Olumide Akpata and the Burden of Leadership, By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Olumide Akpata and the Burden of Leadership, By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
NBA President Olumide Akpata
Almost 10 years ago, in September 2012, then president of Ass ociation of the Nigerian Bar (NBA), Okey Wali, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), was at the start of his tenure. With the energy of a new presidency, he wanted to make it his mission to change the way the association operated. To begin with, he formed a small committee to review NBA operations. I chaired it.
The committee took three months to complete its work. During this period, he consulted with a cross-section of leaders, branch structures, members and secretariat staff. The report, when released in January 2013, was ruthless in its diagnosis and ambitious in its vision. He said the NBA was "severely under-capacitated, with an unclear mission, an uncertain future and extremely unrealized potential. The NBA itself does not offer a clear value proposition to its members. The absence of a defining value proposition is an existential threat to the NBA…."
At the time, the association was on top. It elected its leadership through a relatively small number of delegates, comprising the most experienced and well-heeled lawyers in the country. Most of its members had good reason to feel excluded because the process by which leadership emerged offered no incentive to serve the large number of mostly poor members. The association also had the habit, as the 2013 report said, of entering into “potentially problematic relationships with politically exposed persons (PEPs) who sometimes have partisan interests in undermining an independent bar”. Predictably, his credibility was diminished, and for most members as well as the public, the NBA was now part of the Nigerian problem, not part of the solution.
Okey Wali’s successor, Augustine Alegeh, another SAN, who emerged against the grain of conventional reckoning in 2014, did the unpopular thing among senior lawyers to reinvent the cone of legitimacy for leadership in the Nigerian bar . Instead of giving this unique responsibility to a small coterie of self-serving senior lawyers, called delegates, he reformed the Law Society's constitution to return leadership selection to a one-lawyer, one-vote system. To make this work, the Alegeh reforms moved the NBA into a new world of digital voting.
These reforms made possible the emergence of Olumide Akpata in 2020 as NBA president, six years after Alegeh's tenure ended. There were, however, some teething problems to overcome in the interregnum between Alegeh and Akpata. Many experienced lawyers felt estranged from a system that treated their votes as having exactly the same value as those of their employees. The association also lacked the data infrastructure for digital voting. So its early efforts to elect leaders digitally were initially marred by apathy and suspicion. When they voted for Alegeh's successor in 2...
Almost 10 years ago, in September 2012, then president of Ass ociation of the Nigerian Bar (NBA), Okey Wali, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), was at the start of his tenure. With the energy of a new presidency, he wanted to make it his mission to change the way the association operated. To begin with, he formed a small committee to review NBA operations. I chaired it.
The committee took three months to complete its work. During this period, he consulted with a cross-section of leaders, branch structures, members and secretariat staff. The report, when released in January 2013, was ruthless in its diagnosis and ambitious in its vision. He said the NBA was "severely under-capacitated, with an unclear mission, an uncertain future and extremely unrealized potential. The NBA itself does not offer a clear value proposition to its members. The absence of a defining value proposition is an existential threat to the NBA…."
At the time, the association was on top. It elected its leadership through a relatively small number of delegates, comprising the most experienced and well-heeled lawyers in the country. Most of its members had good reason to feel excluded because the process by which leadership emerged offered no incentive to serve the large number of mostly poor members. The association also had the habit, as the 2013 report said, of entering into “potentially problematic relationships with politically exposed persons (PEPs) who sometimes have partisan interests in undermining an independent bar”. Predictably, his credibility was diminished, and for most members as well as the public, the NBA was now part of the Nigerian problem, not part of the solution.
Okey Wali’s successor, Augustine Alegeh, another SAN, who emerged against the grain of conventional reckoning in 2014, did the unpopular thing among senior lawyers to reinvent the cone of legitimacy for leadership in the Nigerian bar . Instead of giving this unique responsibility to a small coterie of self-serving senior lawyers, called delegates, he reformed the Law Society's constitution to return leadership selection to a one-lawyer, one-vote system. To make this work, the Alegeh reforms moved the NBA into a new world of digital voting.
These reforms made possible the emergence of Olumide Akpata in 2020 as NBA president, six years after Alegeh's tenure ended. There were, however, some teething problems to overcome in the interregnum between Alegeh and Akpata. Many experienced lawyers felt estranged from a system that treated their votes as having exactly the same value as those of their employees. The association also lacked the data infrastructure for digital voting. So its early efforts to elect leaders digitally were initially marred by apathy and suspicion. When they voted for Alegeh's successor in 2...
NBA President Olumide Akpata
