervising ministry. He’s not answerable only to himself. He’s an employee of the government.
L&S: But we haven’t seen the supervising ministry do anything.
Akpata: Because I don’t think we’ve piled enough pressure. So one of the things that I’m going to be telling my successor is that as far as CAC is concerned, we need to engage with the Minister. The minister is also a lawyer and then you know the NBA also has a representative of the CAC Board. When I came on board there was no representative. I recommended one. That person is yet to be confirmed. Once that person is confirmed by the Minister, he’s going to have his marching orders. I have called the ministry and they said the process of confirming him is still on course but that it will be done soon. That person has marching orders from NBA to give the Registrar General feedback from lawyers.
L&S: I understand that the Board does not call him to order and that he has the Board in his pocket.
Akpata: Well he does not have NBA in his pocket. But that’s the way it works in most of these government agencies. The Board will just say— where is our allowance— and everybody goes home. But the Minister is the Chairman of the Board. He’s a lawyer and a former Governor of Ekiti State. We have to put pressure. That’s what we can do. We’re a pressure group. We don’t have any force of law to stop anybody. It’s good to know the limits of our powers and manage our expectations.
L&S: Does this not boil down to what people say about the NBA being a toothless bulldog; that we only make noise and no action?
Akpata: I think it is a total misunderstanding of what your powers are. Can we just take two steps back? You’re a body of lawyers. Right? You’ve formed an association. What is your leverage? What is the leverage that you have? Your leverage is that you either withdraw your legal services, you go on mass protests or you influence public opinion. You can also call out people and institutions when they have done wrong and this is not about CAC alone. You really have no powers. Your power is persuasive. When people say NBA is a toothless bulldog, I think that is myopic. It is very narrow and comes from a total misunderstanding. Look at Pakistan from where we draw our example for militant lawyers. What do Pakistani lawyers do? They come out. Mass protests. Right?
L&S: Which we couldn’t achieve here…
Akpata: Who told you that?
L&S: When Chief Justice Onnoghen was removed and then NBA President Usoro tried to rally lawyers around, we all know what happened. The NBA became divided and what happened, happened.
Akpata: The NBA was divided along ethnic and religious lines but the point I’m making is that… I’m giving you the Pakistani example to say that even the Pakistani lawyers who are our shining example of how effective a Bas Association can be, all they do is mass protest. We’ll not go to court, we’ll picket the Supreme Court, we’ll picket the CAC and not allow anyone entre. You know where all that will end now, so people must understand our role. We’ve formed part of that group that is the conscience of society. All you can do is remind them they’re doing wrong. It’s just like the journalists. Their power is in their pen. What else can they do but write? If push comes to shove and they refuse to comply what else can you do?
L&S: NBA cannot file public interest actions against such issues?
Akpata: Haven’t we been doing that? The President extended the tenure of the Inspector General of Police. We sued him. The government said everyone should go and queue up for NIN in the middle of COVID. We sued them. They banned Twitter. We sued them. But where are those cases? They’re still ongoing.
L&S: So even the judiciary is complicit?
Akpata: I don’t think they’re complicit. It’s just a systemic failure. The judge doesn’t mean to delay the case but the judge is writing in long hand. The generator has gone off he can’t sit. The case will be going on month by month. The cases are there. You and I know that in instituting those cases, it’s just calling them to order, pricking their conscience; rather than staying silent in the face of that kind of illegality. The day that we see CAC has crossed the line, we can sue CAC but right now they haven’t crossed any legal line. They are just giving poor service. People have this high expectation that NBA can do magic. I receive letters every day asking the NBA step in. My husband beat me NBA step in. My landlord kicked me out, NBA step in. I tend to be a bit more pragmatic about these things.
My tenure is coming to an end. I think now more than ever before, we have come back to the fore. What we are supposed to do? Agitate society, agitate members of the public and articulate the issues because we’re gifted in that way. We can articulate the issues. We can speak to the people. We can galvanise the people so that there can be civil action in the face of tyranny or any other thing. For me really, I think the Bar is doing well. If it can be sustained that will be great. We should not allow people to use religion or ethnicity to divide us but it’s happening. Any issue that comes up you’ll see the hall divided into north and south. Somebody killed Deborah in Sokoto wrongly and I’m not allowed to say it’s wrong?
L&S: Don’t you think we might not have a united NBA in the next few years the way things are going?
Akpata: The way things are going we’re probably going to have splinter groups. That’s the plan. They’re going to set up small, small Bar Associations. They did it to the accountants. They’re going to do it to us now because we’re not strategic. A lot of our people are social media warriors but were not strategic.
L&S: I thought NBA will find a way of opposing that bill. It is still at the National Assembly. It has not been signed into law. If that happens, Lawyers like accountants can no longer speak with one voice.
Akpata: That’s why I have refused to sign up for it. I’ve been opposing it for one year and six months. NBA has refused to sign up. They presented it as a bill that is a collaboration between the NBA and Body of Benchers and I said nope. If it is this bill containing these propositions, take NBA’s name out of it. That’s the deadlock. NBA has its own version of the bill which we’re ready to present if our negotiations break down. We’ve told them you can’t have a bill that says the regulator of the legal profession is the Body of Benchers, a government agency, funded by the government. You can’t have that. That’s a death knell. That’s the end of public interest. We who are supposed to be fighting for the interest of the people, the day you go out there and say something the government doesn’t like, and the government instructs them not to renew your license, they can’t do otherwise. They receive their funding from the government.
But the major problem is that we’re divided inside. The Bar itself is divided. A house divided against itself, can’t stand. The older group feels they have an idea of where we should be going. We disagreed with them. But back to the CAC, we can only put pressure. We live in a country where there’s systemic failure and a lack of accountability. There’s an entitlement mentality. There is a Kabiyesi culture even in government. Our leaders are not humble enough to take criticisms when you tell them they’re not doing well. It’s not looking good. Not just in the legal profession but in the country as a whole. One highly placed government official told me when we were talking about the elections that we should pray we have a country before the elections. Election is six months away. It’s a long time but pray you have a country before the elections. (COURTESY: LAW AND SOCIETY NEWSPAPER)
